Well this sure has been a crazy month for SEOs and affiliates.

The “unnatural link” warnings that we talked about on our webinar last month have been affecting folks left and right, and as a result, it’s one of the few times where Google makes an algorithm update and we say, “Ok, yep… we need to change some things up”. This post is about those things.

It’s been an even crazier than usual time because of the disagreement between marketers on what this actually means, and what action steps are required in light of it.

In one camp, you’ve got the purist old school guys who say that “This is just another algo update”; “What works to rank in Google is the same thing that always worked”; “Don’t get caught up in this”; “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

And another camp – usually in sync with the first. Not even the usual doomsdayers – that is saying “Google is out to get link builders!”; “We have to fundamentally change how we’re link building”; “We can no longer rely on the search engines for traffic”; and so on.

I’m writing this post because I don’t particularly agree with either of them and I want to guide our readers along what I think is a more intelligent path. Here’s the situation…

What Happened Exactly?

In the industry mainstream, it started with the deindexing of BuildMyRank – a blog network link building service that even we in Unstoppable Affiliate recommended last year. After that, lots of SEOs in forums around the web started noticing other blog networks go down. Then it became a blanket thing. Blog networks are going down.

Why Did They Go Down? And How Were They Detected?

Those are important questions to ask.

It turns out that for the most part, Google was picking up networks of blogs that were all publishing spun content. So where there were 10 blogs, all of a similar age, that all published variations of the same article, with similar anchor text links, Google said NO. And proceeded to deindex.

There may have been other footprints that helped such blogs get detected too – like if they were all linked together, shared IPs, had a common footer watermark – but it seems that the primary cause, is spun content.

This is backed up by the fact that so far, it doesn’t seem like blog network owners (us, and others I’ve asked about this) who didn’t use spun content, and always mixed up anchor texts haven’t seen their networks or their links affected. But time will tell on that one.

Did you use blog network services where you spun articles and submitted them to multiple blogs owned by the same people? If you haven’t already, it’s possible you’ll be affected by this.

Us here? We did. And upon further examination, they were certainly the cause of the unnatural link warnings that we received from Google. When the above became clear to me, I canceled our accounts at sites like Linxboss, BacklinksNinja, and some other networks too. In short, it’s time for some changes. More on that in a moment.

Now…

Why’s This Different To Other Updates?

Remember Panda? There were months of ongoing analysis, trying to determine what things we’re causing a slapping at the hands of that Chinese mountain bear. And even in the end, there was no ultimate consensus. On the question: “What caused my site to get slapped recently?”, the only answer that ever came forth was the equivalent to “Well… it’s complicated”.

This update is NOT like that. Here there’s a very clear cause for a penalty, and there are very clear action steps for SEOs moving forward from here.

One singular thing was penalized. A pretty specific thing at that. This isn’t a time to “keep doing what you’ve been doing – create good content and hope for the best” unless you want to lose all your sites and all your money.

So what do you do?

Action Steps For Right Now

Here’s what you do:

1. Cancel your accounts at blog network services where you were using spun content to submit the same article to many blogs. Even if they haven’t been penalized yet, that’s not a bet I want to make.

2. If you were using any kind of technique for submitting very similar (spun or otherwise) content to multiple blogs for backlinks… stop. It’s not that big a deal: there are many ways to build links.

3. Calm down. There’s no need to stop link building, stop doing SEO, change your business model, or go and get a real job. Besides this one reasonably insignificant thing, SEO is still the same, and link building is still the same.

4. Watch the video below:

Feel better? A little bit? I do

One Last Noteworthy Point

This is the final thing I consider worth mentioning regarding this update.

Having all these sites receive warnings about “unnatural links”, ans subsequent penalties in the search engines has laid to rest the debate about whether something a competitor can do to your site, can harm your rankings. It can.

Just so that’s clear: A competitor CAN build crappy backlinks to your website, and hurt your rankings. And Google now admits this.

The following hilarity was pointed out to me through a post on Dan & Marc’s blog. From that post:

“Well, to understand this, let’s take a look in their support area back towards the end of last year, where they said was part of their “guidelines”:

“Can competitors harm ranking?

There’s nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”

Then, in November, it got “slightly” modified… just a TINY fraction too:

“Can competitors harm ranking?

There’s ALMOST nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”

Wow, what a difference one word can make! So hang on, saying “almost nothing” means “can”, no matter which way you spin it.

Then on March 14th, they caved.

“Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.” -http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

In case you missed it, the key difference is in that first line:

From “nothing” to “almost nothing” to “perfect political answer”

Amazing, right?

So that’s something we have to deal with openly in our SEO too. Your options are basically:

a) Monitor your link profile closely and report any strange links you see to Google (via Webmaster Tools) and hope they can sort it out. Aka trust Google to make it right (fat chance in my books)

b) If you see it happening, fight fire with fire (not a recommendation and not something we’ve ever done, but something for you to make your own moral decisions on)

Rock and a hard place? Yep, I think so too.

So it’s definitely a time to be aware of what’s happening at Google and make some minor adjustments to your strategy. Other than that, it’s a time to keep doing the big picture things you’ve always done, and keep growing your business one income stream at a time.

Remember: The only thing that doesn’t change, is that everything changes.

Thoughts/comments/deep seated emotions below.

And some guide points to help if you’re in a rush:

9:06: 5 Words To Meditate On For Affiliate Success In 2012
13:56: Google’s Recent Link Building Warning
37:18: Two Best Alternatives To Yahoo Site Explorer
1:06:00: Improving LSI Relevance On Your Keyword Posts
1:16:50: A New Search Engine For Finding LSI Keywords, And Doing Keyword/Product Research
1:30:00: Q&A Time

OR… you can download the webinar here!

If you’re reading this post, I’m going to assume you know the importance of link building when it comes to getting search rankings, and making affiliate income.

As I’ve said before, link building (or “off page SEO”) is the great equalizer in the search traffic affiliate game. Anyone can find a niche, build a site, create some content and monetize the heck out of it… but when push comes to shove, the ones who make money are the ones who can link build effectively enough and consistently enough to push those rankings and drive that traffic. This can not be disputed.

So what stops people from doing their link building effectively enough and consistently enough? There are a few things, but in this post, I’m going to talk about one. The biggest one.

Content (Ohh Content!)

I want to say it’s “time”, and explain how most people don’t spend enough “time” consistently link building to see results in their chosen markets. But the only reason it takes “time” is because of this other thing called “content”.

