If you are new to search engine optimization and wondering what is the secret in getting top ranks in the search engines, the secret is link building. That’s not what I’m going to talk about today because I have talked enough in other search engine optimization tips in this blog.

What I’m going to talk about today is the “other secret”.

You see, with some keyword research and link building effort, it is not hard to raise the ranks in the search engines. The challenge is how to stay there. With millions of new webpages being added each day, and more and more marketers becoming SEO savvy, your competitors will beat your ranking sooner than you think.

The solution? More backlinks!

The truth is, link building is a never-ending chore and if you want to keep your position, you literally have to keep building links to your website for as long as the website exists. That can be a daunting task and many people give up.

So how can you overcome this problem?

One way is to outsource. This means you pay other people to do the daunting job. View outsourcing as a form of leverage. The degree of leverage varies dramatically, from engaging someone to write or spin articles to engaging a professional to do the entire process of link building. Treat link building as a necessary expense, just like the need to employ a person to man a brick-and-mortar store, so that you can free yourself from doing other things, such as developing more websites or networking.

Another way is to encourage your visitors to link to you. This is only possible when you have a website that truly provides good values and good solutions to a problem, so good that people are willing to quote your website in forums or in their blogs. In fact, this is the true backlinks that Google wants.

Both ways should be used concurrently.

Your Blueprint To SEO Success

If you were to build a website with intention to use search engine as its main traffic source, here is the blueprint I would advise.

1) Build a site that provides true values. Forget about those made-for-adsense websites. Fill the site with good articles and good online applications that people can use. They will be the ‘link baits’ that your visitors will bite and voluntarily spread your website. A good affiliate program can expedite the spreading process tremendously. If not, you’ll need to be a bit more patient.

2) Build backlinks. Either do it yourself or get someone competent to do it for you. This step is necessary until your website is rooted in the search engine and when more people link to your website voluntarily.

3) Add more webpages to your website with the intention to target more keywords. Note that each webpage should target at most 2-3 keyword phrases, usually only 1 keyword phrase. This means the more webpages you have, the more keywords you can target and hence the more traffic you can potentially receive.

4) Rinse and repeat step 2 and 3, with the intention to create more link baits. Remember, a link bait can either be a content or an online application. As more visitors come to your website and find it useful, it is inevitable that some will spread your webpages to others and that’s when more backlinks will be established on autopilot. That’s what you want to achieve eventually.

Many marketers missed Step 4 and they work very hard to do Step 2 and 3. Start your website on the right track and your SEO journey will become easier and easier. If not, you will become exhausted eventually, regardless of how hard you work initially.

In my next post, I will show you an example of what I mean by link bait. Stay tuned.

There is a lot of talk about how difficult it is to get good quality traffic to your sites but few people talk about what to do with that traffic once it hits your landing page.

It seems crazy but it’s the truth, people have become so blinded by traffic that they forget to make sure their website is setup to convert. This means they spend a fortune in both time and money driving traffic to poorly optimized landing pages that never fulfill their earning potential.

Today’s post is a thought-provoking one. In this post, I’m going to throw you a few questions about your landing page. You may call it a checklist. I hope it can give you an insight into how well your landing page is optimized for conversion.

1) Is Your Landing Page ‘Scannable’?

Eye tracking studies have shown that there is a set way that the majority of people use to read webpages. Generally they start at the top left corner and slowly scan through the page picking out the key things that interest them.

This means using a combination of short paragraphs, bullet points, bolding, colors, etc to get attention to the things that need attention and to make it easy for people to read what you have to say. Just make sure you don’t overdo it as trying to make too much stand out will end up with none of it getting any attention.

2) How Soon Will Your Visitors Get The Answer Of ‘What’s In It For Me?’?

When someone lands on your website the first thing they will ask is ‘what’s in it for me?’ If you introduce yourself rather than addressing this right at the beginning, people will not read more than a few words before leaving your site.

So, always start off by telling the visitor what they have to gain if they continue reading and use lots of ‘you’ focused language throughout the page to relate everything to them individually.

3) How Fast Can You Make Your Visitors Trust You?

Once you’ve gained your visitors’ interests, the next immediate challenge is trust. The faster you can gain their trust, the higher the chance that they will read your entire landing page.

