Many people attack blogs open for comments like flies to… all for a link shared with hundreds of others on a page that will disappear from the index soon as it inevitably trips a filter.  Time could be better spent killing a flock of birds with one stone.

If you like the prospect of the easy links that comes with blog commenting then take your time and do it right.  The rewards will blow you away. The first thing you should do is forget about all of the irrelevant blogs you may have been previously attacking.  Focus purely on your niche.

Your goal should be to find popular blog posts that your target audience will be reading and start a conversation.  Use them as a perfect chance to share your knowledge of a subject and impress or intrigue fellow commentators and visitors.  People do checkout the web sites of a blog commentator if they provide something of value to the conversation.

IF you don’t agree with what a blogger has to say about a subject then get in there and tell them what your opinion is.  Back it up with the correct answer and your reputation in the niche will climb and people will start recognising who you are.

Take note of the blogs that give you the best response and become a regular contributor – in the comments.  If the blog has a regular reader-base then they will start to really pick up on your name and start to become a regular visitor of your site too, or if you don’t run a blog, they will check out your site and hopefully sign up to your email list or buy a product.

This stream of referral traffic is what sets quality blog commenting apart from the mass Scrapebox and Xrumer spam which has clouded the view for many.  Traditional blog commenting will still help your SEO and backlink build efforts.  I’d argue that it actually helps you more.

The problem with a spammed comment is that it is highly unlikely to get past moderation on a decent blog, a decent blog that will have high PageRank and the longevity to make that PR stick.  They also won’t be surrounded with a ‘bad neighbourhood’ of pharma spam and gambling backlinks.  You can usually still get away with anchor text in your username, but you will definitely be more likely to sneak in a hyperlink in your blog comment when you have a real reason for putting it there.

If you aren’t sure about the amount of referral traffic you’ll get from your comments you can still take the time to focus primarily on dofollow blogs.  The good dofollow blogs are always moderated so your extra effort will reward you.

Now there are a few different ways to find quality blogs to post on.  The easiest is by setting up Google Alerts for your niche and configuring it for Blog results only.  This will give you a stream of daily sites and articles you can comment on.  (If you need a hand setting up a Google Alert then just yell out.)

The beauty about focusing on new posts is that:

1.       it is where your audience will be; they aren’t going to be hanging around posts from 6 months ago.

2.       The conversation is going to be active and current so the blogger will be more likely to accept comments on the post.

3.       The post won’t show any PR so it won’t be in the sights of the spammers.  This doesn’t mean it is worthless though – PRwise.  It just means that you don’t know what the actual PR is yet. (The PR you see in the various tools is only updated every 6 months of so.)

Some other benefits of following new posts is that the same story is often covered on a range of blogs.  Share your thoughts with as many of them as you can and note down the ones that send you a lot of traffic.  (Use Google Analytics or similar to check referrer statistics.)  You can keep an eye out for new posts on the blog then – just subscribe to their RSS feed.

Another way to make the most of your blog commenting on new stories is by taking your opinion and the opinion of others that you just found and create your own article about the story.  This can really pay off with a quick boost of organic traffic.

Other places to look for breaking stories open to comment is aggregator sites such as iCurrent.com.  I’ll go into more detail about iCurrent and similar services in a future post but it basically allows you to make a custom feed of breaking stories based on niches and keywords.  It is very cool!

Hopefully this little article has helped you to realise the full potential of quality blog comments & gives you something to add to your backlink and traffic generation arsenal

Today I am going to try and make sure you don’t make the same mistake I made which left easy money on the table – that could have been fixed overnight…

After making a few small changes to my Google AdSense Ad Units I was able to double my click through rate (CTR) for a consistent and fast improvement in income.

One of first things you are taught when creating a squeeze page or sales letter is to always test different versions of copy and formatting until you get a conversion rate you are proud of.  What I, like many, didn’t realize was that this should be applied to all forms of direct response marketing – AdSense included.

Just like how every market reacts differently to sales copy, people react differently to online advertising.  Using a template that provided a high CTR on your last site won’t necessarily produce the same results on the next.  It is crucial that you realise that there is no single best AdSense layout or theme that will work for every type of site or every market.

How to Optimise Your AdSense Layout

So how do you find the most optimised AdSense layout for your current site?  Easy!  Test it just like you would a squeeze page.

