Finch Sells Premium Posts

Category: Internet Marketing

Building Backlinks: The Fastlane To Insanity

| January 23, 2012 | Comments (7)

This weekend, I decided to engage in some research that never fails to get my blood boiling. What better way to spend your Sunday afternoon than by crawling the web making notes on how to boss Google’s search rankings?

SEO is to Finch, what the slaughterhouse is to cows.

It’s where I go when I feel like throwing my business plans before the judge and pleading for a stay of execution. “Dear Google, please take pity upon thee.”

So I loaded up on Victoria Sandwich, pointed my browser at Yahoo Site Explorer, and prepared mentally for the skullbreakingly arduous task of analysing my competitors’ backlink structures.

As it so happens, Yahoo Site Explorer is now defunct. My childhood sweetheart, the only SEO tool I ever truly loved, has been married by Bing and shepherded away – presumably to be shagged and ruined in some Microsoft developer’s basement. This has driven yet another wedge in my already unstable relationship with SEO.

Backlink research is touted as a ‘must’ before venturing in to new niches. Nobody wants to build a potentially lucrative website only to find that Joe Marketer has already pummeled Xrumer and assembled his gajillions of links to maintain search engine dominance through 2017. But there’s the paradox. Even though I make the effort to do backlink research, it rarely ever affects my decision to go ahead with a project.

“Wow, the competition has 3,990,374 backlinks. That’s pretty impressive. But I don’t like his choice of stock photos. I’ll build my site anyway.”

Ego often impedes the voice of SEO reasoning in my head. I hate the idea that success hinges on some bullshit measurement of who has the best/most backlinks. That’s why you’ll find me feeding buckets of fish laced with steroids to Google’s Panda in the middle of the night, then running away like a little girl as the ‘SEO Professionals’ come charging in disgust.

The whore charade makes me wonder if offline business ever used to be this way. If you took the regional equivalent of today’s Google, let’s say a local business directory, would it have been ranked and prioritised in the same manner? Are you telling me that to get my business spotlighted on a good page, I would have to cruise every last dark corner of the neighbourhood posting my business card through abandoned letterboxes?

Because that’s essentially what backlink building is. It’s handing your business card to anybody who will accept it, in the faint hope that a chief regulator, aka Mr. Google, notices the card in abundance and is mathematically satisfied that you’re worth half a shit.

No doubt this analogy would provoke an uproar from the local directory ranking experts. They would tell me quite bluntly that I’m wasting my time whoring business cards in the ghettos. They’d insist, “No, no. You need to get your business card adorning the windows of the palaces and castles!”

So, I’d work hard and mingle in those upper class circles. I’d send letters and scratch backs. My culture vulture would be well and truly on. But invariably, I’d discover that the owners of the palaces and castles aren’t interested in my business cards. Their interest extends only as far as their own financial gain.

Believe it or not, these Princes and Kings don’t classify what you promise to be “relevant content for their kingdoms” as fitting for their cause. Cruelly, they would rather engage in a furious 24/7 circle jerk behind closed doors than deal with the ignominy of your fresh arse on the block. So, what are you to do? You get on your bike, retreat to the neighbourhood, and blast your business card through 3,990,374 derelict letterboxes instead. Fan-tastic.

My conclusion? The backlink building game is fundamentally shagged. Don’t waste your time building backlinks. Just build a reputation for awesomeness instead.

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Monetizing a Blog With Premium Posts: Does It Work?

| November 4, 2011 | Comments (16)

If you’re a reader of my affiliate marketing blog, Finch Sells, you will probably be aware that I’ve introduced paid content over the last 6 weeks.

I thought it’d be interesting to see how many of my regular readers converted in to paying customers, especially given how fellow marketers can be notoriously hard to sell to.

The results from the first 6 weeks have been promising. I’ve taken just under $15,000 in sales, which I’m hoping will double in the next couple of weeks (Volume 2 was released yesterday).

While $15,000 is certainly a nice side-income to go with my usual marketing projects, I think the most exciting development is simply discovering that the premium content angle can work.

I’ve spoken about the concept on Twitter and a few people have quite rightfully pointed out that paid content can only be successful as long as the standard of the posts is kept high. I couldn’t agree more with the need to deliver quality content, but this is one of the reasons I’ve chosen standalone products instead of the currently popular subscription model.

Subscription based Internet Marketing forums are all the rage right now, and I’ve had the pleasure of checking out most of them. Sites like Aff Playbook, Stack That Money and IMGrind all do a fantastic job of delivering valuable content – and I’m sure they make a lot more money out of it than the $15000/month my Premium Posts have delivered so far.

The issue for me is commitment. I could potentially roll out a subscription based service, but it would create an enormous burden of pressure to keep delivering excellent content month after month. There really is little margin for error with a crowd that is so tough to please.

It’s the type of model that is much more sustainable on a forum where you have dozens of different personalities offering their own useful advice.

I’ve gone with the Premium Posts on a themed basis, so users with particular interests can buy information that should hopefully be directly relevant to them. With no subscription deadline, I can take full creative control and spend however long it takes to deliver content that I’m proud of, and that I think my readers are going to enjoy.

I hope that by adding products slowly, and keeping the quality high, I can build up a sizeable ‘passive income’. I’m also hoping that readers who have been converted in to paying customers will become more loyal to the brand.

Ironically enough, after releasing Premium Posts Volume 1, my blog received 6 of it’s 10 highest traffic days in the history of the site. Far from driving readers away, it seemed to generate extra visitors.

Releasing the products has also allowed me to seize a lot of traffic from forums and blogs linking to the announcement, which will presumably help my SEO. Not that I give two shits about SEO, but it’s a nice bonus.

Perhaps the opportunity that excites me most is the idea of exporting the Premium Posts concept and implementing it on other blogs.

