Internet Marketing Strategies and Marketing Tips by Neil Shearing

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.