Many things can affect how fast you can build trust. They include the design of your website (does it look like a scam site or a trust-worthy site), the use of testimonials, the use of external recognitions such as awards, 3rd party site ranking etc, and having your own photo on the landing page.

4) Is Your Copywriting ‘Hypnotic’?

Copywriting is an important element in traffic conversion. You’ll be surprised that certain words can chase people away from your site while certain words can get people to take action. Also, you have to vary the usage of words so as to appeal to different modalities, namely kinesthetic, visual and auditory. For example, ‘imagine this…’, ‘can you see what I mean…’ and ‘listen to me…’ all have different impact on different modalities of people.

5) Do Your Visitors Know Exactly What They Are Expected To Do Next?

Many websites and landing pages fail simply because they do not tell the visitor what to do next. If your visitor reaches the end of the page and there is no link or instruction on what you want them to do next they will most likely leave your website.

If you want people to stay on your website then give them a link to another article that might interest them. The only time you may want them to leave is to take the desired action (e.g. visit the product you are promoting or opt-in to your list), but even in this case you still need a clear link that tells them what to do next!

Traffic conversion is an important skill that every internet marketer must master. I remembered when I first started, I spent more than $2000 on a course on traffic conversion. The good thing about traffic conversion courses is that you can apply the strategies immediately and you can see the benefit right away. I remembered applying just one strategy that turned one of my websites from 3 figures to 4 figures a month. Not a lot, but that’s just one strategy on one website!

If you would like to get a good course on traffic conversion, I suggest that you take a look at Conversion Rate Course by traffic conversion expert, Paul Bryant. It has everything you need to know, from sales funneling strategies to copywriting to real-life examples (which is lacking in many traffic conversion courses).

About 2 years ago, I started a link building network called ezarticlelink.com. The basic idea of this network is that members set up an article directory in some of their websites, allow other members to post articles to it and they can do likewise.

Fast-forward 2 years now, guess what….

The entire network of article directories (more than 4000 of them) are getting more than 1 million traffic a day from the search engine. This is something I’ve never expected.

How do we make it happen? Well, that’s what I’m going to share with you in today’s post.

You see, getting traffic for the article directories, honestly, is not the intended objective. The intended objective of the system is to help its members to get backlinks through posting articles.

But simply posting article to a ton of websites isn’t going work, because most of the articles are not going to be indexed, or even if they are indexed, they do not have much link value. This is what is happening to many link building networks in the market now.

The solution? Backlinks, again.

That means in order to make those published articles worth more, you have to build links to those articles that eventually link to you. That’s why nowadays, you see tons of “link booster” system flourishing.

Understanding this fact, we devised a system to ping and build backlinks to EVERY article posted in the article directories in our network, before these articles eventually link to our members’ websites.

Imagine a website where every article posted in it has got other websites linking to it. That’s the picture of each of the article directory in our network, in the eyes of the search engine.

What happens when the search engine sees such a website? If the search engine can talk, he will say “wow, this got to be a popular site with many people are raving about it”.

As a result, the articles posted in our article directories rank very well in the search engine. In fact, in total, they receive over a million traffic every day. (We know it because all the articles are served via our server and we record the daily hits.)

That is one part of the equation, the most important part.

The other part of the equation is relevance.

The article directories in our network are a general one, yet the articles posted in them can rank well in almost any niche. Why is that so?

The reason is we make sure that everything at “article level” is niche focused. For example, we make sure that for each article, all the links from that article page to other articles are in the same niche and all the links that link to that article are also from the same niche.

This means what the search engine is seeing is an article about, say yeast infection, with links to other articles about yeast infection and has got other yeast infection articles from other websites linking to it.

Since the objective of the search engine is to provide relevant resources to its users, each article in our article directory appears to be a good resource on any given niche, and hence the good ranking.

That, my friend, is the secrets behind 1 million traffic a day. If you practice these two secrets on your website, there is no reason why you can’t rank well in the search engines. By the way, just to make sure you don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not asking you to create thousands of article directories! The secrets I’m talking about are backlinks and relevance.

If you are looking for an easy way to get thousands of quality backlinks, you should check out ezArticleLink. You can join as a Silver (free) and Gold member. If you are getting its Gold membership, make sure you get it fast because the Gold membership price is always increasing. Get your account here.