It’s constantly preached that creating products is the best way to produce a long-term stable income, no matter what kind of site you’re running. While it will definitely be a challenge to provide the same incentive for purchasing paid content as affiliate marketing brings (who wouldn’t want to make more money?), I believe the concept has legs on it.

It should be interesting to see the results over the next couple of months. I’m definitely looking forward to making blogging a more profitable cornerstone of my business.

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Want High Quality Banners For Free?

| September 16, 2011 | Comments (12)

How many hours have you lost piss-arsing around in Photoshop and still getting no closer to a banner that is suitable for promoting your product?

How many freelancers have you paid to take away the torment?

Welcome to the world of SnackTools, a cracking suite of automation software that takes the hassle out of creating banners if you’re not already outsourcing the task.

SnackTools has a number of very handy and attractive looking apps, each designed to improve the visual presentation of your website. From professional quality slideshows, to online surveys and polls. There’s a lot to digest, and like sweet music to your ears, most of it is free.

The app most likely to capture your imagination is BannerSnack.

Bannersnack Review

BannerSnack is my new best friend if I ever find myself weighted with the burden of having to produce a banner that isn’t embarrassingly slapped together like something out of MS Paint in the nineties.

The software allows you to create flash and gif banner ads using a very simple interface. It’s all drag and drop.

I consider myself a bumbling dinosaur when it comes to showing that deft touch in Photoshop, or indeed any of Adobe’s industry standard tools. BannerShack is simplified in such a way that even if you’re like me (you poor sod), you’ll be able to produce the eye-catching banners that have alluded you for so long.

Want fancy icons to give your banners that sleek 2.0 look? No problem. Want lots of direct response friendly arrows, buttons, labels and familiar visual cues to drive more clicks to your site? It’s all here.

Besides using BannerSnack to create images, I’ve adapted the software to create entire product landing pages for my affiliate marketing campaigns. Just select a custom banner size, adjust it to the size you want, and lavish the page in direct response love.

Call to Action Arrow

I haven't accessed ClipArt since 1997. But these arrows will come in handy for my landing pages.

Call to Action button

Many different kinds of buttons, colours and effects available.

BannerSnack lets you save your artwork to the cloud, making it possible to drop back in and edit your creations whenever you feel like it. I have a growing assortment of banners and landing pages, all of which perform very well for me in their given tasks.

No automation suite will ever replace the genious of a super-talented designer. If you’re a designer reading this now, I’m not trying to put you out of a job. I admire you for having all the skills that I was never blessed with.

However, for those occasions where as webmasters we want effective banners ready to roll in 10 minutes, there aren’t many creative suites as fun and simple to use as BannerSnack. Check it out!

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  • Got a book, service, product or something entrepreneurial you want showcased on this blog? Traffic has grown over 300% on the site in the last month alone. Check out advertising rates, or get in touch if you think it’d be suitable for an honest unbiased review.

  • Subscribe to my new FinchBlogs RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add Finch to your Twitter. Merci beaucoup!

How To Increase Traffic When Your Site Hits The Plateau

| September 2, 2011 | Comments (4)

Every website has a plateau which marks the growth of traffic up to a point of diminishing returns.

The plateau is like a glass ceiling. It can be so difficult to crack, and often causes a loss in motivation when your project stalls and loses momentum for apparently no reason. It’s even more frustrating when you increase your workload and still can’t see the desired improvements.

This post is about conquering the plateau, switching gears and blasting your website to the next level. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that it’s the hardest challenge for any webmaster to overcome.

Your patience will be tested, and your hairline will surely recede. Your dinners will disappear in the space of 4 minutes and your children will begin to refer to you as “that angry man” who lives in the basement. Will it be worth the struggle? The struggle is what we live for!

Beat the Traffic Plateau

Let’s take a look at some tips and techniques for taking that next step.

Step out of your comfort zone.

The growth plateau is very closely tied to our personal comfort zones. What are we willing to write about? What are we willing to do to attract publicity? How many backs will we scratch to get that invaluable mention?

I believe that many stalling projects can be attributed to losing your nerve and not fully committing to a vision of success. Maybe you want to become the Internet’s next life coach? This isn’t possible if you live in a shell, blogging fictional stories and avoiding the hazard of actually getting out there and talking to people.

Behind most successful websites, you will find fiercely driven owners who realised the importance of exiting their comfort zones and making themselves heard in their respective markets. If you never volunteer for interviews, never offer to write guest posts, and never spend time looking straight in to the eyes of your peers, how can you expect to earn their sweeping respect?

Whatever comfort zone you have erected is usually built on foundations of fear. Overcome that fear and put your content and voice where it is likely to be judged.

100% praise for your website means you’re not taking enough risks.

Mimic existing blueprints for success.

The fact that you’re reading this post shows that you believe there is somebody out there doing your job better than you. Hey, it might not be me, but I’m sure there’s somebody out there you would interrogate for a winning formula if you had half the chance. This is a healthy attitude to have.

Mimicking the success of your industry’s leaders is the safe way of guaranteeing growth, but are you doing it correctly?

When you analyse your superior competition, what is it that you’re attempting to steal from them? If it’s their mission statement and not their blood, sweat and tears then you’re trying to ride a unicorn to the bank. I see it all the time. Webmasters trying to explode traffic by duping the intention and sentiment, but completely misjudging the application. Look at your superiors not for their success, but for the foundations that success is built on.

How often do they update their sites? How active are they in the comments? What forums do they post on? What social networks do they utilise? How can you replicate their backlink profiles? Who do they outsource to? What plugins and incentives do they run? What type of coffee do they drink?

Duplicate the entire work flow! Don’t just publish similar content and hope it enjoys the same success. You’re dealing with finely tuned and well-oiled profit machines. What you see on the homepage is just an afterthought.

