Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

Liz Sherwood has reopened the doors to 500 “miners” at the AdGold site… this is your chance to join the site that sold out in 30 hours last time and has been closed for months.

Liz is offering you a huge amount of value… 12 researched top-paying niches each month with 20 original articles per niche to help you build sites quickly…. plus autoresponder content, a list sites to request links from, a list of affiliate programs in each niche, keyword research data, customized introductions and conclusions for your pages, graphics, contests and more.

All you have to do is grab a domain name for each niche and put the articles online. I then suggest “padding” the sites with more quality articles, either from Article Underground, from ghostwriters or articles you write yourself. How you monetize the sites is up to you… but I bet most people put up Adsense and wait for their Google check from the mailman.

Check out AdGold and join while you can… then you can see if it’s an opportunity you want to stick with or not… but if you don’t join, and the doors close again, I honestly don’t know how long you’ll have to wait for a chance to get in.

I agree!

It’s been all plain, boring text for too long… so here are two pictures I took in my garden this morning… one of a visiting great spotted woodpecker who had a red patch on the back of his head which means he was a male, apparently. (click the link to learn more)

Here’s the woodpecker… click to enlarge

…and one of a great-tit who was grabbing peanuts and flying off to a nearby tree branch to share his prize with a few excited youngsters. It was fun watching that. … click to enlarge

I know… now I need a camera that can take good pictures of wildlife.. ‘cos I can’t!

Finally! It’s only been a couple of years (or feels like) since AOL took a disliking to my IP address and point-blank refused all incoming emails from my server. Having successfully been removed from the Outblaze block after fixing insecure scripts on my server and getting my outgoing volume down by 99%, I figured it was time to try AOL again. So I called them last night and a helpful bloke took all the details and “escalated” the ticket.

Today I got an email from AOL…

“Removed block from your IP address and you can sent mail to us after 24 business hours. It is recommended to setup a feedback loop through our website postmaster.aol.com if don’t have any at this time.”

Yippee! I’m not sure how long “24 business hours” is (does anyone know?), but the news is good. The IP ban is lifted.

Now when someone buys a product from me, or emails me a question from an AOL account, I won’t have to run around to my Gmail account to send a reply.

Liz Sherwood (who runs the excellent Adgold Rush) has allowed me to link to her blog competition! I don’t think any other marketer has been given this opportunity to let people enter the competition. All you have to do is post a comment in reply to the blog post here and tell Liz your best “Tall Tale” on how the AdGold Rush could help you hit the gold mine with your AdSense earnings.

One winner will get three months of Adgold membership for free (chosen on the 29th June) and two people will get a free month (chosen on the 30th). So get your entry in early because the deadline is very, very close!

As I write this, there are only 12 comments on the blog post (and one is a reply from Liz!), so you have an excellent chance of being one of the three winners!

Click here for the blog post, then add your comments.

(don’t post your comments here, Liz won’t see them… click the link to Liz’s blog first, then reply! )

If you’re going to make money with Adsense (or similar programs) you’re probably going to buy quite a few domain names. You may not think so, but one or two here and there adds up quickly… and you want to make sure you get the right ones.

What do I mean by the right ones? Well, quite simply, it helps your search engine rankings to have the search term you’re trying to be ranked highly for in your domain name.

Check it out for yourself at Google. Here’s an example… home theater… seven of the top ten results have “home” and “theater” in their URLs… and one of the other three is Amazon!

People are arguing over whether or not you should use hyphens in the domain name, but most people seem to agree that having keywords in the domain names helps with your ranking.

So, you plug in your desired domain name into a registrar… taken.

You plug in something similar… taken.

You plug in something similar… taken.

Aww shucks, this isn’t much FUN!

Well, here’s a cool tool that plugs your keyword into Overture and gets similar phrases containing your keyword which it reports to you along with the number of searches per month… it also checks to see if those domain names are taken or not.

The ones that are available and have lots of people searching for the keywords in the domain name are your hot tickets!