If you are searching for web hosting options, you may have compared reseller hosting vs shared hosting. Which one should you choose, if money is not an issue?

I decided to write this article because I recently helped a client to set up a script, and notice that he, as a newbie, is using a reseller hosting account. Puzzled, I asked him why. He said he had done some online research and most people said that reseller hosting is better.

Curious, I did some research too and realized that many bloggers are advocating reseller hosting. OMG.

Hence I decided to write this article, to shatter some of the myths that are going around… and to help you save some money.

I’m going to list down the arguments on why reseller hosting is better (based on what other bloggers wrote). Then I’ll share my own view point… and you’ll be the judge.

1) Reseller Hosting Saves You Money When You Have Several Domains

Most bloggers say this, “if you have ONE personal website, shared hosting will save you money. But if you run an online business with several sites, a reseller hosting will save you money, since it allows hosting of multiple domains.”

That’s not true.

Yes, some shared hosting services allow only 1 domain, and the cost is about $5/mth. But there are tons of hosting companies that offer shared hosting with unlimited domains and the cost is less than $10/mth. You can have 100 domains hosted on a shared server. No problem.

2) Reseller Hosting Makes You Money

“A reseller account allows you to sell hosting, helping you to offset the cost of your server.”

If your intention is to get into the highly competitive website hosting industry, then yes, by all means, get a reseller account. But if your intention is to offset your cost, it’s really a bad idea.

As a reseller, you have to provide your own customer support. If you are not server savvy, you will have problem serving your customers. Even if you are server savvy, your time will be better spent growing your key business, not to offset your cost.

3) Shared Hosting Is ‘Shared’

“With shared hosting, you are sharing the server with hundreds or even thousands of other users.”

That’s true, but what those bloggers didn’t say is reseller hosting is also shared!

The only difference is whether the server is shared among a few hundred people or a few people.

Other than reseller hosting and shared hosting, there are 2 more forms of hosting called virtually dedicated hosting and dedicated hosting. To put it very simply, only dedicated hosting is 1 server to 1 user. All other hosting plans are shared.

It doesn’t matter if you are sharing the server with 2 users or 200 users, you are still sharing, which means there is a limit to what you can do, and there is a risk of other users crashing the server.

Nowadays, hosting companies are giving unlimited disk space, unlimited domain and unlimited bandwidth for shared hosting (such as the baby plan in hostgator.com, which cost less than $10 a month). If you can burst their limit, it is their problem!

Even if you are on reseller hosting, all you need is one heavy user from another reseller to crash the server. Unless you are using a dedicated server, the risk of sharing is always there.

Conclusion

Unless you want to run your own hosting service, always go for shared hosting, until you hit some limits that force you to upgrade. Even so, you should upgrade to virtually dedicated or dedicated hosting. Don’t bother about reseller hosting.

Some Interesting Pointers

You may be curious why hosting companies can offer unlimited domain, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space. If you are interested to know, here’s why:

- although they give you unlimited bandwidth, they limit the connection speed. It’s like giving you 1000 trillion dollars but you can just take out $1 a day (a little exaggerated but you get the idea).

- although they give you unlimited disk space and unlimited domain, they limit the Index Node, which is the number of files. For hostgator, the limit is 250000. Wordpress script itself has about 250 files. If you use some templates and plugins, you can easily hit 500 files. That means by the time you reach 500 domains, you would have hit the Index Node limit. (You can theoretically fail the server by uploading 250000 video files, each 1GB big. But remember, your connection speed is limited. It will be a pain to upload those files.)

Recently I’m thinking of more viral marketing ideas and examples that I can use for my online businesses. As the saying goes, give and thou shall receive. Here I am giving you my best kept viral marketing ideas. If you’ve come across any others, feel free to share them in the comments below.

1. Organize a referral contest

Organizing a referral contest has been an old-schooled viral marketing idea, yet it is still extremely effective. The thing about contest is that it can stir up people’s adrenaline and encourage people to work extra hard to promote for you.

For example, you can create a referral contest with 2 chances of winning. First chance is a lucky draw, where those who refer just 4 people to your website can quality to win say $100. Second chance is top referral, where the best 3 referrals can walk away with $1000 each. This way, you can encourage everyone to refer at least 4 people while at the same time give the power affiliates a chance to show their full potential.