Invest in brandable assets.

When you become as big as Facebook or Google, you don’t try to be the best at everything. You simply stick to your strengths and invest in the best that other people can muster. MySpace went down the shitter because it internalised every aspect of it’s business and was left with a half-baked final product.

So learn from Facebook and Google. Look to invest in high quality websites, scripts and services that could be integrated with your own product. I have purchased websites on Flippa with the sole purpose of re-branding them under my own site and merging the traffic. It costs money, but it provides instant momentum and growth.

Demand attention by stroking the ego.

I can’t think of a better example of innovative linkbuilding than Dukeo’s “Who is…” series using caricatures as the bait to get high profile bloggers to take notice.

I didn’t know too much about Dukeo until I received a link to a post that had my name in the title. There I saw myself depicted in caricature form (incredibly accurately), along with a lengthy biography detailing my background in the industry.

The biography alone would normally be enough to get a link. But the caricature, excellent as it was, meant that I had all the more reason to link to his site and to really force my readers over there. Take a look for yourself.

I was even more impressed when I discovered that the caricatures were not actually drawn by Sté, the owner, but by a hired artist.

It shows how taking a little initiative can really produce something memorable and effective if you think outside the box. Even if, like Finch, your own drawings look like arse.

Check out the weird and wacky jobs on Fiverr to devise a similarly ruthless link building strategy.

Adapt to new forms of media.

Webmasters often forget that audio and video content can open up a whole new realm of possibilities for generating traffic.

Again, it comes back to stepping out of your comfort zone. Are there parts of your website that could be adapted and re-issued in video or audio form? Maybe as podcasts, YouTube videos or even a mobile application? Not only will doing so reach new corners of the market, but it will open up valuable new income streams.

Wake up and smell the coffee. It’s 2011 and the traditional ‘words on a page’ approach is just one form of media.

Sharpen your prose.

I believe far too many bloggers sit on the fence when they would enjoy much more success by committing to an opinion and lighting a fire under it.

Read through your posts. Does it sound like the author believes in them? You will find people are much more happy to link to you if you’ve taken a stand, in a big way, and your thoughts reflect their own. This is often the intention, but it can fall apart if your writing isn’t sharp enough. Become a sharp opinionated writer who doesn’t understand the meaning of neutral vocabulary.

Being in the Internet Marketing industry is a big help. We are blessed with enough pantomime villains, who legitimately don’t know shit about their craft, to chug out a giant scathing FU every day for the rest of our lives.

Give your visitors a hero to believe in.

So here’s a quick tip. People buy in to personalities.

Imagine yourself inside your reader’s head. What do they aspire to become? What are their fiercest dreams and ambitions? Now look at your site. Are you positioning yourself as the man who controls the gateway to that lucrative future?

If you can position yourself as simply one step closer to the dream lifestyle that your readers are desperate to attain, you will find yourself in a position of power and influence. Wedge yourself where the dreaming ends and the glamour begins. Traffic will surely follow.

I’ve already written a meandering piece on this very subject called how to brand yourself and your blog. Go take a peek.

How To Increase Traffic: Some final tips

Spend some money on paid ad campaigns. I know how much a jolly webmaster hates to spend money on exposure when there are 101 free methods of generating traffic!!1! but you get what you pay for. And in many cases, as you can see, that turns out to be fuck all.

Has your design outstayed it’s welcome? The more features you add to your site, the more likely it is that your pages are becoming convoluted and the message is being lost. Often a redesign with prioritised content can fix this problem.

Allow visitors to submit questions. This provides endless new material, adds to your reputation and allows you to create content using exact match phrases that your target market are actively searching for. It’s sensible on every level.

Showcase your best post or feature. Pinpoint similar sites in your industry. Outsource the creation of an effective eye catching banner and then use Google Content Network to advertise your very best post. I always prefer to link to a post or feature rather than the homepage. It provides greater focus and control. Be sure to litter the page with incentives to subscribe!

Scale sideways. The plateau can often be overcome by asking “What else is my target market interested in?“. You don’t want to lose sight of your main demo, but you can collect closely related readers by scaling sideways and bringing your perspective to new topics. This also applies to guest posting.

Spread some rumours. Follow the Z List motto that any publicity is good publicity. Depending on your niche, it may be possible to inject some controversial rumours in to the blogosphere. I don’t know, maybe you’re a Pickup Artist who shagged his way to a broken dick and now hasn’t been seen since entering the Thai Red Light District last Thursday. Stir up some shit, dismiss it, and ride the waves of traffic. Why not apply for the next series of Big Brother? Go on, lose your dignity.

Start attending events. Check the event schedule for your area of expertise, grab yourself some business cards, and go make an impression. Offline marketing is not dead. It just requires a shower and the effort to get off your arse.

Get in to bed with your industry’s curators. Sometimes it pays to be friendly with the right individuals. Adapt a social strategy of reciprocating goodwill shown to you, and actively seeking the goodwill of those who run the rule at the top of your vertical. You might not want to brush shoulders with them, but they can help you get what you want. Traffic, fame and fortune comes at a price!

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How To Build A Diversified Online Business

| July 5, 2011 | Comments (4)

Diversify, diversify, diversify.

The three coolest words in an Internet Entrepreneur’s vocabulary. But what does it mean in practical terms?

Most entrepreneurs appreciate that with competitive markets and rapidly changing technologies, placing all your profitable eggs in one basket is a risky tactic.

If you don’t want your online business to end in a flood of tears and bitter resentment, then you better learn to diversify and create several avenues of profit. MySpace has shown, quite spectacularly, that it’s possible to fall from grace in 18 months. And you would do well to assume that so can pretty much any profit spinning website in your portfolio.