So, say for example you’re keyword is “internet marketing” but “internetmarketing.com” is taken, you plug “internet marketing” into this tool and it shows you what other terms, containing “internet marketing” people are searching for… the number of searches and whether or not the domain is taken. So, you could see that the next most popular after “internet marketing” is “internet marketing help” searched for almost as much, but it’s available! Bingo. You have a domain name containing not only a phrase you know people are searching for (”internet marketing help”), but it still contains the phrase “internet marketing”!

Ok, so you can see how powerful it is… let people know you heard about it at this blog when you’re rich and famous!

Here’s the link to check it out!

Another great question about Article Underground… you guys are really getting value for money from me for this promotion!

“Hi Neil,

I notice that you are recommending both ArticleUnderground and Liz Sherwoods Adgold Rush.

I wonder which would be the preferred choice if one had money only for one. Also I have a concern about ArticleUndeground. The 400 articles that one gets every month cover a wide range of topics. How does one go about using them if one wants to operate with an optimum minimum of domain names and sites. Because each domain name involves USD 5-7 and each new hosting ( for IP Diversity and theme focus ) involves USD 10 per month. And the wide subject range of the Articles can involve upto 50 domain names and hosted sites.

I am sure there must be a way to use sub domains and build the article content sites around a web like structure. But can people with little experience do it, and justify the money spent on AU. I’m sure there must be a way to maximise the use of the 400 articles with a minimum of websites. Can you explain and throw some light on this aspect, please.

Am I missing something?”

My reply…

I’d have to recommend AdGold first, because that provides 20 pre-written articles for each niche site… and 12 niches per month. Article Underground is very good for providing additional content for each site you have built or will build and for promoting your pages using their blog system. I think both dovetail wonderfully together and I’m trying not to say that one without the other would be only 25% as effective.

Think of each “main” site you build (the Adgold sites) as the “main meal“. It’s nice to have a main meal… the meat, the veg… great. Lots of people build “main meal” sites and move on to the next site, and the next site…

Now think of adding Article Underground articles as adding the “extras” that make a meal really special… the starter, the soup, the side salad, the glass of wine, the lighting, the ambient music, the dessert, the coffee, the mint with the coffee.

You’re a search engine. Which site do you visit? A main meal site, or a site with a main meal and all the extras? (more important, which site will you score highly in your search engine results?)

(by the way, don’t think you have to build a site around every article you get from AU… 400 articles is a ton… it’s almost too many to work with… until you realize that using some of the articles to add to your niche sites… the on-topic ones from your sets of 400 is, IMO, the smart way to use them.)

As for the domains, yes, you could use subdomains, but I don’t know what impact that would have on your SE rankings. As each site costs $8 per year, aim to have each site make $8 per month and each domain will easily pay for itself. Then consider if each site made $8 per week… per day…

As for separate IP addresses… I don’t see why you’d need separate IP addresses for each of the sites… just don’t inter-link them. If you have a few feeder sites, just link them one-way to the main site. As long as the main site has lots of other links pointing to it, the few from your feeder sites shouldn’t be a problem at all. Only if you want to inter-link sites should you be concerned about IP addresses… and that becomes a huge amount of work.
See the answers to other questions about Article Underground here, here and here. (!)

I want to be free from debt… all debt. I consider debt to be a big scam, and I don’t like being scammed. In fact, I want to be “ScamFree”. My personal date for being scamfree is January 2008… just 18 months away.

I don’t know the data for the USA, but here in Britain, we’re still piling on the debt…

…”various studies put the number of over-indebted people between 1m and 3m. People are considered over-indebted when they can only afford the interest on their loans but cannot pay off the principal amount.” source

There are only about 60 million people in Britain, so, given a 2m figure of over-indebted people, that’s about one in 30 who are deep in debt and only paying off interest!

Don’t let it happen to you! Pay off your debts as soon as possible… become ScamFree!

It looks like I’ll have to start a category just for AU questions!

