As far as what’s happened to my own sites, the results are very mixed. The one thing that has been consistent is that a lot of my inner pages from larger websites all experienced drops in rankings.

I’ve read a lot of blog posts a lot of forum posts and a lot of other information on this latest penguin update, and while nobody knows for sure exactly what’s going on and how to deal with it, there are some common denominators that people have figured out.

I myself am not an SEO master over the last few years I’ve learned enough about SEO and getting websites ranked to be able to earn a decent income but after this penguin update there really aren’t any SEO grandmasters.

So, I’m just going to go down the list of any discoveries, hints, tips, tricks, or other relevant information that might be helpful going forward.

Back Linking After Penguin and Any Other Tips or Tricks I Know Of

Internal Linking

Internal linking on your site is something that doesn’t get much attention, but seems like is becoming more and more important. Without attempting to BS my way through an explanation, what makes sense to me is that it does at least two things: 1) it keeps your visitors on your site longer and helps increase your average number of page views which helps your “Google stats”, and 2) it let’s Google see that you link to other pages on your site instead of just a bunch of outgoing affiliate links.

The latest version of WordPress makes it really easy to go through your pages and quickly build links to other pages:

Probably a good rule of thumb is to have more internal links per page than affiliate links.

“Dofollow” Links and Nofollow Links

First of all there aren’t any links actually labeled “dofollow”… I remember thinking I was a genius back in the day by looking at the page source scanning for “dofollow” and never finding any… there are just regular links and then links labeled ‘nofollow’.

I read an interesting idea/theory that seems to be completely accurate… After Penguin, Amazon.com’s results are even more powerful than before, and this theory I read said that even though people think ‘nofollow’ links don’t matter or aren’t ‘counted’ by Google, the evidence suggests otherwise. Then he pointed out that with Amazon’s affiliate program, Amazon has got thousands of people to build millions and millions of back links to their site and individual product pages, and that’s the reason why their product pages rank at the top for every conceivable keyword.

The other thing to keep in mind is that if you use a bunch of different paid link building services, most(or all) of your backlinks will be ‘dofollow’ links, which looks incredibly unnatural to Google. Your link profile should include both types of links.

“Spammy” Back Links and “Negative SEO”

There’s a lot of irony going around… especially from the supposed SEO Gurus. The first part of this comes from Matt Cutts telling us that your site’s rankings can’t be hurt from a competitor pointing thousands of crappy back links overnight at your site. Then on the other hand, Google is handing out penalties for “unnatural” back links, and the gurus are telling everyone not to join “spammy” link networks.

The problems are obvious: If Google does penalize sites for “unnatural” back links, then “negative SEO” is definitely possible… meaning a competitor can knock your site off or get it penalized.

What should you do about this… I have no idea. I point this out merely to illustrate that Google search is perpetuating problems for itself by allowing this to happen, but I don’t have a proposed solution.

Varying Your Anchor Text

This is one part of the Penguin update that everyone agrees on… If you built all your backlinks with your keywords in the anchor text without any variation- or just a little variation, then your site got hammered.

Moving forward, you need to vary your anchor text to include phrases that are loosely relevant and even flat out generic.

For example, if your main keyword is “dog training”, then build links with keywords like: dog articles, pet advice, pet tips, click here, visit our site, check out this article… etc.

Shoot for your main keywords to make up less than 50% of your anchor text as you build back links.

Web 2.0 Sites and Authority Domains Getting All the Rankings

If you want to absolutely geek-out on this stuff, you can read Jonathan Leger’s full post here… One of the main takeaways from this post and thread I’ve read on his forum is that authority domains are getting higher preference in the SERPs even with little to no back links. Sites such as:

• Blogger
• Tumblr
• WordPress.com Blogs
• Squidoo
• Hubpages
• LiveJournal
• Yahoo Answers
• PRWeb

So… it seems that you can use the “buffer site” back linking method to kill two birds with one stone: Link back to your main site like normal from these buffer sites, but add some affiliate links as well since these might end up outranking your site for a while.

According to Pat Flynn’s latest income report, he built a site following his “backlinking strategy that works” while he hired a service that claimed to replicate the process only faster, and after 3 months both sites were getting similar results, but when Penguin hit the site Pat had done manually stuck in its rankings and wasn’t hit, but the site the hired company did disappeared from the SERPs.