Many forms of link building (generally the most effective ones) require content. And content takes time to create. Too much time for most people. Whether it’s content for blog comments, blog posts on networks, for article submissions, or guest posts, it’s still content and at some point, you, or some one you’re paying, has to write it.

If you’ve followed our methods in the past, you’ve probably noticed this. In Unstoppable Affiliate we talked about submitting posts to blog/article networks. A very effective link building strategy. But even when you only need to submit short posts, you still have to write them.

Personally, I often found it faster and easier to write these little link building articles than even to use a spinner. I can write quickly and the hassle of using a spinning software, going through and selecting your synonyms one at a time, and inserting the little “spintax” code… Ugghh, it gets old very quickly.

And they’re even more annoying because these kinds of articles don’t even have to “be” anything really. Just unique, mildly relevant (depending on their destination) and containing your link with the right anchor texts. If you’re ever writing these, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that… you shouldn’t be. (Because your time should be focused on something more profitable).

Anyway, two things on this subject caught my attention recently. And they point to a cool solution to this little problem and a way to ramp up your link building exponentially, increasing your rankings and your traffic with minimal added effort.

Link Building With Unique Vs Duplicate Content

The first one is this post at Jon Leger’s blog. To save you reading it, he basically ran a little test which clearly uncovered that submitting the same article to a number of directories (or blogs, domains, whatever) is vastly INFERIOR in it’s effect on your rankings, to submitting different pieces of content to different directories.

It’s something many of us knew, but that few of us implement.

It means that submitting an article to 10 directories is ok, but that taking the added effort to instead submit variations of it to 10 directories is much much better.

After reading that, I started looking for ways to integrate this back into our own systems. We’ve tried outsourcing article spinning before, with some success, but hadn’t found a way to do it affordably or efficiently enough to warrant continuing.

Then this thing came across my inbox…

A long time marketer mate of mine, and trusted web ally in the fight against “marketer ridiculousness”, Ben Shaffer, just released a product called Instant Content Robot. It works like this…

As a member, you get to choose 50 unique articles every month in a niche that’s relevant to you. These articles have versions that are PRE-LOADED, with “spintax” – that’s the code containing all the synonyms and brackets that you normally have to spend hours inserting yourself.

You take these articles and you slot them into the Content Robot feature, and it spins them, creating a number of variations that you choose.

“So you’ve got potentially hundreds of unique, spun articles that… really… you didn’t have to spin. You did a copy paste job and clicked “spin” and it was done.”

Actually you got hundreds of unique articles for link building that you didn’t have to write yourself… OR spin yourself.

With these articles, you can go STRAIGHT to article directories, straight to blog/link networks (like the ones we mentioned in UA and more) and post them for backlinks.

I estimate that it would save you 3-6 hours per week, depending on how much time you’re spending doing article submissions/blog posts at the moment. And if you’re not doing any of those (you should be) it will speed up the amount of links you can build by 500% or more. Oh, and it will decrease the amount of time it takes you to make money by about half.

All THAT got me interested, but it was only one part of this service.

For a low monthly price (for which there’s currently a $4.97, 10 day trial) you also get access to:

- An enormous PLR database of around 100, 000 articles (enough for ya?)

- You get a tool to help you find and grab Ezine Articles to spin as well

- And you get a solid set of training to maximize the use of these tools and turn them into traffic and income as quickly as possible.

The more I looked at this, the more I wanted to tell you about it.

For those of you are committed to build your Unstoppable Authority Sites, or following our “0-$100 a day in 2012″ post, this is an invaluable resource that will speed up your progress beyond measure.

The $4.97 trial gives you 10 articles to play with, that you can use to spin potentially hundreds of unique link building pieces of content. To be honest, even if you don’t have the budget for the full service, grab the trial right now, use it for 10 days, and get yourself enough link building content to last you the next few months, for a few measly bucks!

Check Out Instant Content Robot And Learn More About The Trial Offer Here

I can’t recommend this one highly enough, and I hope you get a chance to check it out.

P.S. Like I said, Ben’s a stand up guy who sells with integrity. There’s no hardcore upsell to this, only the option to buy a bigger set of articles with the spintax included. As you’ll see in the trial area, everything you need to make money with this is included for the one price.

There are few things more frustrating than working hard on your affiliate site for a couple of months only to see it suddenly disappear in the search engines seemingly overnight. Maybe telemarketing calls during dinner are more frustrating. But it’s up for debate.

I wrote a post last year trying to educate people on what exactly is going on when your site gets (or seemingly gets) a penalty in the search engines and what you can do about it. But with changes in the search engines even since then, and new results coming to light, it’s become necessary for me to expand on that.

I’m going to touch on how to avoid ever getting such a penalty in the first place (stuff we ALL need to know) and then how to come back from a slapping if you’ve had one.

But first we need to be reminded of the basics…

Google And New Websites

If you’re trying to make money by having your website rank in the search engines, you need to know this:

New websites are at a disadvantage in the search engines relative to older ones. Period.

Keep in mind that when I say old, I’m referring to how long the domain has been indexed in Google for. That’s it’s real age. Not how long you’ve owned the domain.

Further to that, new websites do weird things in the search engines. They’re indexed one day, gone the next. They’re in one position one day, 10 pages back the next day. Back and forth like this, sometimes for a month or more.

I know a lot of you know this. So why am I repeating it here?

Identifying A Google “Slap”

I repeat it because slaps mostly happen to new websites. And when your website is jumping around in the SEs anyway, it can be very hard to identify when your site has ACTUALLY been slapped, and when it’s just doing it’s normal thing before establishing a more consistent ranking.

Want to know the first thing to do when you think you’ve been slapped?

WAIT!

Don’t do anything crazy. Don’t panic.

Just as easily as it could be something, it could be nothing. Continue your daily work on the site and see what happens over the preceding couple of weeks.

Too quickly I see people questioning their entire SEO strategy, wondering which particular thing they did caused their site to get penalized. They’ll change up effective link building techniques that were working, lose faith in otherwise powerful techniques, or stop adding content to their site until they see what happens. No no’s.

If your site stops fluctuating in the search engines and stays permanently at a ranking of page 10 or more for a couple of weeks despite your ongoing link building and when it WAS previously ranking page 1 for your target keywords… chances are you’re in the “sandbox”.

But let’s back up for a second…

What we really want to do is avoid this ever happening. How do we do that?

I’m going to give you the 5 best ways.