Many people get a bit anxious when it comes to performing testing on a web site but there is a way to achieve it without relying on installing complicated scripting. When testing, it is important to compare results against similar sets of data. Often people make a judgment on the effect of a change after just 1 or 2 days.  These 1 or 2 days might be different to other days though and this can skew the results.  A test on a weekend will also produce inconsistent results as the traffic on the weekend is different to the rest of the week.  It is less frequent and is usually made up of more casual surfers.  Dismissing a test on a Saturday because it produced fewer results than Friday may be misleading.

(You also have to be aware of holidays and other world or local events that may affect the traffic to your page.)

I find that across an entire week the traffic levels sit on average and the spikes cancel out any troughs.  1 week on most sites gets enough traffic and clicks to make an informed decision on the results of the test.

Note: testing a site that has low traffic may produce inconsistent results so I recommend getting at least 50-100 unique visitors to your site before doing significant testing.  A quick way to tell is if your CTR is consistent across the course of a week.

How to Test AdSense Layouts

The ideal way to test a page is to do an A-B split test.  This involves randomly sending a user to either version A of a page or version B.  Across a week the number of views of A and B will be approximately 50%.

For testing AdSense A-B testing can be difficult and time consuming to setup.  There is another approach though that will still produce accurate results…

Run an AdSense layout for an entire 7 days in format A and then another 7 days in format B.  After the 2 weeks is up compare the results and note the winner…pretty simple huh?  Just make sure you start and end on the same day each week and your traffic will be consistent enough to make the right decision.  At the end of each week make sure you document the number of impressions, click through rate, average cost per click and eCPM.

You can then repeat the process for a 3^rd, 4^th, n^th week continually trying to beat the best performer.   You will get an idea of what does and doesn’t work each time you make a drop or rise.  Once you start failing to beat the best performer you can set it up as your permanent AdSense layout for that site.  It isn’t unusual to double your CTR after just a few runs of testing.

What Layouts and Formats to Try

When you make your changes don’t be afraid to try drastic changes.  Just make sure you document the current format before you replace it – you can always go back then.

It is a common belief amongst marketers using AdSense that blended ads work best.  This isn’t always the case.  If you have ever tried Google AdWords on the Content Network you would know that image ads often get the highest CTR.  Image ads when done right can really pop out of the screen and make the user at least look at them…

Use this to your advantage and try it out on your AdSense site too.  What works for the advertiser will work for the publisher.  Image ads may have a lower cost per click than text ads but the increased CTR should make up for this.  When comparing a change, especially involving image ads, make sure you look at the eCPM as this will take into account the higher CTR and the lower CPC.

One of the biggest boosts I had to my AdWords Image campaigns was when I changed the images over to blue text with a red border around the ad unit.  You don’t have control over the image ads on your AdSense sites but this effect can be applied to text ad units too and is well worth a try.  Set the title to blue, everything else to black, and add a red border. This works because people associate blue underlined text with hyperlinks.  I have had great success with this format on some of my sites, but not all.

If you are still using the default ad unit then give blending a try.  Change the font type and size to the same as your main content and set the title colour to the same as your links; the rest of the text will be the same colour as your content; there will be no border.

Positioning can also change drastically between sites.  Some markets respond well to the large rectangle in the top left before any content; others are more interested in reading what you have to say so you need to capture their attention elsewhere.

To capture this attention put the ads inside the content.  That same rectangle placed one paragraph into the content can have an instant effect.

Read up on some of the usability sites to get an idea of how people are interacting with different styles of sites.  This article from Jakob Nielsen on Scrolling and Attention made me try adding an ad unit to the end of my content.  People are looking for the next place to go after reading an article so by getting an ad unit in their face at this time gives those options.  Remove any other useful links around the footer to improve it even further.

Sometimes removing a unit can also have a boost on your CTR.  Too many ads might be causing ad blindness on your site so by relocating or removing a skyscraper ad unit in the sidebar might keep them guessing.

Don’t be Afraid to Try

Optimising your AdSense layout has to be one of the easiest and quickest ways to boost your income so don’t be afraid to give it a go.  If you do it this way you don’t even have to touch any code – just make the changes in your AdSense account.

If you make sure you document everything carefully, the only risk is having a week of less than average income; just change it back after the 7 days if the results don’t improve.  I encourage you not to panic after one try though as the next change might be the big one…

It would be great to hear if you do give it a go and get some positive (or even negative) results.

There is no right or wrong answer but I do have my own preference that I think uses the best of both worlds…

Each type of site has its own benefits; a mini-site has a clear goal and can make use of exact domain name matches for very fast results – 1 page in a week!