That’s pretty telling, and is great to know… if that method withstood Penguin, that’s amazing since even a lot of authority sites that were completely white-hat were hammered.

I do also want to point out that Joseph Archibald is the guy behind the “buffer site” back linking method, and this method is more relevant than ever.

Take It Easy(easier) for a While

Slow your roll and don’t try to build back links as fast, and remember to vary your anchor text. Unique Article Wizard has even changed their daily recommended submissions from 25 to just 5, so you might even want to set it to 1 or 2.

And yes, I’m still using UAW and overall, it still does what it says it does.

Conclusion, and What to Do Now

Going forward there are a few key things to do and/or keep in mind.

Diversify your traffic: Go out and try to figure out other traffic methods and put SEO on the back burner. Figure out getting traffic from Youtube, article syndication, tutorial sites, forum marketing, blog commenting… there’s a bunch of stuff.

Ironically, the more traffic streams you get coming into your site, the better your site will do in Google’s organic rankings.

Experiment and Research: Use whatever SEO tools you have to look at competitor’s backlinking profile and anchor text profile to see what they’re doing and to get a feel for what type of sites are ranking for particular keywords. Here’s a tip… you can do most of this with Market Samurai.

For example, enter a new keyword and then click on the “SEO Competition” module:

Then, click on ‘Generate Results’, and you’ll see the results, and I want you to notice the little down-pointing arrows next to each result:

If you click on one of those arrows you’ll see this:

Clicking on the ‘AC Rank Analysis’ will show you where they’re getting their back links, and clicking on ‘Anchor Text Analysis’ will show you a breakdown of the anchor text in the back links pointing to their site:

This is very valuable info if you’re trying to rank for these keywords. By the way- researching the top 10 results for a given keyword and analyzing what they’re doing and why will always be the best way to figure out any update.

One Method Per Site: This is a solid, common-sense idea I picked up from Chris Rempel’s blog post: If you have the means, set up as many sites as you can and experiment with one back linking method per site. The idea is to profit from diversification and a ‘safety net’ of many small sites.

That’s it… What do you think about all this? Please share this post and leave a comment below.

In this episode of the Passive Profits Podcast, I go through some simple things you can do to set goals that actually motivate you, and some tips on ways of writing them down so that they’re always accessible.

Download audio file (013-how-to-set-goals.mp3)

Right-click here to download the MP3…

Please take a second and go to iTunes and leave a comment and rating for the podcast… (you have to actually be in iTunes to do it)

How to Set Goals That Motivate You

Setting goals is a big deal… you need to be doing it.

The most profound thing I’ve noticed about goals and goal-setting, which is closer to a phenomenon, is that someone who is obsessed with hitting a goal can literally will them self to reach it. I’ve seen this first hand countless times, and I’ve also done it myself…

I’ve got two good stories about this… so listen to the podcast if you want to hear them- I’m not going to type them out here.

Okay… let’s get into the ‘how-to’

First of all, I’ve read a lot about goal setting and there are simple explanations and there are incredibly complicated explanations and methods.

I’ve kind of got my own system for goal setting, and it’s been working

The Foundation: Tony Robbins has two books that are both excellent sources on goal setting and achieving your desired life. But, when I said there are incredibly complicated ways of setting goals, he gives you some of those… submodalities and NLP- very cool stuff but there’s one technique in particular that’s simple and has worked wonders for me. Basically what you do is identify  your top 3-5 goals. In other words, figure out what 3 to 5 things that if you did or accomplished would make the biggest difference in your life. Then, for each goal, you’re going to write out 5 things or reasons why it would change your life for the better and how it would benefit you. Then, you write out 5 detailed reasons or things that will or won’t happen that are bad if you don’t accomplish that goal.

Once you’ve done that, you then write out a detailed plan of how you will hit that goal. The follow up to this is that you read these statements to yourself every morning. This is incredibly powerful for cementing in your brain what your goals are, and more importantly, the ‘why’ behind them.