2. Provide free ‘viral’ online services

Whenever I talk about free viral services, I like to mention Google. Besides being a search engine, Google has really created tons of useful applications, such as Google Map, Google Doc, Google Analytics, Google Mail, etc that we can use free. Whenever we use these applications, we are indirectly helping Google to establish its branding and increase its market awareness.

In fact, this is the model that our website, LeadsLeap.com, is adopting. For example, we create free tools like Slidesense and MYOB list builder script that members can use for free. Since all our tools carries a link to our website, as more and more people use our tools, even more people are checking us out. We have been online since 2008 and you can see from our Alexa ranking that we are still very strong. This viral strategy has contributed to our success significantly.

3. Target-based referral program

Another viral strategy that we adopt is target-based referral program, where we set a minimum target for our referrals to hit. In specific, when our members reach 20 referrals, they will receive free advertising credits EVERY MONTH. This is another strategy that has worked wonders.

4. Bait post

The idea of a bait post is to turn your blog post into an online resource that other people will link to. You must have seen in forums and Q&A type of sites such as Ask Yahoo! where people reference an external site for the answer to a particular question. That’s an example of a bait post.

Of course, for a bait post to work, you must first write high quality blog that really solve people’s problem.

But does it mean as long as you write a good blog, people will link to you? Of course NOT! In most cases, a blog post becomes a ‘bait’ when it ranks high in the search engine for a particular question. What happens is when people want to answer other people’s questions, they will Google. When they find a good reference, they will post that reference in their answers.

I know what you are thinking. This sounds like mission impossible. At LeadsLeap, we don’t leave things to chance. We have lots of people linking to our blog posts  because each of our blog post is an affiliate link. This means by referring people to any of our blog post, they are at the same time building their referrals!

5. ‘Sure-win’ referral program

I have a client who pays people 5 cents to every email sent out to promote his business. I call this ’sure-win’ referral program because regardless of whether people make any purchase, as long as you send out the email, you will be paid. He has been doing that since 2007 and have paid over $20k to people. I’m sure this trick has worked well for him.

6. Video marketing

The power of video marketing is well known. If you can produce useful how-to videos for your niche site and publish them on Youtube, those videos can bring you traffic for years.

This viral marketing idea is especially useful for niches that involve skills, such as cooking, scrapbooking and magic tricks because at the end of your video, you say say something like ‘for more magic tricks, please visit YourSite.com.’. Since those who watch your video are craving for more tricks, chances are they will visit your website.

7. Leverage on social networking

Last but not least is viral marketing through social networking. One good example is the use of Facebook Like. By encouraging people to ‘like’ you on their Facebook, you are exposed to all their friends who potentially have the same interest. Eventhough the exposure is short-lived, if some of their friends also start to ‘like’ you, this thing can go very viral.

Have you come across any interesting viral marketing ideas and examples? As I said, I’m looking for more ideas. If you have, please share with me and the rest of our readers in the comment section below. I thank you in advance!

What are the most important things to consider before you venture into a new online business? Is it the technical know-how? Or perhaps it’s the traffic strategies?

In today’s blog, I’ll give you a checklist that you can refer to whenever you want to start a new online business.

1) Is the market easily targetable?

Before you do anything, you need to make sure that the market you are trying to get into is targetable. What I mean is your prospects should belong to a community that you can easily locate. This is important because when your business is launched, you need to know where to look for your customers.

This may seem common sense, but in reality, many netpreneurs believe that their product targets everybody. As a result, they advertise everywhere and have no idea why the traffic doesn’t convert.

2) Is there a problem in the market you’re targeting and does your product address to that problem?

In most cases, a business idea is generated when the founder faces a problem that he fails to find a good solution in the market. If this describes the cause of your business idea, then congratulations, as you’ve found THAT problem.

However, if you have no idea what problem your business is solving, you really have to think of one and sell that idea as a problem. Otherwise, you are going to have a hard time convincing people to buy your product.

3) Is your product unique in the market?

To me, this is the most important point before I take action on any business idea.

If you have studied marketing, you may recall the term USP, which stands for Unique Selling Proposition. A good USP is one that not only provides a solution to the problem in Point 2 but one that is unique.

