In this multi-series affiliate marketing post, I’m gonna start with one of the “biggies” that cost me lots of time, energy, money and frustration…

I think MANY other Internet marketers make this same mistake, so hopefully it’ll give you some ideas of how you can enhance your own online biz.

So, what’s this huge mistake, right?

Here it is:  not selecting the right keywords.

Simply put, keywords run things in the online world.  Everything is based around ‘em, especially when you’re talking about the almighty Google.

Failure to fully understand keywords will inevitably lead to the following:

- Inability to rank highly in search engines

- Inability to get free organic traffic

- Inability to make sales of affiliate products or even your own products/services

Let’s take a quick look at how this shakes down…

Obviously, if you’re selecting keywords that are too competitive… then even with solid SEO, you’re probably gonna be buried on page 12 for about a year before anything happens (in terms of making the slow climb to page one).

Without getting to page one — heck, without getting to the top few spots on page one — you’ll never generate any significant free traffic… at least, not from big daddy “G”…

And without free traffic… and due to the fact that you’ve gotta have some seriously deep pockets to pay for traffic these days… you’re pretty much incapable of making sales and getting your affiliate marketing (or Internet marketing) biz off the ground.

Also, there’s another scenario and this is the one that adversely affected my biz the most:  I knew enough to select longer tailed, lower competition keywords…

*BUT*…

… I didn’t understand SEARCHER INTENT.

Say what?

Meaning, I didn’t think about the commerciality (I think that’s a word) of the keywords I was targeting.

The end result?

I got lots of blog posts and pages ranked, but never made any sales.  ‘Cause the visitors I was attracting were NOT buyers.  They had no intentions of buying anything, so no matter how good my affiliate marketing sales funnel was, I had virtually no chance of converting any of these visitors into buyers.

As soon as I realized this fault, I immediately started targeting transactional keywords.

And guess what?

Instant income boost!

Cha Ching

Here’s an example so you can see in real life how powerful this understanding of keywords can be…

Affiliate Marketing For Beginners — The Power Of Keywords

In about 20 minutes I wrote this Gymboss interval timer review, which is nothing more than a little fitness timer I was using in my workouts.

With a little backlinking work, I was able to shoot this baby to the top of page one in Google for various phrases, such as:  Gymboss, Gymboss Interval Timer, Gymboss Review, Gymboss Interval Timer Review, etc…

Even with a pathetically small $5-something commission, this page makes me over $1,000 per month on total autopilot.  I haven’t touched it in months.  (You can learn all this in more in my new private money making club)…

Funny thing is this page only gets a handful of visitors per day, since the search volume for those phrases is fairly low.

But with a 25-30% conversion rate… thanks to me using a BUYER KEYWORD (aka the name of a product plus “review”), it just doesn’t take many visitors to generate a healthy passive income stream.

Now compare that page/keyword to something like my “celebrity workouts” page that currently ranks #1 in big “G” and brings in far more traffic, but results in almost no sales…

Bottom line is this:  to make money online, you absolutely have to understand keywords inside and out.  Once you do… simply sprinkle some best practices SEO on top, and it’s fairly easy to start making consistent passive income online.

I’ll be back soon with another mistake that held me down when I first started my affiliate marketing business on the Internet…

Stay Cool,

-B

To learn more affiliate marketing tactics, swing by Affiliate Marketing for Dummies and see if there’s anything that floats your boat…

“Lazy Man” Traffic Building Strategy Guest Post by Brad Campbell

4. Pinging is “a Must”

After doing your comprehensive research, applying the simple on-site optimization and writing a super helpful post, you’ll want to make sure and PING that puppy upon publishing.  Refer to 6 simple SEO tips and follow the instructions for pinging your blog posts.

This tactic is killer and it’ll allow your posts to get discovered immediately by the search engines (any post I write these days will be on the first page of Google within 1-2 minutes after publishing [for my long-tailed keyword] thanks to pinging…it’s that powerful).

5. BackLink Rocks

Be sure to link back to that blog post from other blog posts, using your keyword as the anchor text to the link.  When all of these steps are followed correctly, you should be able to rank on the first page of Google for nearly ALL of the individual posts you write.

From there, the traffic compounds.  One post may bring you 20 visitors a day and the next post may bring you 15 new visitors a day, and so on.  Pretty soon you’ve got 20-30 posts that are all chipping in towards your total website traffic.  It doesn’t take long at all to reach the 1k visitors/day mark and since your content will be straight fire, there’s a good chance of new visitors telling their friends.