The 5 Best Ways To Avoid A Slapping, Sandboxing, or Delisting

These are serious things, because losing months of your work is a serious problem. Let’s take it from the top:

1. Sacrifice a Keyword Targeted Domain In Favor Of An Aged One

Fact is that with a new domain name, you’re at significantly greater risk of getting penalized in the search engines. Old domains are safer.

I know we want to use keyword targeted domains to get quicker rankings – and there’s nothing wrong with that as a strategy – but if you’re talking about being in this game for the long term, and lowering your risk of a penalty while pursuing intelligently fast profits, old domains are your safest bet.

How old is old? I say 2 years at the minimum. And the older the better. I won’t go into strategies for buying old domains, but anyone who bought our Unstoppable Affiliate should be well versed in them.

You won’t get an exact match domain but as long as you end up with something mildly relevant to your broad niche, you’ll be doing great. Oh, AND you’ll have the opportunity to build out an authority site on it that promotes multiple products. Bonus!

If you CAN’T get an old domain for some reason, it doesn’t mean you’re asking for a slapping. There are still plenty of things you can do to keep on Google’s good side.

2. Speed Of Your Link Building

This has been a factor for new sites for years now and it’s still in effect. It’s the main exception to the rule that your site can’t incur a “penalty” for a backlink that’s built to it.

Put simply: If you’re building too many links too quickly, to your new site, it looks suspicious. Google sucks at being able to tell the quality of backlinks, but they’re perfectly well versed at telling the quantity of your backlinks and the velocity at which they’re growing.

9 times out of 10, if someone contacts me to say that their affiliate site seems to have been slapped, aggressive link building is the cause.

What’s aggressive? I’ve come to think that aggression relates to both quantity and quality (really meaning PR) of your links. I couldn’t prove that to you scientifically, but let’s call it an educated hunch.

Google thinks it’s weird when your site that’s been indexed for a week starts pulling all kinds of backlinks from all kinds of websites that are much older and more authoritative than it. Why wouldn’t that look weird?

That’s particularly the case when your new website isn’t adding much new content. Google: “What is so interesting about this site when it’s number of pages in the index isn’t growing and it’s only 2 weeks old?”

You can see where they’re coming from.

So what’s too aggressive. I used to go with less, but SEO expert and friend Matt Carter convinced me of the strategy of 10 links per day at MAXIMUM when your site is just starting out. That’s for the whole first month.

And easy on the high PR links too. If 10 of your 10 are high PR links, I’m going to be concerned for you. Sprinkle 1 or 2 high pr page links in there per day at the most.

You can boost that number from 10 to 15 or more in the second month, but you may find you don’t even need to. 10 links a day if you’re doing it EVERY day is plenty to rank for a whole lot of low competition keywords.

Besides that, as long as you’re keeping the backlinks to your money site as “quality” as possible, you should (not will… it is Google after all) avoid a slapping in those critical first few months.

3. Be Careful Of People Duplicating Your Content

This is a big one that’s only gotten bigger.

Sometimes, particularly with new websites, it’s hard for Google to tell where any given piece of content originated. As I’ve written before, Google will often judge the most authoritative website carrying a piece of content as the originator (that is the oldest with the most backlinks) of it.

And when your website is young, some crappy 2 year old spam blog that’s managed to stay in the index can scrape your content and suddenly YOU look like the thief to Google. Ridiculous, I know.

In light of this, here’s a simple thing you can do for each of your websites.

Let’s say once every two weeks, you go to your website, copy a paragraph from one of your articles (your most important money ones perhaps) and go paste it in the Google search bar and hit enter.

Do any other sites but yours appear in the results? If so, there could be trouble.

What you should do, is go back and rewrite that piece of content. Make edits, add bits in. It needn’t be a full rewrite, just enough to make that piece of content “unique” again. I know that’s a pain in the face, but it might just save your website from search engine destruction.

If you don’t find any pesky scrapers here, that’s great. Do the check again in two weeks. It might take an hour every two weeks to do this check (or you could outsource it for probably a few dollars… or write a piece of software to do it, if you’re so inclined!) but it will be an hour well invested in the safety of your income and your affiliate business.

This hasn’t happened to us, but I’ve heard from other marketers that they’ve noticed one of their sites take a hit in the engines, done as I’ve described here and changed up that piece of content, and had it successfully return to it’s original position in the search listings. This unique content stuff matters!

4. Watch Out For What’s “Above The Fold”

This one’s new as of… like a week ago. If you haven’t heard yet, take note!

Even in our UA course, we recommended using a sidebar banner for your affiliate offer, and getting one banner high up on your piece of content so it sits “above the fold”. We’re officially revising this in the wake of a change at Google this past week, where they’re aggressively downgrading sites with too much advertising “above the fold”.

In reality, I don’t think having the sidebar banner plus a small banner high on the content is going to trip the filter but… I also don’t want to test that out. We’re keeping our sidebar banner placement (at the very top of the sidebar) and removing that high banner in the content, in favor of the call to action at the bottom of the post, and possibly another banner in the middle of the piece of content (below the fold).

Anyhow, point being… if you want to avoid a Google slap this year, don’t throw too many ads in that space at the top of your website. Easy. Shouldn’t even cost you many click throughs.

5. Add Content Regularly

This is something we talked at length about in UA so I’ll sum it up quickly:

When your site is new, and you’re building your backlinks but not building content, that looks weird to Google. When your links are coming in somewhere relative to the amount of new content Google in indexing, that makes sense. You’re adding new content, doing more stuff, and it’s attracting more links. No red flags raised there.

Building a tonne of links to a “static” site is bad news to Google.

How much content should you add? Given that each new piece of content is an opportunity to get traffic from more keywords and make more money, the answer is: as much as you can! One a week is great, two a week is better, three a week is fantastic.

This is the second most popular reason I see people getting slapped with their new sites. Remember it, work on it.

6. Be !#$%@#$& Patient!

Ok so there’s one more.

This probably should have been number one, even though it’s a mental and not a technical point.

The underlying reason why anyone gets slapped in the search engines is because they’re being impatient with their SEO.

I’ve never heard about a real webmaster talk about getting slapped. I’ve never heard a serious blogger talk about it. Or a big ecommerce store. They probably don’t even know the word.

Getting slapped is a “make money online” problem. It’s for people like us.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing you. We all need money and we need it now. We just need to surpress that need a tiiiiny bit if we want lasting success in the search engines and in online business.