You don’t have to be Einstein to create a unique product. A product can be unique by simply combining two or more ideas into one, or it can be an idea that exists in some part of the world but not found in your territory or country. Or it can even be a cheaper way of providing the same solution and the low price itself can be the uniqueness.

No one can tell you if one USP is more profitable than another. This is where your vision comes into play.

4) Is there a viral component to your business model?

If you think getting traffic is tough, that’s because there isn’t a viral component to your business model. If all the traffic has to be generated by you personally, it’s just a matter of time before you give up internet marketing.

To truly understand the meaning of viral, look at Facebook. While most people think Facebook is doing the world a favor, by providing a good platform for people to connect, in actual fact, the world is actually doing Facebook a favor, as every Facebook user is a free promoter of Facebook, helping Facebook to expand its user base.

Viral components can include many things, from having an affiliate program to providing viral tools. However, the best form of viral component is a system that can easily convert your users into your affiliates, without them having to intentionally promote your website. This means the more they use your product or service to benefit themselves, the more they promote you!

5) Do you have a traffic retention strategy?

Getting traffic is easy, keeping the traffic is harder, converting the traffic into sales is the hardest. A good traffic retention strategy will help you keep the traffic that comes to your website, so that you not only have more chance to convert the traffic into sales, but also have more people promoting your website, if you’ve done the right thing.

The most common form of traffic retention strategy is getting people to optin by giving away freebies. As I said, this is the most common form but with more and more marketers using such trick, you need to be more innovative than that in order to stand out from the rest.

6) Do you have an automatic sales conversion strategy?

People need to be reminded to buy from you. If you need to do this manually, both you and your prospects will get sick and tired of it. Instead, what you should do is to think of a subtle sales conversion strategy that is always reminding your prospects that there is something better waiting for them.

Imagine a person who needs to get from point A to B everyday. He can either get there on foot or take your taxi. It will be annoying if you were to approach this person everyday. Instead you just have to make sure that he sees you everyday and he knows about your offer. One day, when he sees the value of your service, he will buy.

7) Is the need for your product long-lived?

If you sell something that people will only need to use once, you will have to find a new prospect after every sale. That is tedious.

On the other hand, if your product can service a person for live, like an insurance policy, you are going to have recurring income from every sale you make.

Another way of looking at ‘long-lived’ is are you selling a fad? A fad is something that suddenly bursts into a full buying frenzy and then, just as quickly, fizzle out. If you are selling a fad, you may be making some quick money but such income is not lasting. Soon you will be back to square one and you have to start all over again.

Is the operation of your business self-running?

How much time will it take for you to keep that business running? If the running of your business requires a lot involvement from you, it means this business is going to keep you so busy that you may have no time to expand the business or explore other business and investment opportunities.

As a basic principle, you should spend most of your time growing your business or establishing other businesses, not running the business.

Of course, no business is 100% self-running. If most processes can be automated or can easily be outsourced, that business is worth exploring.

Let me give you an example of what I mean by running a business. Say if you run a membership site that provides new video tutorials every month, you will have to spend time preparing the videos. You can outsource, provided that the outsource personnel can do an equally good job, and the business is profitable enough for you to engage that person.

However, there is an interesting twist. If you are indeed in such a situation, you can turn the ‘maintenance work’ into a growth opportunity. For example, you can turn your videos into a MRR (Master Resale Right) product and allow your customers to sell or bundle it with other products. This way, the same videos suddenly become a viral tool that will bring you more traffic. You can also produce videos based on interviews with other marketing gurus. This way, you are growing your affiliate network while at the same time delivering good values to your customers.

9) Is your business building an asset?

Most people do business to make money. But that’s not enough. In addition to making money, you have to make sure that your business is building an asset other than money. An asset can be a collection of websites, which the guru call virtual property, or it can be a network, which can be in the form of a subscriber list or a network of affiliates, or you may be building an infrastructure that you can use for your future businesses.

Looking beyond money and focusing on building assets is the way to ensuring that your online venture is a lasting one. Whether your current business is going to survive tomorrow or not, you know that you are sure to win because the asset that has been built is going to benefit you no matter what.

I was reviewing the comments in our blog and one reader asked for advice on how to advertise and get traffic to his niche web store.

You can take a look at his website here or this screenshot to see how it looks like when this article was drafted.