What Makes a Strong Portfolio of Online Assets?

In no particular order, here are some of my favourite business cornerstones.

Profitable affiliate marketing campaigns

Who would have guessed it? An affiliate marketer recommending affiliate marketing! Stable it is not, but an important staple of my business it will remain.

CPA campaigns provide enormous earning potential, and although short term in nature, can be used to fund investments in to more long term business models. I advertise affiliate offers using various PPV traffic sources, Plentyoffish and Facebook.

Effective affiliate campaigns require only part-time management, making them key contributers to your bottom line, without swallowing up all of your time.

The information resources for Tomorrow’s Next Trend…

Forget about the monetization, and ask yourself, “What is going to be really talked about in 2012?”, then build a website that provides top quality content on that topic. Does anybody remember the crazy market for backgrounds and add-ons when MySpace peaked? These exploded in popularity, and those who were ready to meet the demand, profited immensely.

Predict what is about to become hot, rather than attempting to monetize yesterday’s news, then build a website that delivers outstanding content on the topic. If you do this well, the monetization will take care of itself. Being first matters.

How about a home bizopp site for Greeks? Smell the demand, jump on it.

Having an online store

Drop-shipping and digital download stores are two areas I’ve been exploring closely over the last few months. I have a turnkey download store that produces a steady flow of revenue, and it’s inspired me to look further afield.

One of the great benefits of selling your own products is a conspicuous lack of anal manhandling by Google if you later decide to use their Adwords platform. Yes, owning your own product takes away the title of Internet Middleman, which Google unfortunately associates with Aids and Rabies.

For those with aspirations of something more legitimate than a digital product store, feel free to get utterly lost in the possibilities of drop-shipping. Sites like Alibaba make it possible to purchase, via wholesale, just about any product imaginable, and then sell it on for [sometimes] healthy profits. This is a step away from simple sideways diversification, but worth a look.

The branded blog

You may have noticed my soft spot for blogging. And you may have noticed my particular style of blog branding. I believe that it’s possible to become an authority in your industry, making good money as a blogger, without selling out in the eyes of your readers.

But the formula is murky.

Some bloggers use their platforms too eagerly to push any affiliate product with a commission attached. Others, I feel, are guilty of under-monetizing their blogs. I prefer to ignore writing about products, and instead focus my efforts on establishing relationships of similarity with my readers.

For my Internet Marketing blogs, I like to use humour, sarcasm and an occasionally self-deprecating tone. These are excellent weapons for building bridges of trust with a notoriously cynical market, but they’re not always as effective elsewhere. If you’re going to diversify in to becoming a blogger, step one is to understand your market.

And no, that’s not just some useless Quantcast demographics. But understanding what makes them laugh, what makes them smile, what content are they known to devour, and most importantly, what do they aspire to be? It sounds straightforward, but is often forgotten. The secret to running a popular blog is to know exactly what the “end goal” is for your average reader…and then to position yourself as the lifestyle rainmaker who can deliver that golden egg.

I have developed a collection of popular blogs that rake in $5-10K per month through direct banner buys alone. Many affiliates would laugh at those numbers, but hey – it’s diversified income. Most of my money traditionally comes from affiliate marketing, but if it were to disappear overnight, I make more than enough through publishing crap like this to live comfortably within my means.

The coupon haven

Consumers love coupons. It’s an addiction that has been passed down through generations and is now more exploitable than ever thanks to the reach of the web.

When people ask me what kind of website would make a good first addition to their portfolio, I tell them to go find some niche coupons for products with affiliate programs, then build a website around them. If you’re smart, you’ll do this in such a way that the website doesn’t die with each coupon period that expires.

Your own personal page

Even if you don’t want to become a blogger, I don’t think it’s ever a bad idea to have a personal presence on the web. Some of the most exciting opportunities I’ve had would never have found my inbox if I hadn’t made the decision to promote myself, and what I do, through a personal site.

Obviously, a portfolio is not going to attract money in the diversification sense. But you shouldn’t underestimate the opportunities that can fall your way if you tell the world what you’re good at.

A collection of mailing lists

They say the money is in the list, and although that statement is being challenged by the arrival of fan pages and enormous Twatter followings, I believe it still rings true. Mailing lists are fantastic assets to have. The ability to land effortlessly in the inbox of 50000 potential customers at the snap of your fingers should not be discounted.

I like to use Facebook and PPV sources to build highly targeted mailing lists that can be sold various products. For a brilliant illustration of how this works, get your IMGrind on and read this.

Understand there are Internet Gazillionaires who make money through no other means than by mailing the hell out of some very large lists. Contrary to popular belief, those lists do not last forever, especially if you’re the kind of prick who buys them from the unsolicited scrapheap. However, put to the right use, mailing lists can deliver lots of return customers and cross-selling opportunities.

The acquisition of good products

As perfectionists, we sometimes doubt what others are capable of achieving. One of the best ways to diversify an online business is to invest in somebody else’s good work. You can’t give 110% of your attention to every brainfart that occupies the mind… but somebody else can.

Stable businesses make a habit of innovating and investing in equal measures. While I enjoy the creative thrill of building websites from scratch, it makes just as much business sense to buy websites and digital products straight off the shelf if the standard is high. You might want to avoid marketplaces like Flippa which are about as buyer-friendly as a fist in the balls for your money back.

I recommend buying re-sellable digital products, or privately seeking out under-monetized blogs for the best chance of adding a nice juicy investment to your portfolio. If you can monetize better than 95% of other webmasters, you can have an absolute field day profiting from their hard work.

What Are The Areas I Don’t Like Diversifying In To?