Coming Back From A Slap

Once you’ve had a good slapping and you’re sure of it, deciding what to do next can be tricky.

A site can sit in the sandbox for months, and considering that a new site (that you do properly according to what we’ve discussed above) can rank quickly, it’s always a trade off of whether to keep fighting to try and get this site out, or just start a new site in that same niche (or a new one) and use the old sandboxed site for backlinks.

If the site you had slapped had big potential and you’d worked on it a LOT for multiple months and when it was ranking it was really making money… it’s worth sticking with it and reviving it. Revivals happen, they just take time.

What you do here is:

First, check all the points above and make adjustments where needed.

Second, continue your link building AS NORMAL. A site that’s trying to game the search engines will stop working and building links when it’s suddenly dropped from it’s position in the SERPS. A site that’s in it for the long term will continue as before. Google knows this and it’s watching.

Keep building links, keep adding content. Only adjust your link building if you deemed based on the above that you were being too aggressive.

IF you decide that the site isn’t worth rescuing, move on, register another domain and start again. Use the old website to link to your new one for a little extra juice in the beginning.

Frustrating but… lesson learned. Mistake that you won’t make again.

Bottom Line

Slaps are a fact of life for affiliate marketers. But they’re made to be avoided.

By doing things right and having a little patience, none of us should run into them.

Follow the instructions here and I wish you a slap free 2012!

Ok, from this moment on, you’ll never have trouble getting approved at an affiliate network again. Enjoy!

Ok, friend, here it is. This is how I think anyone reading, can go from $0 to $100 a day in affiliate/ad income with almost no work and but a minor investment in 2012.

Is this a plan for income overnight? No. This is a 12 month plan. It’s a plan for anyone who can put their entrepreneurial ADD on hold long enough to focus on one thing for an entire year (you know… the way real business people do). This is a plan to generate a lasting income from a solid business; A plan to reach $100 a day initially, and push from there to $1000 a day and beyond.

This is not a “new” concept either. It’s just a smart one. You ready? Here goes…

(Note: If you were able to buy one of our Unstoppable Authority Sites last week, you can implement this on them. If you didn’t, you can build a new site for them, no worries at all.)

Overview

This plan is about good keyword research, extreme(ly easy) long tail traffic, and outsourced content.

It’s based on the idea that the long tail of search becomes longer by the day, and as much as we see those exact money keywords becoming ever more competitive… the tails of those keyword markets are growing longer too. The original principle of the “long tail” is that the tail grows towards a length where there’s more traffic to be gained there across all the different keywords than there is by getting ALL the traffic that can be got from that major 1 or 2.

Anyone who’s gotten traffic from the search engines knows that when you look at your traffic sources, you always get traffic from long tail keywords you didn’t even know existed; much less intentionally targeted. And the way you get that traffic is by publishing quality content on long tail keywords, to your quality, authoritative site. You’ll end up mentioning words in your articles that will make them match search queries for other weird long tail variations. And the longer a keyword is, the more variations (of word order alone) it potentially has.

The most important factor however, is that the longer a keyword is – generally – the more specific it is, and the further the searcher is along that “buying scale”. Here I’m talking about long tail BUYER keywords. Keywords 3, 4, and 5 words long that are the name of a product or some question about it. Those are money keywords and in tens of thousands of keyword markets across the web, no one’s targeting them. In fact, people don’t even know they exist.

This plan is how you can take advantage of that fact with minimal effort, and maximum long term reward.

Step 1: A Niche

As always, you need a niche to get started in. Don’t think of the most way out, bizarre market here. Think mass markets. The bigger the market, the longer the tail. It doesn’t mean you’ll be competing with the big dogs for any keyword like “weight loss”. It just means you’ll be following the money, and picking out a spot in an already profitable market to claim as your own.

This is a niche too, not a product name this time. Like I’ve said before, nothing wrong with that, this is just something that also works.

So pick weight loss, or Forex, or dating, or electronics. Something with a tonne of products available that’s always coming out with something new, where there are a lot of products that get searched for by name and a huge amount of search volume overall.

There are plenty of markets like this and at this point you don’t even need to be too discerning (we’ll do that on your keywords). Anything with a tonne of products, and a tonne of searches, where money is being made, and you should be fine.

Step 2: Get a domain

If you can, try to find an old domain on the subject/main keyword that’s indexed in Google. (Just grab the url of it, go to google and search info:thedomain.com to check indexing. If it comes up there, it’s still indexed.)

See if you can find something that’s cool, neutral and informative sounding. In big niches like those, it’s not hard to do. You can use Godaddy domain auctions, dynadot auctions and many other services, (like those we talked about in UA for those who have it) for this purpose.

An old domain will be a big advantage in your new market, particularly in ranking for your long tail keywords. That said, if you can’t get an old domain, it’s not the end of the world. Register a new domain with a neutral sounding name, the major keyword in it if you can, and you’ll be all set.

Step 3: Keyword Research

What you need here is about 100-200 long tail keywords that relate to product names in your market.

NOTE HERE: The ONLY way this plan can go wrong, is if you pick keywords that can’t be monetized well. I’ve made that mistake before. So sticking to product name keywords (even if it’s products you can’t be an affiliate for… you can always monetize with Adsense) is vital.

This is the first place your small amount of work is to be done. You probably need to do this research yourself. But 100-200 keywords in a big market is not at all difficult to find.

What you want here are keywords that APPEAR in the Google Keyword Tool. That’s it. It doesn’t matter if Google shows they only get 10 exact match searches a month. That’s enough. Writing an article on that keyword will mean you get traffic from it and other variations of it. And even if that keyword doesn’t bring traffic, the next one on your keyword list will (Remember you’ll have 100 of them).

So if your niche is LCD Tvs, and you see the keyword “Vizio 42 LCD x1090” and it gets 100 exact match searches a month… that’s a winner. You’ll probably end up finding one product, say “Sony Bravia  B1080” and that’ll have 5 or 10 keywords below it that all get over 50 exact match searches a month. Grab all 10 of them (not including variations where you could have the same piece of content rank for multiple keywords). You’ll reach 100-200 keywords before you know it.

You don’t need the keyword with over 500 or 1000 exact match searches with this plan. When you’re targeting a product name term for a one product minisite, that opposite is true… but again, this plan is different. We’re going to be making money on the aggregation of lots of small chunks of traffic from lots of keywords and lots of pieces of content.

What about competition? It won’t much matter.