Get Inside Your Own Mind: Save this one for a day when you have a few hours… but this is so revealing and helpful that you should do it as soon as possible. The book “Think and Grow Rich” should already be on your desk. If it isn’t, order it now. Without preaching about how great every one of its chapters are, the most helpful chapter in my opinion, is the last chapter, “The Six Ghosts of Fear”. When you read this, you’ll wonder how Napolean Hill knew you so well, and the inner slacker that’s constantly trying to prevent you from getting your work done. But that’s not all… at the end of the chapter, he lists out quite a few questions that he advises you sit down and answer with as much brutal honesty as possible. And I’m telling you to do the same thing… Sit down, and write out a very honest answer to every single one of the questions. This will results in quite a bit of writing, so this I don’t recommend you read every day, but go over weekly to keep your inner slacker/limiting beliefs in check.

Nate River’s Goal-Setting Tips

Now I’ll tell you exactly how I do my own goal setting and mental pushups each day. First, I setup a Blogger blog and set it to private so that no one can see it but me. You can make yours public and do whatever you want obviously.

First off, I recommend writing out the previous two exercises I just mentioned in your blog. This way everything is all in the same place, and you can access it from anywhere. So you’ll have one page where you wrote out your biggest goals and 5 reasons why you need to accomplish them and 5 bad things that will happen if you don’t. Then you’ll have another page where you write out your answers to Napolean Hill’s self-grilling questions.

Now we’ll go over some of the stuff that I personally do that really helps me stay focused.

Affirmations: I have another page where I type out my five affirmations every morning. The point of typing them out each time is to hammer them into your head, especially your subconscious. You can read more about affirmations in the chapter called “Auto-Suggestion” in Think and Grow Rich.

Goal Pictures: This is a fun one, and is easy to look at everyday. Just go online and find a picture that represents things you want or want to do. Don’t put any text on this page, just pictures… and go crazy… the more pictures the more motivated you’ll be to jump into your work that day.

Goal Rewards: This is a post where you list out something like, “when I hit my first $1,000 in a month I’ll buy myself this”, “when I hit my first $3,ooo in a month I’ll by myself this”… This is another layer of motivation for obvious reasons.

Financial Statement: Another big tip you’ll get from Think and Grow Rich is to write out a statement of your financial objective and read it to yourself morning and night. So, I have another page for that.

Ideal Day: This exercise includes writing out your ideal day… it can be as crazy or as low-key as you want.

Journal: Every week I write a new post in my “goal blog” where I review myself and what I did the past week, and what I accomplished and what I need to improve on. This is very therapeutic and helps to solidify your work ethic/goal-hitting-ability/whatever else you want to call it.

Income Report: Every month I go back and do my accounting for the month… this part I actually track in Excel but once I have totals I just make a quick post in my goal blog.

Monthly Plan: After I do my monthly accounting report for my business I then write out my next month’s plan.

Essential Books on Goal Setting and Achievement:

1. Think and Grow Rich
2. Unlimited Power
3. 7 Habits of Highly Successful People
4. The Psychology of Selling (very good tips on goals dealing specifically with income)

Please take a second and share/like/+1 this… if you liked it of course

When it comes to website structure, there are two main benefits to putting a little planning and know-how behind setting up your site:

1) Better stats for Google (lower bounce rate, longer avg. time on site, etc.)

2) Higher conversions… whether that’s sales or signups

I follow some pretty simple guidelines for my own sites that definitely work for me, so I’ll go over some of those in this post so that you can use some of them on your own sites.

Tips for a High-Converting Website Structure

A static homepage: I don’t do this with Strayblogger yet, but I do it on most of my sites. The main idea behind this is so that you control exactly what your visitors see when they land on your homepage. Your homepage will be the most visited page on your site by far, so it’s a good place to put your most valuable(both to you and your readers) information. If you’re not aware, WordPress by default uses a dynamic ‘posts’ page as your homepage that will show your most recent posts… a blog in other words.

When you use a static homepage, you go in and choose a “page”, not a post, that will be your homepage and will always look and stay the same unless you manually edit the page of course. To set that up, go into ‘Settings’, and then ‘Reading’, and you’ll see this:

You just check the ‘static page’ option, and then choose the page you want as your homepage. If you want a dedicated blog page, you would just setup a “page” titled ‘Blog’, and choose that as your ‘Posts page’ below the Front page option.