Are there any projects to avoid? This is likely to provoke an angry response from those who dedicate their careers to the work I’m about to mention, and with good reason. Entrepreneurs are driven by different motives with different objectives. But for me personally, the areas I don’t like diversifying in to include…

Anything driven solely by SEO. I can’t control it, therefore I don’t pretend to understand it. SEO is an afterthought for all of my projects. If you build it, they will come. Only a complete bumberclart wastes his time trying to compensate for Google’s next move.

Web design and programming. I have the skills from my background as a programmer, but it’s far too time consuming to “diversify” in to client work. And it’s not so much a diversification, but rather a complete veering from the racetrack. In short, client based programming work can suck a donkey chode. I always get the shivers when friends or family contact me asking for a “quick website built”. And that’s without the duty of actually being paid for it.

Web hosting services. They will consume your entire working day, unless they’re entirely modularised and outsourced. I’ve seen many examples on Flippa of small web hosting services boasting respectable profits, but when you factor in that time is money, those profits suddenly start to look very small. Committing to be somebody else’s 99.9% uptime bitch would push me to insanity.

Customer subscription services. You will find that once again, unless you outsource everything, another service will usually beat you to the market by dedicating 100% of it’s time and doing a better job. A good example of such a subscription service is the pay-to-access forum. Many of these forums are emerging (PPV Playbook, IMGrind…), and it’s tough to knock the earning potential when you look at the numbers. 500 members paying $60/month is a healthy $30000/month in revenue.

However, forums are also notorious time-vacuums. Unless you can dedicate significant time to them everyday, they will never blossom in to healthy communities. Even once they’re established, you still need to engage and interact on a daily basis. This is perfect if the forum is your primary business. But as a diversification strategy? Be prepared to double your current workload, or get eaten by the competition.

Niches I know nothing about. If I can’t understand what I’m selling, I have no hope of guessing my customer’s next move. I’ve made the mistake far too often of developing websites on niche topics that I don’t “get”, and although I can motivate myself for the build phase, they often sit derelict after the site is launched.

Whatever You Do, Do It Well

It goes without saying that diversifying a business is irrelevant if you do a half-arsed job of it. We can go back to the MySpace example as a prime example of this. The examples above are merely my own professional choices, based on my own skillset and the talents of those I work with. You may have a very different vision.

As long as the vision is clear, and the planning is sound, diversification can only ever be a good thing.

Recommended This Week:

  • If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny

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The Unfashionable Value Of Alexa And PageRank

| May 13, 2011 | Comments (2)

If you’ve ever stumbled in to the trenches of marketing communities like The Warrior Forum or Digital Point – and let’s face it, most of us have – you’ll have been greeted by thread after thread of newbies asking questions like “How do I improve my PageRank?” or “How do I get in to Alexa’s top 100,000?”

It has become popular geekspeak to dismiss both PageRank and Alexa as useless metrics from a prehistoric age. Neither are accurate depictions of your site’s success, so why bother paying attention to them? This advice typically comes from the same mob who insist on not providing support for IE because it’s the worst web browser, in their expert opinions.

I agree with the sentiment, but I completely disagree with their interpretation of what equals value on the web. In my opinion, Alexa and PageRank will be valuable metrics as long as paying advertisers continue to use them as guidelines for measuring their investments.

Google PageRank has to be one of the most misunderstood concepts on the web. If I check my junk mail right now, I’m guaranteed to find a whole bunch of sales pitches from so-called SEO professionals offering to improve my PageRank so that I can drive more traffic to my site. This evidence, right here, goes a long way to explaining why their shit lands in my junk box.

Toolbar PageRank is disconnected from the actual ranking algorithm that Google uses to place your pages in it’s search listings. They are not related, although they may share similar data. PageRank has developed a reputation as a useless metric. It’s the distant bastard cousin of the true ranking algorithm we’d all love to know.

However, PageRank can still add value to your website. There are swaths of advertisers with money to spend. Advertisers who will continue to place artificial value on PR. And if that’s the difference between your site attracting advertisers or not, wouldn’t you be a fool not to value your little green progress bar?

The Alexa rank is very similar. Most of us with our heads screwed on can appreciate how the data derived from Alexa is twisted at best, and complete bollocks at worst. But does this matter if advertisers are investing in what they believe to be one of the top 20,000 websites in America?

There’s a small but very active market for professional site-flippers who know exactly how these factors can be used as an advantage. I know one particular site-flipper who develops turnkey websites and massively inflates their value by playing to the perception.

He doesn’t bother with the chore of building a brand. No, that wouldn’t catch the eye. Instead he works meticulously to inflate PR, boost Alexa rank and improve a bunch of other key measurements that he knows the buyers are impressed by.

He banks a lot of money by simply knowing his market.

If you’re building a website from scratch with the intention of turning it in to an advertising machine, or flipping it for profit, look closely at what your market values – and then build it in that image.

PageRank and Alexa rankings are only useless metrics if you can’t find a way to sell them to the people who still care. I would never encourage somebody to base their marketing efforts purely around increasing these values. But to dismiss them as pointless is as dumb as not listening to what your customers are basing their purchases on.

In my opinion, your website is only as valuable as the money you make from it. If your primary income is through selling advertising space, you need to be speaking in the buyer’s language. This is something I stress time and time again. It doesn’t matter how much knowledge you’ve accumulated to tell them otherwise. Putting across the right image and ticking the right boxes is all you can do.

If the people buying ads are basing their decisions on search engine rankings, you need to rank well. If they’re basing their decisions on branding, you need to brand well. If they still cling to measuring scales like Alexa and PageRank, I hate to say it, but you need to consider them too.

I don’t want this to sound like a sweeping endorsement of PageRank and Alexa, because that’s the last message I’m trying to convey. I’d be about as popular as the guy petitioning equal rights for IE6. But I do believe that any measurement of a site’s value can be given a positive spin and used as bait to attract more advertisers. If this means agitating a few of the Google PR “myth debunkers”, then so be it.