There aren’t a lot of keywords that only get 50 or 100 exact searches a month that are replete with high level competition so you’ll be fine on most of these keywords. Plus, even if you get a handful of the keywords with competition that’s too high, remember, it’s a balance thing. Publishing enough content on enough of these keywords and you’ll run into an equal number of keywords where you instantly rocket to position 1, as keywords that are too hard to break on to the first page for.

Finally… I’m saying that keywords with any amount of search volume is fine, but I don’t mean higher volume keywords are bad. If you come across good keywords with higher search volumes, that have 3 or 4 words in them and don’t seem too competitive, by all means include them too!

The key here is continual posting, and continual growth. That said, once you’ve gotten 100-200 product name keywords in your niche that get at least 50 exact match searches each per month, you move to step 4.

Step 4: Set up a WP blog on your domain

Won’t go into detail here. Do it like we recommend in Firepow, NBI, UA or if you can’t do that, find a good tutorial on youtube somewhere. There’s nothing much you can do wrong here that would destroy your chances of success provided you’ve followed the other steps.

Are there things you can do to tweak things here? Of course. But you can worry about those later.

Step 5: Find a content writer

This is key. You’re going to find a writer who’s going to work for you on a part time basis, continually writing and posting content to your site each week.

There are no shortage of content writers available online. You can use Elance, try the Warrior Forum, or use the writers we use. You just need someone who can write great english, with some decent research, to a formula you’ll give them, and who can also learn how to post to WordPress based on your instructions too.

Your creating good instructions for a writer is your next little piece of work. Only needs doing once, so it’s no big deal. You want at least 600 word articles, divided into subheadings, with a neutral tone, information and possible reviews on the product. You can use the exact formula from UA if you have that, but if not, sticking to the above works fine.

You should be able to get a quality article like this written for $7-9 a pop.

When it comes to posting to your blog, you’ll have to show them:

- How to write a good Title for the article (to include the keyword but be catchy and curious at the same time)

- How to set the permalinks with the little feature below the post title bar (just making the permalink the exact keyword)

- How to set the Meta Title (just copy/paste the post title) the Meta Description (an interesting and benefit driven sentence or two about what’s in your article) and the meta keywords (just the single keyword that the article is on)

- How to set a “More” tag (just click the little Split Box icon in WordPress) on each post.

- How to bold each subheading (Obvious)

And that’s almost it.

This set of videos I did is a couple of years old but will still show your writer each of these points above in a simple fashion.

You should be able to get them to post your article for an additional 50c or so. It’s a 5 minute job of copy/paste once they know the instructions.

NOTE On Monetization: To begin with, you don’t even need to monetize your site with an affiliate link or ad block. You’re not going to be earning money overnight with this method so there should be no rush. Further, it may yet prove to be a benefit in the eyes of Google if you don’t monetize your site immediately, but wait until it’s indexed (or re-crawled if an old domain) and even ranking before you throw aff links in.

It’s a test of your discipline too. Are you really in this for the long term? Can you handle waiting two months to even put up your monetization links? If you can’t, then this model isn’t for you.

Next…

You need to decide on a frequency for posting.

This comes down to your budget. At minimum you’ll need to do 2 articles a week, but if you want to push right up to 1 article a day, that’s even better.

That’s minimum $15 a week investment. Probably less than you spend on coffee or eating out each week. There aren’t any other costs than this, so it should be affordable.

Picture what’s happening so far…

You’ve got an authority site set up, possibly on an old domain, that’s publishing two articles a week, every week, on long tail, low competition money keywords.

In a month, you’ve got 8 pieces of content out there. After a year you’ve got almost 100.

What happens to that content and how does it make you money?

Let’s have a look as we move to step 6…

Step 6: Promote that thing

Right now, you’ve got quality content targeting money keywords coming on to your site afresh each week, with no work of your own. That’s a powerful position right there.

As long as your site is indexed, you’ll find that a percentage of the content you add, will rank, and bring traffic for SOME keyword, even without you doing anything to promote it. That just happens with these types of keywords. Not all of them will do that, but a percentage of them will.

To take it up a notch, you need to convince Google of this site’s authority. And you have to do what you can to grow that authority.

How do you grow the Authority? With Backlinks.

So if you like, your work each month can consist of merely trying to get backlinks for your site. It’s not even important that the backlinks point to the individual pages in this method, and it’s not even important that you build 10 links a day or anything like that. If you were able to get just a handful of quality links each month to this site, that would add up, and the effect would be felt.

It’s mostly just important that link juice passes through that homepage of your site and filters down to each of your pieces of content. This will demonstrate your authority and make it so that eventually  every piece of content your site publishes carries more weight in the search engines.

For this, I don’t even need to lay out a specific plan for you, because most kinds of link building will help for this purpose. If you can get 5-10 good backlinks for your site each week, just pointed to your home page with a related anchor text, that should suffice. But you can take it to a higher level if you wish/are able. Let me instead just make suggestions:

1. Get an Onlywire.com account, create accounts at each of the services and submit every second post that goes to your blog, through Onlywire. That will be a tonne of backlinks worth over time.

2. Use your services like ActuallyRank or BuildMyRank to submit maybe 10 posts/comments a month with a backlink. See UA for full instruction on using those services.

3. Ask your writer to write an EXTRA two articles per week of just 300 words each, on any keyword in your niche, and ask him/her to submit them to an article directory like GoArticles with a link in the author bio of one of your target keywords. That should cost an extra $7 a week and will have a tangible effect on your rankings when it accumulates over time.

4. Buy some links. Use somewhere like DigitalPoint forums to buy some anchor text targeted high PR links from blog posts on related sites. Even a couple of PR2 blog post links a month (cost, maybe $15) will have a big effect on rankings.

5. If you’re committing just to this site, you might even choose to get a bit social. Set up accounts on Stumbleupon, Twitter & Facebook for your site, build a community of relevant friends, share links of all kinds, and drop a link to something of your own once in a while (Note you don’t have to link to your money posts here, and you don’t just have to add posts to your site that are for monetization… something to think about ) The links/likes/shares you get from this will benefit your SEO.

The key here is consistency rather than a big blast. As long as you’re feeding SOME new link juice to your site each week, you’ll notice the rankings and traffic of each of your pieces of content growing over time.

You’ll also notice that new pieces of content you add start to get indexed more and more quickly. If you can do this for even 6 months you’ll see how much authority your site can build up. After that, you can claim long tail keyword rankings almost at will. And it only gets better from there on out.