Some ideas of what to put on your homepage

First of all, your homepage should basically be an article about the overall topic of your site. Shoot for 700 to 1,000 words so that it’s substantial… both for human readers and search engines, and then as you build your site out you’ll be able to add links to your main pages right from the content of the homepage. If you look at my stroller site, you’ll see this in action:

The links on your homepage within your content shouldn’t just link to your money pages… that’s the wrong place to link to your money pages. Your homepage should link to your main category pages, and those main category pages will then have links to your different articles in that category. So basically what you have is a hierarchy of pages like this:

You should choose anywhere from 3 to 6 “categories” that any article on your site will fit into. Then, you create a “page” in WordPress to serve as that category page. Then go into your menu options and list these category pages in your navigation. First you have to do it under “Appearance” > “Menus” like this:

In Profits Theme, you choose ‘Top Navigation 2′, because that’s the menu under your logo… that’s just the way I setup all my sites, you can do it whatever way you want. I just prefer one main Nav bar under my site logo such here on Strayblogger. In Profits Theme, this is under Profits Theme > Site Options > Display, and then check the box to Remove/Collapse Top Navigation #1:

Then, on each category page, you make it another general article about that category or topic, and then link to the pages within that category. Here’s another example from my stroller site:

What this does is it gives your visitors a lot of places to go, and this increases your avg. time on site and avg. number of pages that visitor views. The longer you can keep a visitor on your site, the higher chance they’ll subscribe or buy something you’re promoting. These improved metrics also increase the quality of your site in the eyes of Google, which will improve your search engine rankings as well.

As you continue to build more and more pages, you should spend a little time going through and interlinking your articles. If you have a page titled “How to Cook Trout”, then in your other articles whenever you  mention cooking trout or eating trout, you would link back to your page on “How to Cook Trout”. Interlinking is another thing that boosts your search engine rankings, mainly because it get’s people viewing more pages per visit and staying on your site longer.

What to Put in Your Sidebars

Your sidebars are very important to the success of your site. This is where the bulk of your money-making actions will take place: 1)people subscribing to your list and 2) visiting your money pages.

As you can see in the shot below, I have a simple optin on my top-right sidebar, which is the best place to put it.

I know I beat this like a dead horse, but if you’re not building a list yet- it will drastically reduce the amount of time it takes you to build up your traffic, sales, and income. You can also watch the list building webinar if you haven’t yet…

I know this will get asked, so to get an optin form like the one you see above, you can either use Optin Skin, or Profits Theme has a sidebar optin widget you can use. In either case, you simply get your form HTML from iContact and paste it into the widget where it says “Paste Autoresponder code here”:

The next best way to use your sidebar space is to link to your money pages. It’s not a bad idea to include a couple of your best pages, whether they’re money pages or not- this goes back to the idea that you want your visitors to see your best stuff when they visit your site.

The easiest way to list the specific pages you want is to first create a custom menu in your ‘Menus’ options inside WordPress:

Then, you need to simply drag the “Custom Menu” widget into your sidebar inside the ‘Widgets’ menu:

Putting your Amazon.com affiliate disclaimer on every page: If you’re an Amazon.com affiliate, you need to have a disclosure statement on any page with Amazon affiliate links that discloses your affiliate relationship with Amazon. An easy way to this so that you don’t have to edit every single page is to use the “widgetized footer” feature in Profits Theme. Here’s what it looks like in action:

To set it up, it’s under Profits Theme > Design Options > Layout. Then you find this section, and make sure it’s un-checked.

Once you’ve done that, then you need to configure the widgets inside your “Widget” options:

At this point the only other thing I can think of that you might be wondering is, “How do I link to all my other pages besides my money pages in my sidebar?”

To answer that let’s recap: You setup your homepage which will link to ‘category pages’ and other main pages, and then on your category pages you’ll link to all the articles within that category. Then, you want to interlink your article pages wherever it makes sense to, and that way there will be a way to access any given page within a few clicks from the home page.