The problem is that they are often created with no scope in mind.  The exact match domain name often makes branding difficult and the pages, as informative as they may be, aren’t something that would make a user want to return or tell their friends about it.  They still require maintenance to keep them ranking on the first page of the SERPs and tracking the progress.

A large authority site on the other hand can make ranking new pages easy and these new pages can be added without upsetting the flow of the site.  The authority site can build up an online presence and become a true brand.   Different monetisation methods can be used depending on the page and keyword.  You can create powerful business opportunities with custom advertising and joint ventures that wouldn’t become available from a 5 page site about 4 slice toasters or yoga mates.

If you plan your large site right you can have a web site that is a great user experience that will have them returning for more after that initial Google search.  This opens up the opportunity of people in your niche talking about your site on their blogs, Twitter, Facebook accounts etc.  This free exposure is priceless…backlinks will flood in if your site is a resource of useful information!

A large site does take work and the results aren’t as fast as a mini-site (with exact match domain).  This puts a lot of people off.  With the right planning though a large authority site will produce faster results from new content over a mini-site as Google will begin to index content almost instantly.

Mini-sites do have a place.  I like to use mini-sites as a way to fund my larger online projects and experiment with my SEO techniques.  Rather than creating an army of 100+ sites that takes all day to track and manage, create a handful at a time and use the boost in income to fund the expansion of a few larger sites that have the potential to become something great online.

The income from the mini sites makes creating the larger sites easier as there is no panic to generate fast results.  You can plan properly and execute carefully without the fear of not having money coming through the door.

If you want to try a new backlinking method or site structure or some other secret SEO technique it is best to try it on mini-sites before risking a large site with history.  The results won’t be as skewed and if it backfires you won’t lose as much work.  It is easier to recreate a mini-site than a large authority site.

Once the large site is up and running and creating a nice income itself, you can cull back some of your mini-sites by flipping them for a lump sum bonus.  Your time can now focus purely on expanding the larger site or creating a new one.  Time won’t be wasted building hundreds of backlinks to hundreds of domains for small returns and trying to follow the ups and downs many keywords face – across many domains.

After 6 months of your large site being online you should start to get massive increases in results as Google learns to trust your domain.  It will be at a stage where you get quicker results be creating a new article on the large site rather than making a new exact match domain from scratch.  This is due to the authority, trust and internal link juice flowing through your site – things wasted on a mini-site.
If you are considering taking over the web with a swarm of mini-sites, take the time to consider if there is a more efficient way to spend your time.  Diversification is great and highly recommended but instead of spreading the work over 100 domains consider a handful of large authority sites instead.

Think of each of your sites as a small business rather than a way to get a few AdSense clicks or Amazon sales here or there.

Many people have tasted some sort of success but struggle to move from micro niche sites making only dollars a day to a piece of virtual real estate that you can build a real business around.  They get caught up with a process without seeing the bigger picture.

I am currently assisting a Warrior who is passionate about his niche but is struggling to get solid results.  We thought that it would be beneficial to other new internet marketer’s if we shared what we were discussing and learning to hopefully help them get a foot in the door as well.

As a marketer, I make a great engineer.  I love numbers and stats but you have to forgive my poor writing and communication skills.  If something doesn’t make sense then just hit me up and I’ll try and reword it into English!

So you want to create a new website to monetise but don’t know where to start?

Unlike many, I don’t start off with a monetisation method in mind and go looking for sites to target.  Limiting yourself to a set monetising method already cuts your potential markets and keywords to only a small slither of what is really available.  Getting in your head from the start that you are going to make nothing but an AdSense site means that you will miss all of the products on Amazon and EBay; there might be CPA offers available that are perfect for certain keywords in a niche or high paying Click Bank products.  Your content is also limited.

Say you make a site about weight lifting, if you were to monetise solely by AdSense then you can target certain weight lifting products but the ads being presented are going to be about the niche in general, usually not about the product.  A user after reviews or wants to know where to buy Mega-x hyper-viper 5000 weight benches will not be as likely to click on a new protein powder than on a link to Amazon that gives them more information about where they can buy the Mega-x HV5000.

If you are getting 100 people a day viewing that page then your sales copy should be good enough to sell a weight bench every day.  That will be worth more than the 5 to 10 AdSense clicks.

Another problem with limiting yourself to AdSense is the markets that have a generally low CPC.  Many people who have followed the AdSense manuals are encouraged to skip those words.  Instead of skipping the word find another way to capitalise on it.  There might be a high converting Amazon product that will fit right in.  Maybe you can capture the users’ email address and send them a PLR product or your own product in return.  Sell them related products or services down the track.