6. ABLB (always be list building)

Encourage visitors to opt in and don’t be afraid to go a little overboard with this.  Every page of my blog has at least 2 different opt in forms and I usually end each post by reminding new visitors to sign up.  These simple steps have drastically increased my opt in rates. It should go without saying that you want to really hook these people up when they do opt in.

If you give them crap, you’ve instantly ruined your credibility and they’ll be less likely to come back and refer friends.  But if you really go all out and give them some useful content/tools, they’re sure to stop back often and spread the word for you.  You can take this one step further and offer your subscribers an ethical bribe when they register – tell them if they get 10 friends to visit your site and opt in, you’ll give them more free gifts.  This works like a charm and it all leads to more targeted traffic for you.

That’s pretty much all there is to the “lazy man’s (or woman’s) traffic system”.

Doing exactly these steps has allowed me to quickly build my blog traffic, without having to pay a dime or spend countless hours doing traditional link building methods.  Granted, it’s always a good idea to build quality links…but it’s nice to start getting traffic and making money FIRST and then you have the option to outsource those kinds of tasks.

Seriously, if you follow these steps you’ll get awesome results for what little time you invested.  The cool thing is that this strategy pays you back for the rest of your life, because generally once you have a post ranking well…you don’t even have to touch it again and it will continue to bring traffic and sales day after day.

Brad Campbell
Traffic & “RockStar” Blogging Expert

Brad Campbell is a rising SEO and traffic generation expert. I personally witnessed him growing his blog Extreme Fat Loss Workout from less than 100 visitors/day to 2000+ visitors/day in 6 months. Fast forward 3 more months, today his blog gets 4000+ visitors/day which generates multiple, 6-figure online revenues.

Comment your questions and feedback to Brad below.

If you want to get a TON of traffic to your site… if you want to make a business out of your blog with what you love doing… then you’ll wanna check out the RockStar Traffic Formula System.

An improvement to your site was by far the biggest (A whipping 221% increase in the traffic to his site from January) –What do you think separated you from the completion – could you share with us?

Dan Go is actually our very first premium customer since we started Fitness Website Formula last April. Now he’s dominating his local market with his bootcamp service on an auto-pilot, and getting a ton of business through his sites. Way to go Dan!

Without further ado, here’s Dan’s success story:

Guest Post by Dan Go

Hey there… I just want to thank Shingo and the team at FWF for awarding me the free blog.  Since this is the Oscars I feel like I should do an acceptance speech but on second thought… I’ll just give you the straight goods on the Ninja strategies I deployed to increase my traffic by 210% in the past year.

So how did I get more traffic to my website?

I’ll do a quick rundown of all the things I did since getting the site:

1. Set up my Google ad words campaigns for my main keywords using Market Annihilator.
2. Started Facebook advertising
3. Got a bunch of links back to my website using an article submitting service. (I’d recommend Chris McComb’s link building service)
4. Created a couple of mini optimized sales pages for other keywords I wanted to dominate.  I still have about 100 pages to add but the ones that FWF and I have set up have worked great.
5. Used the Market Annihilator Google local business ninja strategy to put my business to the top of the local listings.
6. Edited my sales page to further optimize and strengthen the keyword density for the cities I was targeting. I used to go after a couple of other cities but they were too far away from my area so I decided to replace those keywords with my main cities.
7. Did the blog posts 7 Secrets to Outsourcing your business and How to Duplicate yourself on KickBackLife.com blog and this generated a ton of traffic and got me a high level site linking back to mine.
8. I always used my blog post titles to optimize my blog for my main keywords.  So if I was talking about “How to Eat Like a Champ” I would put in my blog, “Markham Personal Trainer reveals how to eat like a champ”.  This makes my posts more search engine friendly.

   In addition, I’m constantly searching for ways to improve my fitness site and blog and I go through FWF for all my website and design needs.

At first I was a little hesitant to get my site done by these guys because well…the investment was high for me at the time and I come from Canada where the exchange rate at the time was not so friendly so I was actually paying more than the sticker price for the blog and sales site….sucked to be from Canada but at least we got hockey and free health care

But in the end I have gotten 10 times the amount of money back for my original investment. I get on average 2-3 prospects a day through my sales page.

FWF got me to the first page of Google when I launched my website. Now I’m ranking #2 for my keyword terms and I’m gunning for #1 very soon.

Thanks again for the blog guys and if you haven’t invested in their services… what the hell are you waiting for?  Do it before your competition does.

Dan Go

Dan Go runs Markham and Thornhill Boot Camps and is a Markham personal trainer

Feel free to leave Dan a comment below about his post and any other traffic getting strategies that worked great for you!