As I have always been saying, getting traffic is easy. The hardest thing is converting the traffic.

The key to traffic conversion is the sales funneling process, i.e. how to capture the immediate interest of your visitors and get them to take action (usually by means of opt-in or adding you as their preferred site) before leaving your site.

Once the sales funneling process is ready, the rest is just going through the process of getting traffic.

I talk about sales funneling process right at the start of this discussion because it is exactly what is lacking in this website.

Let’s go back to the website. The homepage is a catalog page listing the featured products for sale. Such homepage will only appeal to one type of traffic, i.e. people who are currently in need of a SPECIFIC niche product THAT happens to be listed in that catalog. My question is, what is the chance of you finding such a person?

Assuming you advertise such a website, chances are most of the traffic will just come and go, including those who may have a need for your product in the future.

By now, you may ask, “So, what is a good sales funneling process for such a site?”

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. For example, I may offer a huge MRR bundle that people can download free if they opt-in. Whoever come to my homepage will be presented with the offer, either on the homepage, above the fold, or as a popup. I may also have a series of autoresponder attempting to convert them into sales.

Also, instead of selling the product at a premium price of $29 - $59 for just one product, I may just sell most of the products at unbelievably low price of $0.99 - $3.90, emphasizing that those are limited-time offers. I may also have a “BUY ALL” offer at $49 - $97 for those with higher budget.

I sell at such a low price because I want potential buyers to remember my website. I want them to know that should they need a particular MRR product, my site is a cheap resource that they should check out. In my homepage, I’ll urge visitors to bookmark my site for future reference because it is THE WEBSITE they should check out should they need an MRR product.

Let’s sum up what I’ve suggested. First, I have an opt-in offer to convert the traffic into my list that I can follow-up with. Next I have a unique selling preposition for my website, i.e. a complete low-cost resource for MRR products, and that, hopefully, can capture their attention immediately and hence bookmark my site. I even have many time-limited offers to urge visitors to buy immediately as well as a big ticket item to cater to those with more budget.

My homepage will be designed to convey 2 ideas: 1) there is a huge free-of-charge MRR bundle that visitors can download, and 2) the site is the ultimate resource for MRR products at low cost.

These two ideas will also form the basis of all my advertising campaigns. So my ads will either be about downloading a massive collection of MRR free, or hundreds of MRR at just $0.99!!

Once the system is in place, there is really no lack of places to promote the site. Traffic exchanges, paid to read networks, safelists, ezine advertising, PPC ads, SEO etc. Where your prospects may be found, just find your way to reach it - THAT is what advertising is all about!

On 24th Feb 2011, Google announced a major change in its search algorithm. This time, the target of this change are those content farms.

I’m not going into the details of the change. You can read it here.

Following the change, I receive lots of inquiries all asking about its impact on our Ezarticlelink network. Well, I’ll come to that later. But first, let’s take a look at some interesting research I’ve done.

Who Are Hit By The Change?

Following the announcement, Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) said, “Google has been thinking for quite some time about how to deal with content that isn’t obvious spam but is clearly not designed with the best interests of the user in mind. Google needs to be open to ways where we can improve.”

When I read this, my immediate feeling was Matt is referring to sites like Ezinearticles and other article directories, which have been gaining a lot of traffic under the new Google Caffeine system.

You see, these article directories are not spam, neither are they qualified as a great resource. Yet they seem to be dominating Google’s search result, simply because tens of thousands of webmasters are working very hard to build contents as well as backlinks for them.

Is my feeling right?

You bet!

Take a look at the traffic stats for the 3 highly popular article directories: Ezinearticles, Associatedcontent and Buzzle.

As expected, all got hit! But taking regular fluctuations into consideration, Ezinearticles got the least hit of all.

My next suspects are Squidoo and Hubpages, since they work like article directories in many aspects. Here are their traffic stats:

Hubpages is obviously hit by this new change. Taking regular fluctuations into consideration, Squidoo’s impact is not really significant.

It does seem that the new algorithm is doing what it should do, i.e. to penalize content farms.

But is that really the case?

Well, let’s take a look at another content farm, one that I absolutely salute to - Bigresource.com

For those who don’t know about this site, Bigresource is a mega website that scrapes contents from all over the net, from forums to blogs, organizing them into related topics and then present them in its own search engine optimized pages.