Here’s the latest one…

“A quick question about your Article Underground recommendation; assuming I setup 2 sites a day, so by the end of the week had 10, how long before I could expect to see the $97 monthly fee covered?”

And my reply…

“Wow… you really expect an answer to that?

It depends on a huge number of factors, some of which are…

• How many pages are in your sites?
• How well will you integrate ads so that they get clicks?
• How much promotion will you do for each site, and will you use effective or ineffective promotion?
• Will you be building feeder sites for each site?
• Will you be running blogs alongside the sites?
• Will you be getting $1 per click because you’ve reduced the number of ads on the page, or $0.10 per click because you’ve over-saturated the pages with ads?
• Did you choose your domain names wisely?
• Did you add any totally original content to your sites?
• How long will the “big engines” take to visit?
• How long will it be until your sites get into the search engine indexes?

In short, I have no idea.

Seriously, this is kinda answered in my other Article Underground answer post…

..it’s the fact that sites make money month after month which will see you recovering the $97 fairly soon.

I can tell you I took a domain name on the 21st June which was visited by bots on the 23rd and 24th because I posted at two AU blogs promoting just one page. That page has seen Google traffic from SIX different searches and I got my first Adsense click yesterday… the 27th. The first visitor from Google was on the 24th… just three days after taking the domain name!

So, it depends… but it can be pretty fast.

Just a quickie to let you know that Affiliate Classroom officially launched today and there are some unique bonuses for early bird buyers. Check out what the full product looks like (in fact, I think they’ve added to it since I got my copy !!), and head on over to the website for the full scoop on this incredible product for budding affiliate managers!

A person interested in Article Underground sent me this question…

“Can you make more than $97 a month from Adsense on 40-50 articles? Since they aren’t targeting a specific niche, it’s impossible to use more than a handful of the articles.

Perhaps after 6-7 months, it starts to add up, as you can gradually start using more and more of the articles. Or am I missing something? I’d appreciate your input.”

…and here’s my answer…

“The article pages you used and paid for in month one will still be making money in months 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 etc.

So you don’t need to recover the $97 for each month in just one month. Perhaps your 50 article pages make $1 each per month… you’ll make $50 in months one, two, three, four, five etc. You’ll be in profit after month two. If your article pages only make half that… 50c per month each, you’d be in profit after four months.

The same applies to the articles used in every subsequent month… the profits add up over time… month on month on month after the initial “payback”.

I’ve made up the numbers for illustration purposes. I don’t know if your article pages will earn $1 or 50c per month… it would depend on the rest of the sites they’re part of and the topics/keywords of the articles.”

Someone please check my math.

The point is, you’re using genuine content to build quality sites for the long term. Once a site starts generating revenue, it will do it for months and months… perhaps years and years… that’s the payoff.

…so I thought you may like to see it too…

I’ve been amazed by the response to my last email… tons of you accepted my Article Underground recommendation… I guess the offer of huge amounts of quality content PLUS a traffic generating system is almost irresistible!

BUT, if you haven’t yet joined me on the inside, you’ll have to be quick… I’ve just heard from Mike in a personal email that there are only 98 places left in “phase two” and they’re going fast… if you want a place, don’t delay!

Oh, Mike also said he was not sure about *ever* offering another place… “I will take some time off before offering a 3rd phase, IF I decide to add it”… were his exact words.

The Article Underground gets my highest recommendation. If you place your order today and manage to get in, email your purchase receipt to: nsbonuses AT googlemail.com and I’ll send you…

… My 20-minute movie on my personal money spinning system built around Article Underground…and…

… My personal answers to the “duplicate content problem” *and* how to make the most of the 400 articles you get from Article Underground each month!

I look forward to seeing you inside the Article Underground!

But don’t forget… as of right now there are only 98 places and this email goes out to about 25,000 people!

Here’s the link to click…
http://www.scamfree.com/articles/

PS, I spent several hours today building sites around my new system. This is what I’m doing *right now*… and I want to share it with you!

Was I in at the beginning of the Internet? The “big bang”?