KEY: Try to put some plan for your link building in place. Even if it’s only a 5 link a month plan, make it something that happens every week and every month. And repeat it. Repetition and gradual growth is the key to this plan.

Expected Outcome

Continuing to follow this promotion plan while your content is continually being added should gradually see your product name posts ranking page 1 for their target keywords. As visitors start to flow from those keywords, sales will be inevitable, even if your presell content isn’t that great. You’re getting motivated buyers to your site. The rest is easy.

The more you post and promote, the more ALL of your content should gradually rise in the SERPS.

Then you can look at your traffic stats, see which keyword areas and product names are (easily) getting the most attention and you can expand those ones out, adding more content there, focusing more link building there, and so on. That will scale up your income even faster.

There’s nothing else involved in this plan. You’ll just keep doing the same things, over and over, and watch them yield greater and greater results thanks to those all powerful laws of compounding.

How Does It Get You To $100 A Day?

Let’s look.

I’ve done scenarios like this many times before, but let’s take the worst one I’ve ever done.

Let’s say you earn $10 commission from your affiliate offer. And your offer converts 1 visitor in 100. You need 1000 visitors a day across your site to make $100 a day.

If you have 100 pieces of content, that’s each article on your site getting 10 visitors a day. It rarely works out like that, and will usually be something like 2 articles on your site get 100 visitors a day each, another 6 get 50 a day each, and another 50 articles get 10 visitors a day each for a total of 1000.

There’s nothing unrealistic about that. Remember, these are all long tail keyword gems. None of these are high competition phrases.

And if even one of those factors is different (say a $20 commission, or a conversion rate of 1 in 50… neither of which is even close to unrealistic) you’re looking at $200 a day instead of $1000. $6k a month instead of $3k.

If you’re reading this, there’s no reason you can’t make this plan happen and achieve these results.

Final Notes

Remember: LONG TERM. This method isn’t going to be making you money in month 1, maybe not even in month 2. But you HAVE to persist. When you do it for 12 months, there’s NO WAY… read that again… NO WAY, that you can’t have a valuable, profitable asset on your hands, that’s both making money, and has the potential to be sold for a good sum.

UAS Owners: You can do this in addition to pursuing a “multiple product site” strategy laid out in UA, where you try to rank for one new product in your market at a time. Don’t do it instead of. You could feasibly get a plan like this cranking while you’re just working away link building for your first 3 keywords. The linking you do for those three pieces of content will help out all the content that gets added by your outsourced helper.

Questions: I know not every little detail of the plan is covered here – what exactly you should say in your bid for an outsourcer, or what widgets you should have in your sidebar – but I want to stress the simplicity of this plan. If I haven’t mentioned it above, it’s because it’s not important. It’s because you can make money without knowing the answer to it.

Don’t get bogged down in the tiny questions you don’t know the answer to. Focus on what you DO know the answer to, and work on that. Your chances won’t be destroyed if you get some small detail wrong. A small hole WON’T sink this ship. Ready, Fire, Aim. I find myself telling people this a lot lately.

All of that said, if you think you have a big important question, I’ll do my best to answer in the comments below.

So happy holidays my friends! Here’s to an extremely prosperous 2012!

In Unstoppable Affiliate we taught two strategies for two kinds of sites: Single product sites (exact match domain style) and multi product sites (that promote various offers in one niche in one domain name). We talked about the pros and cons of each style of site and discussed why it’s good to have both type of site in your affiliate arsenal.

In this post I’m going to give you some additional points to consider on this matter, and tell you about one of the ways we’re going to be changing our own spread of sites in the coming year.

To distill our discussion on the two types of sites (for anyone who didn’t get UA) we basically said that smaller sites on exact match domains carry the advantage of being able to rank faster, for better short term income prospects, while bigger sites had greater long term profit potential, with the advantage that you can keep expanding by promoting new products from a base (a domain name) that’s growing in authority with each new product promoted.

But with the way the search engines have changed this year – even since we released UA – this picture keeps getting more and more complicated.

Basically, while right now, and for a long time, we’ve had a portfolio of sites fairly mixed between these two, both us, and a number of other SEO affiliate experts I know are gradually (and quietly) leaning slightly more from one type of site to the other: That is, toward bigger sites.

Here’s why:

The Situation With Smaller Sites

First up, no one I know takes away from the point we call the main advantage of EMD (exact match domain) mini sites: that they rank faster. That’s still happening, as many UA customers who tried it out will testify. It’s not really that that’s the problem.

Where it gets tricky is that it’s becoming harder and harder to convince Google (and in particular a manual reviewer) over the longer term that a site with an exact match domain that promotes a single product… actually has value.

You can still create quality content on a site like that – that’s fine. You can still add value in limited ways, like with quality reviews, price comparisons, tips and comments on where/how to buy, but that’s about where it ends.

What’s more is that I believe consumers may eventually start to reject these kinds of sites in greater number as well. Consumers in other niches aren’t as dumb as we sometimes think they are. They know when they see marketing material, even well disguised stuff.

I’ve been researching affiliate products and seen in forum threads, people looking for a particular weight loss pill saying to the forum “Hey guys, just looking for information on XYZ pill… it’s hard to find the truth about it because every website I come across is just promoting the product”. I forsee that in the next couple of years, it’s going to become very hard to convince a reader that your site: xyzpillreview.com has credibility. And remember how the Google algorithm is going with all this bounce rate/time on site stuff… if your market starts to change how they view your site, the search engines will too.

Many people reported a little slap from Google on their single product sites through the Panda updates thus far and it’s likely that those will continue.

I don’t want to be too doomy and gloomy about single product sites here, because really we’re not. We’ve made a lot of money from single product sites and continue to do so through the present day. And will continue to (barring any dramatic unforseen incident in the search engines) in the coming year too. I do however want you to know my thoughts on them, so you can evaluate them and make decisions for your own business when you feel it necessary. I’m also sharing these thoughts because it’s not just me having them. That’s when I know it’s something.

Here’s What’s Different About Bigger Sites

First, when it comes to credibility, you take an immediate boost with a bigger site. When you’re “weightlossreviews.com” (fictional example though I’m sure that’s a real site) you’re just a site that reviews all weight loss products. You’re on the side of the consumer. With the single product site you can say in your content that you’re on the side of the consumer, but when it’s in the domain, it just “feels” different.