Technically speaking, this website has no unique content at all. All its contents are short paragraphs from other websites on the net. Take a look at one of its pages to see what I mean.

I expected this website to be heavily hit by the new algorithm, but take a look at its traffic stats:

There is no significant impact!

Finally, let’s take a look at the articles published in our article directory network.

Below is a screenshot of Google’s search result for a term that I searched.

The results can be summarised below:

#1 & 2 position - 2 articles from ehow.com
#3 & 4 position - 2 articles published in our article directories
#6 position - article from articlesbase.com
#7 position - article from hubpages.com
#9 position - article from ezinearticles.com

It seems that the articles published in our article directory is still doing pretty well in Google’s search result.

Something to note about the 2 articles in our article directories is that they are spun version of the same article. You can see their similarity in the screenshot above. This suggests that spun articles are still considered unique under the new algorithm.

My Guesses…

From all the information I’ve gathered, here are some ideas I arrive at:

1) It’s not the end of the world.

What I mean is the content farms are hit, but they are still getting tons of traffic from Google. So it’s not the end of the world for them and many other webmasters.

2) Content duplication is still okay.

I say so because Bigresource.com is relatively unaffected by the new algorithm, suggesting that content uniqueness is still not a big deal.

But do note that Google evaluates duplicated content based on the overall webpage. This means if you put 30 paragraphs of duplicated contents, taken from all over the net, as what bigresource.com does, you’ve got unique content! I believe this is still the case under this new algorithm, as evident in the studies above.

3) Backlinks are still more important

From the studies above, you can see that Ezinearticles and Squidoo are less hit by the new algorithm. What could be the reason?

Is it because they have better contents? I don’t think so.

What I do know is most marketers, when publishing contents in article directories and social publishing platforms, will only build backlinks to selected sites. In the case of article directories, most marketers will only build backlinks to their articles in Ezinearticles. In the case of social platforms, they will only build backlinks to their Squidoo Lenses.

What that means is these two sites not only have a high site authority, but also have lots of backlinks to lots of their internal pages, as compared to other sites that have equally high site authority but relatively less backlinks to their internal pages.

Could that be the reason why these sites are less hit? Well, that’s my guess. What’s yours?

Following my discussion on the Internet Marketing Mistakes I Made When I First Started Online, today I shall share with you what I did right when I first started online.

I hope my experience can help shorten your journey to online success.

Here we go…

1. Understand The Principles Of Success

I always find reading boring until I discovered a section called Self Help in the bookstore. Since then, I became a self help junkie, reading all kinds of books and attending all kinds of seminars on success, communication, sales, wealth creation, mind power, brain power and even spirituality.

All these readings eventually led me to quitting my job, starting a few brick-and-mortar businesses and failing at every one of them.

If I had given up my dream then, I may now be another skeptic of success philosophy.

But when I turned to online business, everything I’ve learnt began to apply. Be it the law of giving and receiving, the theory of delayed gratification, the concept of focus equals to power or the idea of think and grow rich, all the principles of success that I’ve learnt are now the foundation of my online business.

Personally, I think such foundation is very important because it keeps me focused on what is really important in building a successful business (or even building a successful life), instead of simply chasing after the money.

2. Learn Programming

Many gurus suggest that a marketer should focus on driving the business and should outsource other technical stuff such as website creation to others. For me, I prefer to learn and do it myself.

I’m not trained in HTML, PHP or Javascript, but I make it a point to learn enough so that I can communicate with my programmer at the same level and do minor programming or debugging work when necessary.

The advantages of knowing about programming are as follow:
i. I can save money on simple programming work, since I can do it myself.
ii. I can respond faster to any bug report and system improvement.
iii. The more I understand about programming and its strengths and limitations, the more ideas I can come out with.

3. Build Something

The idea of affiliate marketing sounds great - making money selling other people’s product, with no worry of customer support. Hence, many internet marketers started as an affiliate.

But what I do differently from other affiliates is I will make sure that in the process of promoting as an affiliate, I build something that belong to me.

The idea of building something is very broad. You can build a list, build a reputation, build a traffic funnel, build a network of people or build a virtual real estate.