Take a look at this past article… it mentions DVD’s as “new technology” and also VHS (gasp!)

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Niche It, Niche It Good!

A key to online success is to work the small, profitable niche’s.

I’ll give you an example.

I wanted to buy a DVD player. Yes, I’d held out long enough and was ready to embrace the “new” technology!

BUT, I didn’t want another box under my TV. So I went looking for a DVD/VCR combo.

I found one I liked and took it home from the store.

I’m a happy bunny. The Lord Of The Rings is just spectacular!

OK, back to the niche.

If you search Google for “home business” (without typing the quotes) you get 6.8 Million results.

If you search Google for “DVD VCR combo” (without typing the quotes) you get 61,000 results.

Now, if you earn 2% per sale on a $400 DVD/VCR combo from your local electrical retailers website, that’s $8 per sale.

And there’s very little competition.

Work the Niche

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Now, let’s look at that again, doing the same searches today… home business and DVD VCR combo. I’d say the web has become a little bigger since I first wrote that article!

When you retire, you expect residual income from your investments, right? That’s what your pension is for… to provide an income stream when you retire. But can your online business provide you with residual income too, and is it important to try to build residual income streams? Well…

If you have a job, you have to keep working to earn money.

If you have a business, you have to keep selling to earn money.

But, if you sell a product through recurring billing, or if you sell products as an affiliate and earn residual income, you can reach a level of success which will enable you to stop working!

For as long as the person buys the product, you take a slice of the revenue.

Even if you sold to them five years ago.

Of course, if you’re an affiliate, you have the same risks that the merchant may go broke.

And if you’re the merchant, you still have to provide the service which the customers are paying monthly for, and provide customer support.

But the fact is that building a residual sales income will provide greater stability and revenue than making continuous sales.

Try to build a residual income stream into your business, and let me know how you get on

I hardly know where to begin.

Lots of people took me up on the ArticleUnderground offer… which is great.. so I’ve been emailing them their bonus movie! (it’s not too late if you want to jump on board… see this post).  I also heard from lots of people who were already members and who wanted to know if they could get my bonus… well, of course! Next time, I’ll be faster to do my promotion and not wait weeks before my “lightbulb” moment.

I added my own Incomemax.com RSS feed to the regular pages on Incomemax.com using something called Feedroll. You can see the blog posts at the bottom of the pages. I like having editorial control over my sites. The idea of adding other people’s RSS feeds makes me nervous… so adding my own seemed like a better plan.

I also changed a Meta tag in the Incomemax code I wasn’t previously aware of.. “revisit after” was set to 15 days (!)… no wonder I had to wait so long for Google to come back to my site… they were staying away for two weeks at a time because I was asking them to… unknown to me! I’ve changed that setting to one day! Oh and, also at Incomemax, I changed the meta description and made it longer. Google seem to have taken all the meta description and the first image alt tag as their search engine description for the site… which wasn’t good. So I wrote a longer description.

What else? Oh yes, I tried out the new and improved Article Announcer… it’s a great tool, but (through no fault of Article Announcer’s) the first time you try to submit an article at a site they ask you to fill in a form, then confirm your email address, then pick a pen-name, then submit your article. I can’t wait until I’m done “registering” with each site and can just run around submitting articles… that’ll be fun. Today I think I registered at about a dozen sites and submitted an article at each… which took a few hours!

The article I submitted was the first I’ve ever had ghostwritten! I’m very excited… getting brand new, original content and then leveraging it for inward links to Incomemax.com which use the link text I define. Hopefully, the new inward links plus the on-page RSS feed and the increased spider visits because of the revisit change and the meta description change will all add up to more traffic for Incomemax!

So… phew! How was your day?

In response to my promotion of ArticleUnderground, Bill asks…

“I’m a long-term subscriber of yours, also one of Michael’s too. I’ve seen a lot come and go and I am finally starting to get interested now. What worries me about AU is, what about the duplicate content problems you’re going to come up against? You’ll be publishing the same articles as other people, republishing bits of those same articles again in the blogs as most likely will other people; how are Google going to rank any of these without penalising them for dupe content?”

