Affiliate Marketing Diary » SEO

Have You Ever Thought About Local SEO?

Steven — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 21:21:31 +0000

Have you ever thought about entering the “Local SEO” business?

If so, you may find the following findings from a survey polling 1150 local Search engine optimizers being conducted by BrightLocal.com.

This poll looked at quite a few different types of topics. Below I’ve listed the question along with the most common answer given in the poll:

Q: What was your turnover in the last 12 months?
A: 31% of people answered that they make less than $30,000 annually with local SEO.

Q: How many clients handled (personally)
A: 27% answered that they personally handle between 2 – 5 clients personally.

Q: How many clients handled the previous year (personally)?
A: 31% answered ZERO, which means the local SEO industry is attracting a lot of new people.

Q: How many new prospects do you reach out to every month
A: 46% of those polled suggest that they DO NOT actively seek out new prospects.

Q: Lead conversion (converting those prospects to customers)
A: 21% say that they have a 100% conversion rate!

Q: Do they expect growth in the next 12 months
A: 82% answered YES.

Q: Is it getting easier to discuss the benefits of SEO to local business owners?
A: 38% of the local SEOs say “Yes, a bit easier” to convince prospects to do business with them.

Q: How much do you charge for a local SEO campaign?
A: 28% of local SEOs say they charge $100 – $250 for an optimized Google Places campaign.

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Looking at these answered, there seems to be a lot of opportunities. Particularly for the “Freelance SEO” (or the part-timer).

I do hope that the service given by all of these new individuals getting into SEO will adversely affect the SEO industry.

In any event, if you would like a more detailed overview, you may want to check out the following article at SearchEngineLand.com.

If you’re a local SEO, you may also want to take part in the poll at: BrightLocal.com.

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Have You Ever Thought About Local SEO?

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4 Simple Steps To More Traffic

Steven — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 03:45:05 +0000

Getting traffic to a new blog can be a serious challenge for a brand new blogger.

You can have the coolest looking blog in the world, with the best content… but ultimately the question you will have to ask yourself is “Am I going to make money with this?”

And it all comes down to one thing…

Traffic.

There are many ways to get traffic to your blog, from guest posts on popular blogs and online publications to other published content in more traditional venues (think magazines, journals etc.) to paid traffic sources to social media….

But, did you know that there’s a “trick” that most seasoned SEO (search engine optimization) pros use to drive traffic to blogs WITHOUT creating brand new content all the time?

The method is called “Content Multiplication”, and is in some ways similar to “syndication”, with a twist.

The definition of “Syndication” according to Dictionary.com is:

“to publish simultaneously, or supply for simultaneous publication, in a number of newspapers or other periodicals in different places”

…and the idea here is for you to do something quite similar online, BUT by using different modalities.

In other words, instead of publishing the same blog post on a host of other ‘blogs’, which is more like traditional syndication (which can be penalized by the search engines for what they call the “duplicate content penalty”)… you would turn your original blog post into slightly different types of content by:

re-formatting the content slightly into an article for publication in an online article directory like: EzineArticles.com. EzineArticles.com is arguably the largest and most popular article directory on the internet with an Alexa.com rank of 228 (note: Alexa.com ranks sites based on traffic volume).
re-formatting the blog post into simple power point slides or photo slide show, and submit to video submissions sites such as YouTube.com. Youtube, in case you’re wondering, is ranked the #3 site in the world according to Alexa (just after Google and Facebook). You can also use services such as Tubemogul.com which allows you to submit your video to several video submission sites from one dashboard.
re-writing the content into a press release format and submit it to some free (or paid) press release services such as PR.com or PRWeb.com (paid).
and finally, if you are motivated, you can also turn your blog post into an audio by either recording yourself (or someone else) reading the post OR by using a service such as Odiogo.com, which will turn your blog posts from text into speech automatically (not quite ‘human’ sounding but still ok). Once it’s been converted, you can submit your audio to podcasting directories (even iTunes) for even more exposure.

Each of these steps allows your new pieces of content to be viewed (heard) and potentially syndicated to hundreds if not thousands of additional sites, which in turn will create buzz, links and ultimately more visitors back to your blog.

The really cool thing is that you don’t have to stop there.

You can now take each piece of this re-formatted content and truly syndicate the information using the power of “social media”, in other words, platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and the like.

Once you’ve signed up for each of the services, you can simplify your life by using a social dashboard such as Hellotxt.com or Ping.fm to post each piece of your “new” content to various web 2.0 properties.

Yes, it takes a bit of work to set up the accounts.

And yes, it takes a little extra elbow grease to convert the original blog post into an article, video, audio and a press release.

But the benefits outweigh the little bit of extra time that this process takes. Once you have done this a handful of times you will find that the conversion process will take much less time and it becomes routine.

And eventually you could outsource these tasks relatively easily to a virtual assistant or on Fiverr.com.

Ask yourself this question, if you’ve already spent hours crafting your blog post, why not spend the 30 – 60 minutes to re-purpose the content using content multiplication in order to get more visibility and potential “celebrity status” in your niche…

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

4 Simple Steps To More Traffic

SEO for Blogging – How To Build & Promote Your Blog Effectively

Steven — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 09:04:06 +0000

When you learn affiliate marketing, you will inevitably come across niche blogging as a business model and the need for seo for blogging. (SEO = search engine optimization).

This also happens to be one of the topics that I get the most questions about from readers of this blog… (along with the topic of free traffic generation, which goes pretty much hand-in-hand).

So today I’ll start a new series on SEO for blogging (both on-and-off page optimization), and how to promote your blog(s) effectively.

Let me just start with a warning of sorts, there’s a lot of contradictory information when it comes to this stuff out there, and what I’m sharing with you here will be “best practices” as suggested by many Search Optimizers out there.

Alright… with that out of the way…

Let me first address what SEO stands for (just in case you don’t know)…

In a nutshell, search engine optimization is the work we put into a blog (website) to make it rank high in the search engines (like Google) in order to receive traffic “for free” (people often refer to this sort of traffic as “organic traffic”).

And in order to implement it, you will need your own blog (website), current content as well as on-going content (preferably).

There are some ‘best practices’ when it comes to adding content. For one, you should always have a primary keyword phrase in mind for that particular piece of content you’re writing and design it to be as relevant to that keyword as possible.

This by the way does NOT mean that you repeat the keyword unnecessarily throughout the content (where it starts reading weird), which can be seen as “keyword stuffing” (and can have a negative impact on rankings).

Instead, the focus should be on creating premium content that adds value to the blogosphere (or the interwebz… or what not), not just some mass distributed PLR (private label rights) articles offer little to no value.

When this is done while following the proper parameters in terms of SEO, you create a “win-win” situation for yourself.

In the next segment (the first ‘official’ post on SEO for Blogging), I will cover some terms you must get familiar with when starting your journey online.

Talk soon,

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

SEO for Blogging – How To Build & Promote Your Blog Effectively