The idea of putting your best content directly accessible on the homepage and from any page in the sidebar is that it will be your individual pages that bring in most of the traffic, and then the main thing people click on is your homepage link, and from there they’ll funnel to your money pages… that’s how it works hypothetically and it will work that way the majority of the time. Some visitors will bounce after just a few seconds no matter how good your site and content are, but if you’ll take some time to plan out your site and set it up correctly, over time it will perform much better both in terms of traffic and revenue than it would if you just kept publishing pages and didn’t do anything to organize them.

Okay- I hope you liked this post and learned something useful… Please share/tweet/+1 this below and leave a comment or question.

In the webinar we covered the basics of getting a list up and running, and how to structure your first auto responder campaign.

Tools Mentioned:

If you’re just starting out with building a list, I think iContact is the best choice.

Optin Skin is the plugin that lets you put great-looking optin forms throughout your site along with a lot of other features.

Here’s the replay from last night’s webinar. We covered a lot of stuff, and there was a lot of good questions.

If you want a spot on the private webinar next week, there are still some spots available- watch til the end to see how to reserve your spot.

 Things that were mentioned in the webinar:

Bring the Fresh- this is where, in my opinion, the most cutting edge discussions are happening on SEO about what’s actually working right now…

Unique Article Wizard- this won’t make or break your website’s success, but it sure speeds it up

Hostgator- cheapest + most flexible hosting, and they won’t kick you off when you start to get traffic

iContact- easiest autoresponder service to get up and running with, and the lowest starting price (read about my iContact bonus here)

Profits Theme- the theme I use on all of my sites

Market Samurai- still my #1 keyword tool, and let’s you do those tricks I showed you in the webinar to spy on your competition

First of all, I want to thank all of you for the huge response to the WSO I released last week, “60 Minutes to $100 Days“. I thought it would do well, but it’s been way bigger than I expected and I’m grateful for all of your support.

It really is the best approach to building an online business, both right now and for the future.

This blog post and video is sort of an update for everyone who purchased the WSO, but I think my regular readers will get something out of it as well.

I’ve received literally thousands of emails since the WSO opened last Thursday, and it’s become very clear to me that I wasn’t detailed enough in two main areas:

• Choosing a domain name
• Building a list
• Link building

So, I’m going to cover those two things in this post- let’s get into it:

How to Pick a Domain Name for your new site

The formula for a great domain name for this type of site is very simple. You want to include one or two main keywords relating to your niche, and then one word that makes the whole thing into a brand. For example:

campinggearfanatic.com

dogtrainingjunkie.com

homeimprovement101.com

You can also use .net or .org if you can’t get the .com… they’re all the same SEO-wise. If you don’t have hosting yet, don’t mess with Godaddy or Namecheap, because then you have to change your nameservers inside of your host… you can get it all done in one place with Hostgator. Plus like I said in the course, with Hostgator you have the ability to easily scale up your hosting account, where if you start with Bluehost or another shared host, you’ll have to completely move your sites when they start to get a decent amount of traffic.

That’s really all there is to choosing a great domain name that gives you the benefits of having keywords in your domain as well as it being a “branded” domain.

Getting Started with List Building

I covered this in the video so I’ll just go over the basics here…

Building a list from the get-go is a very smart move. When you can email previous readers and let them know about new content, you build a loyal subscriber/reader base, your content gets more “likes” and “shares”, this increases your avg. time on site, lowers your bounce rate, improves your search engine rankings, which leads to more subscribers, which starts the process over again, and in the end more subscribers and traffic obviously results in more sales.

As I mentioned in the video, if you don’t have an autoresponder service yet, I recommend starting with iContact, specifically for this type of site. iContact is better for this type of site because they’re the best service for creating great-looking HTML-formatted emails. It’s easy to use and you want to use these type of branded emails to build your brand and readership.

If you start with even just their $10/month plan and you buy through my affiliate link, I have a bonus video course on getting up and running with iContact and how to setup your first autoresponder funnel that I’ll give you access to. This course isn’t available for sale anywhere, it’s only available as a bonus for getting iContact through my link. If you’re interested, click here > click on ‘pricing’> scroll down to plans > find the “$10 for 250 subscribers plan” > click ‘buy now’ > then signup and then forward your receipt to me at nate (at) strayblogger.com and I’ll send you the bonus course.

There’s no time limit or something dumb like that on this bonus… but it’s not available for a free trial- it needs to be at least their $10/month plan.