For example, if I want to promote a forex product, instead of simply posting adwords to send traffic to the product or building mini site specially for that product, I will create a forex content site or even create a forex web service. I’ll promote my own website instead of promoting the affiliated product directly.

If the product that I’m promoting is discontinued, I can always promote other similar products. The most important thing here is I’m spending my time to build something that will give me traffic in long run.

4. Go Passive

Let me ask you a question. If you can spare 1 month of your time, would you spend that month doing something that will earn you $5,000 in one go, or do something that will earn you $200 every single month?

Some people told me that they’ll choose the $5,000 option, and they will repeat the process and earn more $5,000 every month. After one year, they would have earned $60,000!

But for me, I will go for $200 every month. I will repeat the process to earn more of such income. My first month may be merely $200, but if I spend 1 year to build the same kind of income, I would have established $2,400 every month by the end of 1 year, and $24,000 every month after 10 years. After 10 years, I can stop working and still earn $24,000 every month, whereas in the first case, once you stop working, your income stops.

You may think this is an ideal situation and things may change. You are right. There is no real passive income. However, with such income, I can stop working for weeks or even months and my income will still be pretty stable. More importantly, I don’t have to worry if I can pay my bills next month. This gives me peace of mind to continue building even more websites and earn even more.

Different people prefer different ways of doing things. What I’ve presented above is what I THINK I’ve done right. You may have different experiences. Whether you agree or disagree with me, leave your comments below, so that others can decide what is the right thing to do for them.

I’ve been thinking of what to write in our blog to welcome 2011. Finally I decided to talk about some of the internet marketing mistakes that I’ve made in the past, not last year, but since I started venturing out online.

I hope my experience can help you avoid some pitfalls and hence smoothen your online journey in 2011.

Without further ado, here are the internet marketing mistakes I’ve made.

Mistake #1. Not believing that internet marketing is for me

This has to be the TOP mistake that I’ve made.

Back in early 2000, I was already learning about internet marketing and trying a few things without any success. My mentality was “let’s see if I can make some money online”.

I was never serious about internet marketing because I had so many other options of making money at that time.

After a few years, I failed in ALL my brick-and-mortar businesses and I was $50k in debt with the bank. At that time, online business was my last chance, as the initial investment was minimal. It was a case where I either made it online or I would have to shelve my dream and get a job.

Now it seems to be a blessing that I failed in all my offline businesses.

Mistake #2. Lacking marketing plans

Whenever I have a good idea, I’ll act on it. But there were not one, but two occasions where I spent months preparing and building a new website and when everything was ready, I realized that I had no idea how to market that website!

Of course, those websites are now sitting there collecting virtual dust, while serving as a reminder for me that I must have a foolproof marketing strategy for a new website even before I register the domain name!

Mistake #3. Hoping that there is a holy grail

There was one time when I bought a 100,000 email list from a renowned internet marketing guru, naively thinking that even if just 1% buy from me, I will be rich!

I prepared a good opt-in offer, since I knew I needed to convert it from a cold list to a warm list, and I also prepared a series of autoresponder to convert the opt-ins to buyers. Everything seemed ready, but when I massed mail to the list, I hardly got any click through, not to mention opt-in or sales.

I knew that things can’t be that simple. But sometimes you just want to prove yourself right and give up that hope!

Mistake #4. Being a cheapskate

When I first started online, I was really behaving like a cheapskate. I signed up lots of newsletters and spent time reading all the free articles I could find.

But when I started to make some money and gathered enough courage to invest in ebooks and video courses, that was when my internet marketing skills really took off.

Mistake #5. Using encrypted script

If you want to run a dynamic website such as a membership site, a forum or perhaps your own traffic exchange site, you’ll need to use a server-side script.

A big mistake that I made when I ran my first dynamic site is I bought an encrypted script, which means I can’t modify or even see the script as the developer is trying to protect its copyright.

It is very bad because whenever I experience a bug, I need to feedback to the developer and worse still, if I don’t like any function or want to add any new feature, there is nothing I can do. I even offered to buy the source-code from the developer, but was turned down.

One person’s mistake is another’s lesson. I hope you’ll find these lessons useful.

Though I’ve made some mistakes, I have also done something right during my early days. In my next post, I’ll write about things that I did right when I first started online. Stay tuned!