Further, you can build trust. You write some good content and people see that they can trust your site for reviews on others as well. You can get a reputation in forums and communities as a source of quality info. That’s not as important for the quick buck, but for a lifetime profit source, that pays dividends.

A site that Google fawned over in the Google Guidelines document we discussed, was Jenny Reviews. She’s operating on an even more macro level (just reviewing everything – which I don’t recommend) but Google holds it up as an example of an affiliate site they like and that’s providing real value. You can’t imagine them feeling the same way about your little exact match domain 5 pages of content mini site. And I don’t blame them.

Point is that there’s nothing Jenny’s doing that you or I couldn’t do. And she’s making affiliate sales too – probably big time.

What You Should Take Away From This

What I DON’T want this to be construed as, is me saying “Stop making single product sites!”. Not at all. They’re still cool provided you do them right (like we taught in UA), and there’s still money to be made there.

The message I’d like you to take away is that if you don’t have any bigger sites in your portfolio, and you’re trying to build an affiliate income for the long term, I think you’re exposing yourself to greater risk for future search engine updates, AND I think you’re sacrificing some significant long term profit potential.

I’m also saying that while previously our portfolio might have consisted of say 50/50 on these types of sites, we’re working on pushing it more toward 60/40 and perhaps 70/30 in the coming year, and I think there are good reasons to do so. I’m also NOT saying that this is the right decision for you personally and for your business goals. There are many ways to skin the cat so as always, evaluate for yourself.

In any case, I hope you found this interesting, and if you want to share your thoughts on the matter, I’d love to hear em!

P.S. We’re also feeling strongly enough about this that we’re going to be doing… a little something… in the next couple of weeks to help you out if you’re also thinking about making moves in this direction… that’s all I’ll say for now. Stay tuned!

Ever since Panda, most good SEOs have been drawing people’s attention to a few factors that according to the new algorithm changes, have greater importance as ranking factors now. Two of those are bounce rates, and time on site.

If you missed all that talk, we’ve basically said that now, Google is looking more and more at how people interact with your website in order to determine it’s quality or lack thereof. So Google wants to see how long visitors are spending on your site (longer indicating greater quality than shorter) and at what rate people “bounce” from your site, leaving it for an outbound link or hitting *back* on their browser to return to the search results.

Google cares more about that stuff now. But how much do they really  care? An accidental case study we did recently gave us an insight…

Really what I’m about describe is remarkable. Even if you’re an experienced SEO, this should surprise you. Here goes:

Our Accidental Experiment

We set up an example website for our Unstoppable Affiliate training course. It was one we set up just for people in the course, just to show them exactly how we created our sites. It wasn’t supposed to be a site we had that was already making money, just an example of exactly what we do in a real scenario.

We set it up targeting a real affiliate offer and with our real aff links in there, real (quality) content & monetization… the works.

But we didn’t start SEO on the site. It wasn’t meant as an example of our SEO campaign, just of the site layout & structure. I’m not aware of any backlink we built to it at all.

This was a NEW domain name too.

Fast forward about a month…

We noticed the site had made a couple of sales.

It didn’t surprise us much. We knew the market it was in well (we’d been in it before) so we knew the offer converted. We figured we’d somehow picked up rankings for a long tail keyword and had pulled a couple of high converting visitors just with our quality content and by having the keyword in the domain name.

But then things started to get weird…

Sales kept coming.

In one month the site made something like $300. We still hadn’t built a single backlink.

In November so far, the site’s up to $583 earnings, it’s bringing about a sale a day, and there’s still a week to go in the month.

We’re ranking on page 1 for the main keyword, plus a host of others, and bringing in a great volume of traffic. We’re outranking sites with hundreds of backlinks that have been around for much longer than ours.

Oh, and we still haven’t built a single backlink.

Question: How the HECK is this possible?

Now, I can’t confirm this, but here’s our hypothesis… (keep in mind it’s easier to analyze what’s had an effect here because we’ve done so little on this site… there’s not much to choose from!)

We know that Google takes data from web surfers. Not just data about your Google searches but about your browsing habits in general if you have Google toolbar or you use Chrome. Probably in other ways too.

And we know that data about how people interact with your site is an increasingly large part of the judgment of quality of your site.

When we listed the site in UA, it got a lot of traffic. People from the course went to our site and checked it out. Google saw that.

What’s more, they didn’t bounce, and they stayed on the site for an average of 2 minutes 30. A pretty long time for a site like this (and in this market given it’s nature). People were checking out the site to see what we did with it. Of course they stayed a long time!

That’s the only thing that’s happened to the site (including it’s solid content, on page optimization and a keyword in the domain) that could warrant a ranking. A site with JUST solid content, on page optimization and a keyword in the domain is not ranking in this market after a couple of months. We’ve tried it.

So you make up your own mind…

NOW…

What Does This Tell Us?

Before you go out trying to recreate this scenario: don’t. I’m going to assume that this is an overcompensation towards these new ranking factors that’s a part of the algorithm now, and as more people game it, it’ll get leveled out. If in fact it is a real thing, (our humble one case study doesn’t prove much) it won’t last long.

But this does tell us something very important. Google is VERY serious about this bounce rate/time on site/user experience stuff.

There aren’t many factors that can compete with backlinks when it comes to determining your rankings, but this case study tells me that – at least right now – those experience factors can and are approaching that level of “weight” in the algorithm. Remember, our 3 month old site with no backlinks outranked sites that had all other factors equal (content, keyword in domain, on page optimization) AND were older and more established. That is a BIG deal.

What do you take from it?

Where you can improve your content, lower bounce rate, and keep people on your site for longer while still having them click your affiliate links… do it.

There’s a fine line there for affiliates. The longer people stay on your sites the longer they’re NOT clicking your affiliate links. So it’s a very fine balance to strike. But it’s possible.

We’re going to do more and more testing with regard to this and we’ll be sharing the results with you in the coming months.

In the meantime, I hope this provides you some food for thought

Amazingly, it’s been almost a year since I wrote this post on the cancer in Internet Marketing. When I went back looking for it, I expected to find it listed 6 months ago. Has this year flown or what?!

I’m happy to report that somehow – remarkably – all of our efforts did something. The cancer we have in Internet Marketing has taken a beating. Really a lot has happened in the past 12 months in regard to this whole saga. Bigger changes than I’ve seen in the 6 years I’ve been doing this.

Some things have gotten better, some things have gotten worse. There are new challenges now, new scams too. Just more to look out for all around. I thought I’d take a good post to spell out a bunch of what I’ve seen, and what you need to keep an eye on if you’re still trying to learn this game & make a living for yourself online.