A Simple Plan for Back Linking

Okay, I got a lot of questions on backlinking as well. Your backlinking plan for this type of site can be summed up in two steps:

• Build buffer pages
• Build mass links to those pages

To build buffer pages, just dedicate one day a week to link building. You need to spend your hour a day for at least five days a week creating new content for your site. So, to do a buffer page, you take an article you’ve put on your site earlier in the week, and you submit it to Goarticles and Articlebase. I skipped this in the video, but only use EzineArticles for your once-a-week 1200 word article for quality reasons.

Once you’ve posted the article on those two directories, build mass backlinks to those two articles with a tool like Unique Article Wizard. UAW isn’t essential, but it sure makes this a lot easier. I went into detail about why UAW works like it does in the video, so I won’t re-type it out here.

By following this type of link building format, you’ll avoid any Google penalties because there won’t be a bunch of low-quality links pointing directly to your site. The buffer pages of those article directories can absorb mass low-quality links and they’ll pass higher-quality link juice to your actual site, without having to worry about a penalty from Google.

Again, UAW isn’t essential and don’t feel like you need it… but if you’ve been planning on joining UAW, then you should hurry because of this email I got from Jason Arnold today:

Alright- I hope this post cleared some things up with you and gave you more ideas… Let me know what you think in the comments below.

This guy is such a terrrorizer

In this podcast episode, I go over several things relating to the recent closing of Build My Rank, such as:

• How it’s affected my sites
• If blog networks are still worth using
• Using buffer pages
• Content/Article Syndication(not article submissions)
• The future of SEO
• My plan moving forward
• Some recommendations and tips for you moving forward

Download audio file (012-bmr-is-done.mp3)

Right-click here to download the MP3…

Things I mention in this episode:

• Unique Article Wizard (surprisingly it’s working better than ever, but I’m going to start using it a little differently)
• Pat Flynn’s “Backlinking Method That Works”

Has this affected your sites at all? Leave your comments/questions below…

Please take a second and go into iTunes, search ‘strayblogger’, and rate and leave a comment on my podcast, Thanks!

Download audio file (011-call-of-duty.mp3)

Right-click to download the MP3…

In this blogpost and podcast, I want to talk about a sickening realization I came to, and a huge lesson I learned last night while I was playing Call of Duty. If you don’t know, Call of Duty is the war video game franchise that breaks records every year when it releases its latest title.

It’s awesome to play, super addicting, and the more you play, the funner it is. That’s the reason I have such a problem with it. Since I do manage to work most of each day on my websites, I am what you would call a functioning addict… but, I really wish I could abstain during the week and get more work done but I find myself playing COD for at least 3-4 hours every night.

Last night in particular, a message popped up after a match that made me realize something big, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But first, there are some other “lessons” that can be applied to building on online business:

Camping vs. Run-and-gun: When playing COD, there are two basic styles of playing: camping and running-and-gunning. Camping means that you pick a spot and kind of hide and wait for people to run by so you can shoot them, and run-and-gun means you run around and try to find as many people to shoot as possible. What really matters in COD is the number of kills each round, so there are obvious pros and cons to both methods. When camping, you’ll have fewer deaths, but the winner of the round is almost always a run-and-gun guy simply because they have more chances to get kills.

How does this relate to building an online business?

The whole idea of run-and-gun is essentially the same as someone who just goes out and makes things happen. While camping is less stressful and the kills are easier, what you’re really doing is just sitting around waiting for an opportunity to come to you. This is a big problem that a lot of people have when trying to build an online business. The most “effort” they put in is in looking around for a “way to make money fast”. In other words, looking for something “easy”. There are “easy” methods out there that might get you some results, but the people that are really killing it are the ones that are simply just digging in and making it happen.

Spying on the best players: Each round in COD goes for 10 minutes unless someone hits 30 kills, whichever comes first. Usually in any given match, there’s some COD freak that will hit 30 kills in 5 or 6 minutes, and the next best player only has 15 or 16 kills. Well, I wanted to be the guy that was hitting 30 kills before the match ended. This is pretty geeky, but it’s a great lesson to learn. I figured out that after a match I could re-watch the entire match from any player’s perspective. So, I would watch matches through the eyes of the psycho who got to 30 kills in 5 minutes to see how he did it.

