Lately, I have been dabbling in affiliate marketing and decided to choose article marketing as my highway of traffic choice. It is free, fairly easy to understand, and requires no website. I have heard and read all the wonderful reasons why I should use squidoo as an avenue for article marketing, but have not yet been successful. After writing several lenses, I want to know, why won’t google index my squidoo lens? I have done the keyword research and even did a squidoo experiment lens on a keyword phrase which had virtually no competition, but it was still not indexed.
So, I am going to do a little experiment with a squidoo lens I just created, which has not been indexed yet. I will place the link in this post and see if the google robot will see the link here and then go back and view my lens as something meaningful enough to index. My lens Losing Weight Post Pregnancy has yet to be indexed even though I manually submitted it, and used low competition keywords.
I would like to know, for all those people out there who use squidoo faithfully, how are you getting your squidoo lenses ranked in google?
I would love to hear from anyone who can help me out!
Well, I am back after a restful weekend. I have read through the “easy biz system” several times and am ready to implement the advice given. Now, I also subscribed to an awesome affiliate teaching website which has given me an incredible amount of information. I am not going to use any of the information from this affilate, website, but only stick to the information given to me from the easy biz system. I am going to pretend that I have never heard of affiliate marketing until now, and also pretend that my only experience with a computer is checking my email.
With that being said, here is a small quote from Easy Biz System, which is directing me to do a specific task, which will help me make $1000/ day. The previous section was discussing how a person can make money from selling an informational product that the public is demanding. The author asks me to think of some categories in which people are hungry for information and do a search on them. The author says, “I want you to try it now. Click Yahoo Tools – Click on “Keyword Selector Tool” under tools menu on right.”
Okay, pretending I know NOTHING about how to do this, I tried to click on the link given to Yahoo tools and find the keyword selector tool which the author told me to do. Unfortunately, when I did this, I was directed to a site in Yahoo where I could not find any Keyword selector tool at all! So, the very first step to my money making adventure was shut down. But I hate quitting, so I decided that I would use a little of my own knowledge and go ahead and use the google keywords tool in adwords to get an idea about how many people are searching for information. I decided to search out “hair loss.” Basically I found that there were 823,000 searches for hair loss in February. According to the author, the higher the search term the better. I am told to do this with 5 different subjects, but in this blog, I will just stick to hair loss.
My next task is to find an affiliate product to promote which deals in hair loss. According to the author, I could promote banner ads on my own website or go to clickband or commission junction and find some products. I am told that if I know of a product without an affiliate program, I could write the company offering to promote the product and request a commission. Now, at this point, let me stress, the only information given about doing any of these former tasks are the website links. If I never heard of clickbank, only saw banner ads on websites and never created a website of my own, I would just stop right there since I would be so confused that I would be unable to proceed. There is such little information given about how to do these tasks that I would not tell anyone to pay for this information. It is terrible!
Since I do know about clickbank and happen to have an account setup with them, I will do the easiest thing and pick a hair loss product to promote.
My next step, according to the author is to make a website. This is suppose to be very easy if I go to a website called Homestead. In fact, it is so easy and inexpensive, the author says it should take just a few hours. Once I have that up and running, I am to log into google adwords and advertise with pay-per-click. That is it, I am told. As easy as that. No other real substanital advice is given.
Now, I said that I would go ahead and follow the instructions given and see what happens at the end of 30 days. Because I know what can happen to my credit card if I do this, I am going to save myself thousands of dollars and just let go of my $24.95, and this is why:
1) This system does not adequately teach how to determine what a profitable niche market would be. The only information given is a bad link to Yahoo to explore a keyword tool in order to see how many people are searching for that topic. The link does not even go to the page which has this tool, so it is useless. Even if a person does know they can go and use the keyword tool in google adwords, this is still not enough information to find the right niche market. I used a broad topic, “hair loss.” Yes, 823,000 people searched for this, which is what the author claimed was a good thing. However, there was over 23,000,000 competing pages of content for this keyword term. Where do you think I will rank with google with this keyword? Certainly not the first page, and probably not the fiftieth page either.
2) Since keyword selection was not even covered, choosing a broad keyword, such as hair loss, would not only rank me extemely low in the natural search, but also low in pay-per-click as well. The author does not even cover ranking well in SEO, but only suggests that I build a website and advertise through pay-per- click. With such a broad keyword as hair loss, I would probably need to spend $20 per click just to make it to the first or second page. I would be spent right into bankruptcy.
3) Not only would the broad keyword higher my cost per click, but also give me poor conversion rates in buying. It has been researched that broader termed keywords are searched when a consumer is just beginning his/her research on a particular topic. They are not yet ready to buy. Therefore the type of people clicking on my ad, would be doing so out of curiosity and research, and I woud not be making sales, but losing money. It is better to narrow down and define the keyword. So, instead of hair loss, I might use the keywords “growing back hair with Rogaine,” or “Rogaine stops hair loss”. Before using those terms, I would do research to compare the terms and see which converted to better traffic, determine how many competing pages used these terms, and then decide if it would be a profitable niche. The key here is to have keywords which have a good amount of people searching for them, but not a huge amount of competing pages. When you find a niche like this, you will be able to rank higher in the natural search. You will also not need to pay as much per click when you use google adwords as a means to advertise. You also will have a target audience who is more ready to buy, since they have already searched out a product name and are more informed about the product. Essentially, this type of audience has their credit card in hand. They are ready to buy.
4) The author gives no suggestions about building the webpage. Some of the things which should have been included are captivating headlines, keyword relevance, targeted, relevant content and excellent ad copy, just to name a few. There is so much involve with building a good webpage, that I do not even want to begin to make suggestions. The author should have been given information on how to get the website good SEO ratings in google. This is extremely important and can save thousands of dollars in advertising costs. Having a website with good keyword selection, captivating headlines and relevant, targeted content will also lower your PPC cost and result in higher ROI.
4) More information was needed on using google adwords. If I have not read this once, I have read it a thousand times, a person can easily burn their money away if they do not know what they are doing with pay-per-click. There are so many simple suggestions and tips which a person should know before using this great advertising system. Just make sure you know them, because mistakes will cost you money! Using appropriate keywords related to your website content, good ad copy and split testing are just a few things to consider when using adwords. It should also be noted that a beginner should not advertise on the content network in adwords.
There is so much not stated in the “easy biz system,” that I would be shocked if anyone could succeed. It almost seems like the author took about 45 minutes to an hour to quickly type something out and then sell it. I will give him/her some credit, however. He did write excellent ad copy, and really got me believing he could help me!
Look, if you are trying to get involved in internet marketing, do not get scammed. It is so easy to do! There is an ocean of information out there, and most of it is incomplete – just not as bad as what I just bought. I highly recommend the website wealthy affiliate. I don’t normally like to recommend too many things. I will say, I have bought ebooks, videos, spent time learning systems and spent hundreds of hours reading all kinds of junk. This website is by far the most complete teaching website that I have found. If you are not interested in network marketing or MLM and want to start making money soon, try this website and learn how to do internet marketing for a few months and see what you think. I am amazed at how much I have learned.