We often confuse our webmaster ideology with real world practicality. What we know means precisely squat diddily compared to what the guy with the credit card in his hand thinks he knows.

Recommended This Week:

  • If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny

  • Help a virginal Finch. Subscribe to my new FinchBlogs RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter.

How To Gatecrash The Title Of Mr. Authority

| April 15, 2011 | Comments (3)

It’s not easy establishing a website when your name counts for nothing. You can have the best content, the swankiest WordPress theme and even the biggest marketing budget. But without gatecrashing your niche’s network of influential people, it’s all going to feel like shoving crap up a hill. A constant struggle for little reward.

This meandering post is going to give you a few pointers for how to attract influential people to your site.

One Follower = One Backlink?

In many ways, I consider people to be the new backlinks. It’s very easy to buy a thousand Facebook “Likes”, just as it’s easy to blast a thousand forum profiles with xrumer. Most people are agreed that where link marketing is concerned, quality beats quantity. And that is also the case with acquiring fans or followers.

Look no further than the self-proclaimed social media experts on Twitter to discover just how irrelevant numbers can be. So you’ve got 15,000 followers, a shiny custom background and a name that rings out to your mother and close friends. It doesn’t mean shit if you’re a nobody in the eyes of the people that matter.

Every niche market has a select group of influential people that exert power over the rest of the marketplace. I would suggest that instead of spending your days preaching to the dumbfounded choir (Hello, WSOs on Warrior Forum), you go after these trend-setters and attempt to get in bed with them.

In the same way that one authoritative backlink is much more valuable than a thousand directory submissions, one influential fan holds considerably more power than a small battalion of “Who The Fuck Are You Again?” Followers.

So how can you gatecrash the party of influential trendsetters in your niche? How can you get behind those closed doors where opportunity awaits? Much has to do with building a brand, as I spoke about in my last post. But you also need to be relentless in your pursuit of the people that matter.

Understanding Who Controls Your Niche

Ask yourself a simple question: Where are my customers or readers likely to be found on the web?

When you know where your audience is hiding, you can begin to draw rings around the people you need to be reaching if you want to crack that network of influence. Let’s say your market is heavily populated by messageboards and forum communities.

Stop Whoring Yourself On Messageboards

The first step, as recommended in every shitty How To guide under the Digital Point sun, would be to register a profile and start posting in the hope that people click your lame signature link. This sucks. It’s not going to do much for your readership. Especially if all you have to your name is seven posts and an introductory thread.

A much more effective method is to hang back and look for the forum’s most popular posters. Find out who has the adoring affections of the community, and approach them with a private message asking how much they’d charge to endorse your site in their signature. Not many posters will turn down the chance to be paid for what they already do.

If you’re going to compromise the value of your time by posting on messageboards, at least make sure you have something valuable to add to the argument. Playing Devil’s Advocate is often a good ploy.

Breaking The Blogger’s Ego

What if the most influential people in your niche consist mainly of other bloggers? It can be very difficult for a blogger to gain status with other bloggers. Especially if his shit is actually good, and deemed threatening by the others.

The best way to breach a circle of influential bloggers is to deceive them with flattery. Comment on their posts, retweet their statuses and do your best to engage them in conversation. If you can squeeze in a guest post or two, all the better. The sooner they begin to associate you as a fan of their work, rather than a direct competitor, the easier you’re going to find it to get them engaging in your site.

Flattery will get you on the good side of your blogging peers, but to really leverage their power, you have to maintain excellent content. It has to be better than theirs, period. This is the only way you’ll earn their respect. Bloggers are much more willing to help others who have already stroked their egos.

An easy way to get an influential blogger to share your work is to namedrop them in a post, lace it with a sweet compliment, and then make sure they find it close to a retweet button. Or you could hand out your own blogger awards – voted by the people, of course – giving the target every incentive to repost it on his own blog in a bid for votes.

There are many ways to skin the cat, but you can’t go too linkbait crazy. Your site has to earn their respect before they’ll see you as anything other than a permanent oral fixture on their balls. Which, at this stage, let’s face it, you probably are.

If You Can’t Assert Authority, Be Happy With Mediocrity

Once upon a time, I ran a pro wrestling news site. If you’ve ever delved in to professional wrestling “news” journalism, you’ll be aware that about a hundred different journalists rely on the same one source for their news. One single whisper in the wind controls what all the websites are able to publish.

Readers would gravitate towards the sites where news broke first. If you couldn’t get the news before your competition, the best case scenario was hiring an overly keen sixteen year old to copy and paste like a whippet on coke. In this niche, the network of influence was restricted to a bunch of undisclosed sources (eg. Hulk Hogan’s makeup girl selling a hearsay backstage rumour for fifty bucks) and established journalists who’d been reporting from the same behind-the-scenes pedestal since the 80s.

As soon as I understood this, I moved on. I wasn’t passionate enough to immerse myself in breaching these sources and getting to the news first. Where would I even start? The Yellow Pages and a wiretap on Vince McMahon’s cellphone? Give me a break, I’m no real journalist. Without the exclusives, I’d always be a step behind the other news sites. If you can’t beat them, join them. If you can’t join them, why are you wasting your time?

Some projects are just too ambitious for one man in his basement. But I learnt something very important that I try to remember before I embark on any new project. You have to understand what your readers want, and be capable of delivering it.

How To Become Mr. Authority

Not every person of influence in your industry is going to have a website or blog. You shouldn’t be drawn in to thinking that you have to befriend every blogger or every high profile Twitter user. Sometimes, it pays to look further afield than rival sites for gaining authority.