1. The Snake Oil Salesmenn Move On…

The old fables about the traveling huckster salesmen go that when people catch on to their scam in one town, they’re forced to move on to another where the people are fresh, unassuming, and fail to see their lies again. That’s kind of what’s happened in the town called Internet Marketing this past 12 months.

You guys really did start voting with your refunds – and it affected the entire industry.

Refund rates went up on all IM products across the board. Regardless of the seller too. Bad guys AND good guys noticed this. On our own last product – Unstoppable Affiliate -  despite getting rave reviews everywhere and being the best product we’ve ever released, our refund rate was more than double our historical average. That was saddening to me, but I totally get it. People trying to learn internet marketing are simply jaded, and rightly so. I’ve confirmed with other marketers I respect and they have reported the same rates.

This caused many “gurus” a lot of grief and they started to seek out greener pastures. The guys who were getting 50% refund rates on their product launches started to think that there had to be a better way to make easy money.

Further…

2. The Sheriffs Started Slingin’ Guns

The powers that be also started to get suspicious. By powers that be, I mean payment processors.

Midway through the year, a handful of big name IMers started to think that if Clickbank was going to start cracking down on them (which they’d threatened to do but not yet done) and if they were going to make it so easy to get a refund, they’d move to another processor. Their target was Plimus.

A few multi-million dollar launches happened on Plimus, but with predictable results: High refund rates, and a lot of complaints. Plimus processes a lot of $$ for non IM niches but the level of heat they got from credit card companies over it was through the roof. Plimus was forced to ban all online business/IM related merchants, which they did in an instant. They had far less to lose from the sale volume than Clickbank so it was an easy decision.

So IM scammers with their crappy products single-handedly ruined a potential payment processor for another bunch of well meaning sellers.

Things were heating up hard.

A couple of months later, and under great pressure, Clickbank was to follow suit.

They didn’t ban all IM merchants but they imposed the strictest rules on them since their inception as a processor. No fake actors in sales letters, no exaggerated claims, no this, no that. A LOT of IM offers were forced to remove themselves from the market because they couldn’t comply. The ones that remained had to change their copy up in BIG ways.

Then – icing on the cake – they imposed penalties on vendor accounts with refund rates over 15%. That is, almost ALL IM merchants, period. There might be 2% of IM/biz-op offers that have refund rates below that level. This again caused many of those sellers to decide Clickbank was no longer feasible and go in search of other options.

These are HUGE changes.

The end result of course, is a much nicer market for all of us to learn in. Well, a little nicer anyway…

3. Casualties

Unfortunately, the high refund rates across the board, the changing rules of processors, and the insanity in the market in general made IM a harder place to sell stuff. As a result, a few good, well meaning guys decided it wasn’t worth it any more. They went off to sell other stuff to easier markets.

We lost some good teachers and leaders in that process, so while we’ll let them remain nameless, let us here remember and salute them.

4. What Remains Of The Gurus?

Here’s what happened to the gurus we all love to hate. They either:

a) Moved to the business opportunity market.

Remember the first time you saw an ad like “Make $3000 a month working from home?” how excited you were? At that time, you were in the business opportunity market. Hopeful, unfazed, excited by sales hype… ready to buy NOW!

Those guys realized that group of people are just much easier to sell to and they moved on to that town. Some “good” guys even did that too. It’s a bigger market where easier sales can be made and you can provide the buyers with less information for their money. Sounds like an easy gig right? Too bad the likelihood is that before long, the same thing will happen as what happened when the IMers moved payment processors… they destroyed them. Perhaps that market is too big and too old for that, but that all remains to be seen.

b) They Became a “Good Guy”

You’ve seen this right? Now all of a sudden, EVERYONE emailing you is claiming to be “against the gurus”… EVERYONE is “sick of the scams in IM”, everyone is “fed up with product launches”, and blahdie blah blah.

It’s a joke. They’ve picked up on the sentiment of their market and they’re pandering to you. Many of them are the very same “bad guys” that customers are rallying against in forums and on blogs across the internet.

Be careful of this, reader. As I’ve always said: Choose who you listen to wisely.

c) They went bankrupt.

Not kidding. More than a couple of big name marketers went out of business in the past year for precisely the reasons we’re discussing. Many more who didn’t, resorted to some of the lowest acts they’ve ever committed. Desperation stuff in the name of survival. To say that it’s been crazy times is an understatement.

5. Where To From Here?

Here’s the situation:

You’ve got a big bunch of fed up people who still want to learn how to make good money online, but don’t know where to turn. And you’ve got less people wanting to provide them the right information because it’s difficult to do so.

Here’s what I think we’re going to see because of that…

I think in the next 12 months we’re going to see LESS product launches than the year previous. Less emails flooding your inbox, that’s a good thing, right?

But it’s still going to be messy.

Now that a lot of these guys are meshing lists with people in the biz op market, you’ll also probably get a few emails for products on paid surveys, or “data entry” work at home jobs. I hope if you’re reading this, you know what to do with those.

You’re going to see some “rising stars” in internet marketing. New teachers who haven’t been round for as long, who are happy to get paid less to teach good online marketing info while they make a name for themselves in the biz. Make your judgements on these guys as they come along. They probably haven’t been around as long as more established experts, and their methods may not be proven to ride out the inevitable storms that go along with online business. Proceed with caution.

And finally, you’re going to see a lot of “new” strategies. Many desperate ones, some decent ones.

The backdrop to this whole story is that actually making money online became harder this year. It became harder for affiliates, harder for SEOs, harder for media buyers, harder for content creators. The internet changed again! And a lot of people are running scared from many methods.

As a result you’ll see new ideas coming up for making an easy buck. You know what to do with those. But hopefully you’ll see people innovating on traditional methods (like content marketing) to make them more profitable and more stable too. That part I look forward to.

Final (More Positive) Word

So that you don’t walk away wanting to give up on life, let’s end this on an important positive note…

Make no mistake: Internet business is still the best legitimate income/lifestyle maximization opportunity that exists. This business is awesome; anyone can have it; it’s still there for the taking.

In fact, online business is still in it’s infancy.

If we want to learn it, and keep getting better at it, we need do nothing more than follow the information of people we can trust, and compare notes based on the experience of our own ACTIONS.

Consider the changes of the past year one more obstacle (partly) out of your way. A clearer path awaits you.

To your success!