My answer…

The research I’ve done seems to indicate that very few people actually use the things they buy. Mike limits the sets of articles to 350 members, so if only 20% of people use the articles (a generous assumption, I’d say it’s more like 10%), then only 70 (35?) people will have that article on their sites.

Just add a personalized intro, a comment in the middle and a line at the end of the article and I wouldn’t expect any dupe content problems. If you want to use a few original sentences to do the blog promotions, that may be a good idea.

I think the fear of dupe content is out of proportion to the facts. For instance, someone issues a news release and it’s picked up by hundreds of sites. Are they all blacklisted for dupe content? I don’t think so.

Also, Andy Williams (ezSEO) gave this example…

“One of my articles was published on my own site.  Google indexed the article, and my site was the only place with that article.  Searching for the title, I was the only site listed in Google.  I then submitted that article to  ezinearticles.com.  I waited for Google to find it, and then searched for my title again.  Guess what? Ezinearticles.com was listed as #1 and my site as #2. Even though Google knew the article originated from my site and therefore ezinearticles had “copied” it.  Google still ranked the ezinearticles duplicate ahead of mine.  If there is a duplicate content filter then it certainly did not apply to ezinearticles in this instance”. (page 126 of his Fat Affiliates ebook, available for free from here)

Also, Andy has 13,000 instances of one article distributed across the net and indexed by Google. If there’s a dupe content filter, why does Google display 13,000 pages indexed for the same identical article? Are all those people using it being penalized? I doubt it.

So, firstly, I don’t think many people will be using the same articles as you if you get the ArticleUnderground bundles and secondly I’m skeptical about the overblown fears of duplicate content filters.

Have you ever been given something important, but your brain hasn’t let you see the true potential? You put the thing aside and then, months later you come back to it and slap your forehead saying, “Oh My! Why didn’t I realize how important this was months ago?”

Well, I had one of those moments… in fact lots… over the last 24 hours. I got an email reminder from Mike Liebner who runs ArticleUnderground which was recommended to me by Michael Cambell. Because of my friendship with Michael, I took a look a few months ago and didn’t really see the potential. Well, yesterday I went back and, wait for it, actually watched the help tutorials and case study movies.

So, having started watching the movies, I couldn’t stop. It was like Mike was slapping me through my monitor saying, “you see the value in this now? C’mon! It’s not that hard to see this is amazing!”

I have to agree. I kept watching movie after movie. I sat and watched them for two or three hours. Now I “get it”.

Article Underground is a monthly members site where the members get 400 articles per month (there’s a maximum 350 members per set of 400 articles/month). That is a MASSIVE amount of articles. They are all quality articles written around top paying keywords that have been painstakingly sifted out from tens of thousands of keywords people are searching for. The articles are written by professional ghostwriters… they read well, they scan well, they look great. All you have to do is put a few of these articles on your sites and they’ll get traffic which you can monetize via Adsense, affiliate links, pay per lead or direct product sales… the monetization is up to you.

BUT… here’s the “slam dunk”. Mike has TWENTY TWO different blogs that you can announce your article pages on. You, as a member, just log in and make a post. It can be as simple as taking a snippet from the article and saying, “click here for the full article” and link the quote to your webpage. These blogs are pagerank 4/5/6! They get spidered all the time… so you get links into your article page and have it visited really quickly… bingo, it should be in the search engines in almost no time.

The articles AND the blogs makes this a really smart system. It’s encouraged me to start building my own web content sites. I’m sure, with Mike’s resources and my own little extra trick, I’ll be cashing big checks in the near future.

If you want to know my “little trick” (which is really my “start to finish” system for building and promoting quality websites and ways to monetize them) sign up for Mike’s ArticleUnderground and I’ll send you a movie going through my step by step process. I haven’t made it yet, so don’t expect instant delivery, but I have finally distilled the process into something easily understood and if you join ArticleUnderground you’ll be one of the first to know my personal system!)