I think you can tell where this is going…

You’ve probably heard that you should find the top people in your market, or the best websites in your niche, and figure out why they are the best, and then emulate what they’re doing. Tony Robbins calls this ‘modeling’ and it’s a proven way to get the results that you want.

Utilizing Killstreaks: Killstreaks are when you have a certain number of kills in a row without dying, and a friendly chopper will come and drop you a box with some advanced weapon that will help you get even more kills, such as a sentry gun or an attack chopper. But… there are some killstreaks that just don’t work that well, while others will increase your kill count every time.

From an online business perspective, the first “killstreak” that comes to mind is building a list. Sure, you might have a site that’s getting traffic and generating sales, but  you could get more sales over time by building a list so that you can market to those customers over and over again. Another “killstreak” that you can utilize is upsells. If you are selling an ebook or your own product, and you don’t use an upsell, you’re simply missing out on more revenue.

Effective Aim: This sounds basic, and it is the most basic and fundamental skill in COD, but it’s crucial to your success. When you’re running and you come face-to-face with another player, you only have one chance to raise your weapon, aim, and shoot. This is the exact same thing as making sure that your core message and product matches what your customers are actually looking for. Any experienced marketer or business person will tell you to find a market first and then create a site or product for it, not the other way around.

Knowing the Maps: Memorizing the maps is another strategy of elite COD players. When one shot will kill you, the ability to anticipate where an enemy is most likely to be hiding will give you an advantage over someone who is simply reacting to what’s happening on their screen. As you’ll quickly find out, and it’s not really different than anything else that humans do, COD players are very predictable. Every map has certain “hotspots” where you can always find players to kill, as well as hiding spots where you’ll find a camper every time.

This concept has several parallels to online business. One is the idea of mastering your traffic methods instead of just dabbling in every method out there. Another example is the ability to identify hot markets and opportunities before everyone else does.

Silencing Annoying Players: Since the internet makes people anonymous, a lot of players on COD say incredibly vulgar, disgusting, annoying, and otherwise ridiculous things while playing. Sometimes it’s hilarious, but after a while it gets very old.

In an online business, you’ll definitely deal with less-than-savory people from time to time. The first few times I got a “hate” email or people telling me I suck, or some other unfounded complaint, it really got to me. When it comes to dealing with customers you obviously have to stand behind your materials, but when you get someone who is just looking for someone or something to blame their problems on, don’t spend any time dealing with them. Just block them from your list, or refund them, or whatever the case is, but don’t waste an ounce of energy worrying about it.

The Biggest Lesson of All: Okay, this is what happened that gave me the idea for this entire post. So in COD, there are just random badges or rewards that you earn for different milestones you hit. Last night, I finished first place in a match, and a message popped up that I had earned a reward for “being the top player in 1,000 Hardcore free-for-all matches”.

Do you know what that means? I place first in maybe 1 out of every 4 matches, and I wasn’t consistently placing first for the first 6 months of playing… so 1,000 1st place finishes alone equals around 150 hours of video game playing. The disgusting part is I probably spent at least 6-7 times that much playing, and maybe even 10 times that much.

So what’s the lesson there? The lesson is that even just a few hours day in and day out add up to a huge amount quickly… I’ve always said that if all someone did was pick one topic and write 3 articles a day on it, everyday, they would have a big big site that gets a lot of traffic and makes a lot of money within a year, probably even just a few months.

But… no one does that because people sabotage themselves into trying different methods and techniques, thinking that it couldn’t possibly be that simple.

Please take a sec and go into the iTunes store and search “strayblogger”, and then rate my podcast and leave a review… I would really appreciate it. Thanks in advance cuz I know you’re going to!

{sorry for the raspy voice- I recorded this thing twice!}

Download audio file (010-amazon-affiliate-conversion-rate.mp3)

Click here to download the MP3…

In this podcast I cover in detail some of the best things you can do to increase your amazon conversion rate from your review sites.