If you are making a site for Amazon products don’t ignore the related keywords that are asking for information about the niche.  Your site might be about the Mega-x HV5000 mentioned earlier but while researching you find that someone is looking for Mega-x HV5000 exercises.  They obviously already own the product but might be interested in AdSense ads or joining another mailing list about those exercises.  Create your page for that term targeted for those other methods.

Finding Your Niche Market

The amount of markets available is practically limitless.  Nearly everyone can be profitable in one way or another.  Have a look around the house; read the newspaper; watch TV.  If you don’t have a passion in anything in particular than just write down anything and everything you can think of.  If you do have hobbies and interest in some topics, write them down at the top of your list.

Do not get your mind set on a niche until you know you can get traffic to it.   You have to learn to let go of something that will never work.  If you really want to make a site about the Mega-x HV5000 but the competition is too tough or the search volume is too low and it limits your ability to expand in the future, forget about it.  Move onto the next potential as quick as possible.  It will take a while but once you find a site with truly easy competition you will keep looking for weaknesses in keywords and markets that you shouldn’t be worrying about.

The key to a successful website is quality traffic.  Your niche must have the potential to get this traffic and it is the first step in qualifying your niche.  I won’t enter a market unless I know it can get 1000 unique visitors per day.  This traffic doesn’t have to come straight away as the site launches.  It doesn’t have to come from 1 keyword but if a site I do launch does have success then I want to know that I can improve on it with little extra work. It will give you room to expand.

Just to recap -

• Be open to various monetisation methods.
• Do not focus on a niche if it isn’t working or going to work – know when to walk away.
• Create a list of markets and niches that you can think of.  Prioritise with what you enjoy or know about.
• Keep in mind you want a large potential of traffic – say 1000UV/day.

Let’s Get Some Keywords

Once you have your list of niche ideas it is time to start moving through the list to generate potential keywords.  The tool you use for keyword research really doesn’t matter.  They all just tie into Google’s database so the results will always be similar.  I like to use Market Samurai at the moment because I make wide use of the domain search feature.  The trial version is enough to get your going and the keyword research feature is always free. It has also integrated Domain Samurai so searching for available domains is also easy.

Create a new project for your research and enter in your first niche as the keyword.  Move over to keyword research and from the base niche keyword check Google Synonym Tool, Include Additional, and Google Search Keywords. Generate your keywords.

This first run will be used to find various micro niches inside your niche.  It will also help you find what the real world uses to find the market.  Sometimes what you call an item or service is different to a large percentage of people.  This is particularly true across different Countries.

Click on Analyse Keywords to be taken to the Keyword screen.  This is what Google thinks is relevant to your market.  Keep the Match Type set to Broad – we aren’t looking for keywords yet, just starting points, seed keywords I guess the term is.

Go through your list and add any good looking seed words to new tabs.  The very top of your list will be some very broad terms that you will learn over time not to produce any decent exact keywords from.  Look at the 2 and 3 word combos with a broad search of 2000+.  These seed words will be used to create more similar keywords so don’t waste your time by doubling up.  “Red Widget” will produce the same results as “Widget Red”.  It will usually get the highly searched keywords that the seed “red widget reviews” would produce so there is no point in seeding “red widget reviews”.

You want seed words that contain unique combinations.

You must use some common sense that can’t be taught but the next steps will help you master this first step.  Experience really does help and once you have tried a few times you will understand.  Always keep the process in your mind the next time you do something.

If your list of seed words is small or the search volume is low then skip that niche and move onto the next one.  No point wasting more time on it when there are plenty more to choose from!

Once you have gone through and tabbed out all of the seed words you can switch the match type over to Exact.  Select the filter under Total Searches to 78.  This will give you a list of all words that gets searched 2400/month for your main niche keyword.  I wouldn’t go any lower than that.  There are so many easy keywords available that you will kick yourself down the track wasting your time on them.

Save the list of filtered results to a text file for later use.  This text file will contain all potential keywords for your niche.  Once save, remove the keyword from Domain/Market Samurai and move onto the first seed word one that you created a tab for.

With the seed selected do keyword analysis on the word but this time change the “Include Additional Results” to “Ignore Additional Results”. It is unlikely the additional keywords will be any different to the ones you had earlier so it will just clutter the results.

Generate your fresh set of keywords and move onto analysing them, i.e. change the match type to exact match and set the total results filter to 78.  Save the remaining keywords back to your master list.