I know one successful music blogger who has never given the time of day to linkbuilding or competing with rival sites. She doesn’t bother with SEO, commenting on other blogs or leaving crappy forum replies. She simply sends email after email to new and upcoming artists, introducing herself and letting them know what her blog is all about.

Inevitably, she gets sent a ton of free shit. Passes to a bunch of shows, free festival tickets, signed albums…just about anything she wants. But most importantly, it’s allowed her to establish a reputation as a trend-setter on the music blogging scene.

How?

By understanding where she can add the most value to her blog. The value is in the relationships.

When was the last time you took the effort to introduce yourself to the companies you spend so long writing about? The best bloggers aren’t merely respected by their readers and rival webmasters, but by the very companies they’re writing about too.

The easiest way for you to gain influence isn’t to jostle for supremacy with the guy ranking above you on Google, but to instead chase down the owner of the product you’re trying to rank for. It never ceases to amaze me how much easier it is to build influence in a market, when you have an ear pinned to the ground of the companies that matter.

This could be as simple as building a list of the top five companies, then contacting their PR departments, introducing yourself and stating what you can offer with your website. Nothing has to materialize straight away. But good things come to those who put themselves in the right places.

And I can guarantee, most bloggers are too busy worrying about yesterday’s stats to be actively engaging with the companies they write about. The only relationships they bother chasing come hand in hand with affiliate commission, which is perfectly fine, but selling yourself very short if you want to be a true authority in your niche.

There isn’t a business in the world that doesn’t like a slice of friendly publicity. Get the exclusives that your rivals were too busy waiting to read about in their Google Alerts, and you will quickly discover it’s actually quite easy to gain influence.

Most of us who own websites or blogs are simply middlemen, wrestling with other middlemen for backlinks, search engine rankings and god knows what else. The quicker you turn your attention to understanding your readers, and the companies you write about, the sooner you’ll be able to forget about the other middlemen formerly known as your competition.

Recommended This Week:

  • Help a virginal Finch. Subscribe to my new FinchBlogs RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter.
  • If you’re feeling generous, you can also do me a favour by simply retweeting this post or recommending it on whatever hellhole of a social networking joint you use. Every little help is appreciated!

  • If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny

The 1000 Fan Theory

| April 5, 2011 | Comments (11)

Last week, my girlfriend shared a theory with me that, I have to admit, I was pretty skeptical about at first. She runs a fashion blog so Internet Marketing is something we have in common. It’s not simply a topic I inflict on her over the breakfast buffet here in Bangkok.

The theory is simple. Any artist or creative person who has 1000 true fans, has the means to make a living. When you first hear that, it sounds like quite a flimsy theory. Then you remember that your judgment is probably misguided by the poor schmuck you saw selling Facebook fan page “likes” the day before.

True fans, in the blogging world, are those who will listen to your recommendations – whether you get paid for them or not. Those who will praise you when you offer nothing that hasn’t been read a thousand times before. Those who give enough of a shit to retweet your “New post!” and add you to their blogrolls. In short, true fans are hard to come by.

But with an army of 1000 true fans, it’s quite easy to see how a blogger could make a living from his craft. As this article on the Technium points out, the numbers are stacked in your favour.

If you could convince each of those fans to spend just $100 over the course of a year, you’d have a total annual salary of $100,000. That’s discounting the influence of your outer network. True fans are likely to recommend your blog to other readers who share mutual interests, if not always in the exact niche market you’re targeting. This dominos effect completely kills the pain and boredom of link building or marketing your site. Why bother when true fans can handle that for you?

More to the point, what good are 1000 search engine hits if you can’t retain a single user and find yourself forever optimizing for the next? The best way to build an online asset is to develop relationships and acquire fans. SEO can bring you traffic, but it doesn’t add long term value to anything you do.

Okay, so lots of fans can equal earning opportunities. But how do you actually gain fans? That’s the problem for most bloggers, nevermind the theory itself. How do you get somebody to read your meandering shit and actually come back for more?

I think most blogs fail because they forget the vital ingredient that distinguishes a voice from the crowd – personality. The worst crime you can possibly commit, as a blogger, is to take the center ground. If you don’t have opinions, you become a news source. And if you compete with news sources, you’re instantly outnumbered and outgunned.

Oscar Wilde’s famous words, “The first duty in life is to assume a pose…” should be nailed on the dashboard of any self-respecting blogger who hopes for his ramble to be read. It doesn’t matter what pose you assume. You could be an offensive and controversial shit-stirrer in your niche. A deluded but always sweet source of encouragement. Christ, it’s plain to see how many people have already assumed the pose of “guru” (with varying degrees of success).

But to have no pose, no unique appeal and no committed voice…you’re sacrificing the very essence of any successful blog. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong. Most people are too dumb to care.

Do you think Pitchfork cares about counter arguments? I’m guessing when their editors sat down to create a business plan, they had the world’s most effective brainstorming session on “How can we be the BEST collective of pretentious Indie-hugging snobs on the planet?” Okay, probably not. That’s just my negative perception. But every negative has a flip-side. And to the Indie-hugging snobs out there, Pitchfork is the be all and end all of latest music news.

How about Nickelback? Nobody loves Nickelback. Never has a band stuck so doggedly to the middle ground and succeeded in sounding so unmistakeably shite. Do you want your blog to be like Nickelback?

Assume a pose, and let people judge you by it. That’s the way to gain fans. If you polarize opinions along the way, you’re probably doing a good job of avoiding the middle ground. The great freedom of blogging is that we have no obligation to report the truth. Invariably, the truth sucks. If people want the facts, they go to Wikipedia. For everything else, they’re fair game to your creative license.