Some of the things I mention in the podcast:

Easy Video Player: what I use to do the affiliate trick I mentioned (as well as anything else with web video)

Product comparison table plugin: doesn’t have a fancy name… it’s what I use to create comparison tables

How to Increase Your Amazon Affiliate Conversion Rate

Actually useful content: I hate to hammer this into your head, but if you create articles that legitimately point out pros and cons that people care about, and then provide helpful recommendations, you will get sales. The idea of providing enough information for the reader to make a buying decision is something that will take more work upfront, but it will pay off in the long run for obvious reasons.

Structuring your site like a funnel: What I mean by this, is if you’re targeting keywords such as “Sony X35F noise canceling headphones”, you might try to get a domain name as close to that as possible. But… what would be much more effective is to do some more research and find a keyword phrase such as “best noise canceling headphones” and choose a domain based on that keyword phrase. Then, instead of putting up 5 articles that are titled after 5 different models of headphones, you could get even more traffic by finding some more general keywords such as “noise canceling headphone reviews”, “best budget noise canceling headphones, “noise canceling headphones buying guide” etc. You would still create a separate page for each review of a specific model, but those more general articles will bring your site a lot more traffic than just the pages based on specific product reviews. Then, in the general articles, when you mention specific models you would link to your review page instead of straight to Amazon. Keep in mind, that the traffic coming straight from people searching specific product names will typically convert the highest, but you’ll still convert a decent percentage of the traffic from more general keywords.

Contextual links within your reviews: These will be some of your best sales-drivers. This simply means links within your actual article body. For example, once or twice a paragraph in a product review you can turn a few related words into an affiliate link back to that product on Amazon.com. You obviously want to strike a balance between too few and too many, but a good rule of thumb in product review that’s at least 500 words would be to have at least 4 contextual links.

Making product images clickable with your affiliate link: This is simple, and easy to do. When you insert a product image into your review, WordPress let’s you make the image clickable and you just insert your affiliate link for that product. This will will be another high sales driver.

Make your links a contrasting color when hovered over: I think I originally read about this on Google’s own Adsense blog. They figured out that they got a much higher click through rate when they made the hover color on links very different from the original. So if your links are blue, make them red, green, or orange when hovered over. More clicks means more sales over time.

Don’t waste sidebar space with an Amazon widget: Amazon’s own tools don’t convert very well. Instead of pasting in a widget on your sidebar, list your own review articles for the top 5 products in your niche. You can title them “highest rated products” or “bestselling products”.

Adding a “Who this is good for” section: There’s a lot of variations of this, but add a paragraph about who the product is the best fit for, and then recommend 2 or 3 other products that are either cheaper, more expensive, or would be a better fit for certain types of customers. For example, if you’re reviewing an expensive golf club set, you could write, “if you just can’t shell out the $1,500 for this set, the X set and the X set are two highly rated but very similar sets that are less than $600″.

Pros and cons bulleted list: I’ve mentioned this before in previous posts, but this is a great way to sum up the main benefits and negatives for your readers. You build these really easily and effectively by going through some of the actual reviews and pulling out benefits that people talk about. You can obviously do the same to pull out some negatives.

A high-converting video trick: For a lot of products, there will be some high quality review videos out there on Youtube you can embed on your site. Adding a good one to your review can really help. But, to take this a step further, you can use Easy Video Player to take the Youtube video, and then import it into EVP and have a buy button appear below the video after 5 or 10 seconds in. So yes, I’m saying that you can take a Youtube video that isn’t yours, import it into your EVP dashboard, and then add an “element” that makes a buy button appear at a specified time under the video. It’s a pretty awesome feature. If you have EVP and haven’t played around with the “elements” and other features yet, there’s a ton of cool stuff you can do with it.

Product comparison tables: This is something I started using just a few months ago, but they have really helped. I use a simple $10 plugin, and I can make one in literally 2-3 minutes. The best way to use it is to pick the main or best product, and then include 3 others so that you have 4 products total in your table. You can watch this video about how I use it here…

List your review articles at the end of every page: You should list your top 5 product reviews at the end of every page and post on your site- this is for obvious reasons and it will increase your sales. Again, title them something like “highest rated headphones”.

Include excerpts of real reviews: You can include the first sentence or two of some real reviews from Amazon, and then link to the full review page using Amazon’s “link to this page” tool. This is another thing that will produce more sales than you would otherwise.

So far, that’s all I can think of and this post has gotten fairly long. I hope you can use some of these tips-