So as you sit at your desk and ponder what to publish next, I would suggest you chuck those imaginary editor guidelines out of the window. You’re probably not qualified enough to merit any. And you’re not writing for a magazine. You can afford to be as wild and creative as your WordPress allows.

A pussy-footing attitude to blogging defeats the bloody purpose, does it not? So mark your ground, fly your colours and wait for fans to find you. When they do, they’ll either love or hate what you have to say. But it’s much better than being ignored. Only a complete tool writes to be ignored.

Recommended This Week:

  • Help a virginal Finch. Subscribe to my new FinchBlogs RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter.
  • If you’re feeling generous, you can also do me a favour by simply retweeting this post or recommending it on whatever hellhole of a social networking joint you use. Every little help is appreciated!

  • If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny

My Niches Bring All The Clicks To The Yard

| March 18, 2011 | Comments (0)

Internet Marketing was plain sailing in the early 2000s. There was a time where simply buying the right domain would put you in the money. In these harder times, we have a buzz word called “niche marketing”. The art of finding topics most people don’t give a crap about and setting up shop for the small handful who do.

It can be very profitable. Building a website to satisfy a small demand is much easier than battling in a network full of bigger, better and richer competition.

Here’s the thing. Just because a niche is nowhere close to being saturated, that doesn’t mean you should be rushing to stick your dick in it with a sparkling new WordPress installation. Some niches are untapped for a reason. That reason being they suck donkey chode when it comes to making money.

The argument, one I’ve heard many times before, is that traffic is traffic. Who cares if my website reviews antique deck chairs from the 1950s? Stats are stats and if Google is sending me traffic, my site must be worth something. If it’s already drawing some Adsense clicks, all the more power to my “thinking outside the box”.

Building niche websites is the sort of game that anybody can play. Hands up if you can pinpoint an interest obscure enough to have no other presence on the web? Christ, it’s not hard. Here, let me string several niche markets together.

How about a site for divorced Jewish transvestites?

By the laws of human insanity, there’s probably at least 14 people searching for this every month. Six of them being me about 30 seconds ago. And yet I’m guessing there isn’t a niche site for it yet?

So are you going to sit down and build one…just because you can?

Unless you have some seriously hot product catering directly for the market we’re talking about, I’d take a step back and think about what you’re doing. If you see zero potential beyond Adsense and a rare Amazon book referral, you’re probably wasting your time. You niched out too far.

My point is that we can dig so deep for opportunity that we sometimes forget the actual principal of what we’re trying to do; make lots of money.

When you’re running the rule over which new niches to branch in to, ask yourself a few questions:

1. Is this a buying market?

Forget Adsense. Websites built around Adsense are clusterfuck monstrosities that have no place on the Internet. Do you have something legitimate that you can sell to the people interested in this niche? Are there web-savvy local businesses – with actual budgets – that would value your content?

2. If I don’t have a buying market, do I have a LOT of traffic?

It’s okay to not have anything obvious to sell, if you have the necessary weight of traffic to rely on numbers instead. Celebrity fan sites, current trends and big upcoming local events can often merit a website. Why? Because if you do them correctly, you can produce enormous surges of traffic that attract direct buy advertisers.

If attracting highly targeted users to a niche website is one method of making money, the reverse is to take the “niche” out of niche marketing and simply drive a ton of traffic.

Think of all those sports streaming websites out there. Many people don’t want to pay for the PPV package to watch UFC live. So if you stick a live stream up with some pretty basic gateway advertising, you can fill such a huge demand that the numbers make you money – not the concept itself.

3. What is the absolute best case scenario?

Because if your answer is “I sell 3 deck chairs in March and make enough money to pay for my dedicated server“, this is probably just a mid-life crisis you’re going through. Carefully select the Back button and filter back in to whatever pipe dream you came from.

I know it’s easy to aim too high. I mean, shit, my career is built around making people believe in that high. But if your niche website has no obvious gold tap that can be switched on, forget about it and go back to the drawing board. It’s hard enough to make money online WITH a vision of where the money’s going to come from, let alone without one.

4. What is the work vs rewards ratio for my competitors?

If you’re looking at moving in to a niche full of psychopath groupies who whittle away their every hour posting content for the reward of jack diddily, you might want to have a rethink. How serious are your competitors ? If they’re working hard for no money, you’re probably going to have to work even harder just to get the show off the ground.

Do not try to beat Justin Bieber fans at building Justin Bieber niche websites, unless you plan on outsourcing to within a community.

Actually, let me rephrase myself. If your tentative keyword research throws up anything related to Justin Bieber, empty your browser history, wash your hands with soap and think about what you just thought.

What’s wrong with you? There’s a line Internet Marketers should know not to cross.

5. Can I commit to this niche?

Most important of all! If you don’t feel capable of getting your hands dirty with a niche, it’s not going to be a winner. That doesn’t mean you have to be the poor guy sat at his desk and churning out article after article on the topic. But if you know you can’t get the quality content published, you’re only ever going to be a bum search engine traffic gamer.

People forget that simply rolling out a niche website isn’t going to be enough to dominate a market. You have to become an authority in that niche. Doing this requires actual knowledge and expertise. You’re going to have to outsource your content to an expert in the field, or a damn good researcher.

There’s a lot more to consider when launching a niche website than the sheer weight of traffic numbers on Google keyword sandbox. Focus on the potential of making money. Because without that, you’re just another pillock with a fansite.

Recommended This Week:

  • Help a virginal Finch. Subscribe to my new FinchBlogs RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter.
  • If you’re feeling generous, you can also do me a favour by simply retweeting this post or recommending it on whatever hellhole of a social networking joint you use. Every little help is appreciated!
  • Due to the rapid spike in traffic this blog has seen already, I will probably be opening up advertising spots soon. If you’re interested in reserving a spot, drop me a message on my email or Twitter.