Repeat the process for all of the seed words you got out of the initial analysis.  Your potential keywords list should have quite a few results in it now and each one should get you at least a bankable amount of traffic.

Are the Keywords Worth Pursuing? – Competition Analysis

This is probably the area where most people fail when researching a potential niche and/or keywords.  The goal for a marketer who relies on organic traffic is to get into the #1 spot on Google for their targeted keyword.  The next best result is landing somewhere on the first page.  This is achievable for most keywords after an appropriate amount of work is put in but for beginners who haven’t tasted success it is best to aim for the words that are very easy to rank well for.

Firstly, the number of pages with the words in the title, URL, description, or contain the phrase etc are not your competition.  They can give you a guide to what’s out there but it gives no indication of the difficulty to rank well for a keyword.

A page will rank well for a keyword based first on its relevance and secondly on its trust and authority.  Relevancy can be achieved by anyone, trust and authority cannot.

The basic way a modern search engine works is that when a search is initiated it creates a pool of results that are relevant to a term and then re-sorts those results based on its trust.  The final result is what the user sees.

PageRank (PR) is a representation of a page’s trust for the Google search engine.  PageRank is generated through backlinks to the page (BLP).  On-site SEO as well as the type of backlink creates the relevancy (I won’t get into an argument at the moment about anchor text or content creating this relevance).

Our competition is everyone above the position we want to achieve – the top 10 of Google results.

Know that on-site SEO factors can be achieved very easily so not a deciding factor.

Knowing that PR and BLP are key factors to a well ranked page, we now look for sites where the PR and BLP are low.  There are several tools that will do this – Market Samurai (paid with a free trial), or SEO Quake Firefox Plug-in (free but a little more fiddly).

With your list of potential keywords that you created earlier, move through each one in your software of choice and start looking at the top 10 results.  Focus on nothing but the PageRank and Backlinks to the Page.

You don’t have to do this but I add the data to an Excel spread sheet for each keyword in my list. Each row is a new keyword.  The first column is for the keyword; the next 10 are for the PR to the page of the top 10 results; the next 10 are the BLP to the top 10.  I then have a column for the average PR and the average BLP.  I create conditional formatting to highlight the average PR cell (green) for any keyword with an average top 10 PR of less than 2.  I do the same for keywords with an average BLP of less than 20.

I sort the data from lowest BLP to highest.  If I have a bunch of keywords highlighted green then I know I am on a winner.  Each of those keywords will be easy to dominate with little external backlinking.  Make sure that the total traffic from your group of filtered keywords is enough to create a site out of (I am looking for 1000 uniques/day).

Here are a couple of screen shots from Market Samurai of keywords that I rank #1 for.  It will give you an idea of what an easy keyword really looks like.

These filtered keywords will be the starting point of your new niche.  If the traffic isn’t there due to excessive competition then once again move onto a new one.  If the traffic is there, don’t discard the keywords that failed the competition filter.  These words may still be achievable but just not ideal to get the ball rolling.  As backlinks, age and authority increases with time these other words can start to come into play.  Using a high broad match as the starting points for your seed words will also give you room to move and the potential for a lot of long tail phrases.

Before you commit on using the niche go through each keyword phrase and start creating a mental picture of the type of site you are going to create.  Think of a way to monetise each phrase to try and get the ball rolling.  Think of long term goals too.  The keywords may make you lean towards something other than an affiliate or either a PPC type site.

I also recommend that you repeat the entire process for as many niches in your original list of ideas before proceeding.  It won’t be until you have seen the number of searches and competition levels of numerous keywords and markets before you get a real feel of what an easy niche really is.

Keep your mind open and realise that you now at least have a group of keywords with a lot of traffic potential to build your first niche site from.

There are many plugins available to display Google Adsense on a WordPress blog but the one I choose to use is Simple Adsense Insertion (SAI). To use this plugin you simply insert your Adsense campaign code into one of the SAI campaigns and then use the provided tags ( or “echo show_ad_camp_1();”) to position them throughout your site.

To display an ad unit under the title of each post you will need to edit your themes template:

1.  Go to you WordPress Admin page.
2.  Download and install Simple Adsense Insertion using the built in plugin browser.

Simple Adsense Insertion Settings

3.  Go to the plugin settings for Simple Adsense Insertion and add in your Google Adsense code and copy down the tag for your campaign “echo show_ad_camp_1();” for example.

Theme Template Editor

4.  You now need to modify the templates to insert your campaign onto your site. Browse to “Appearance > Editor”

Theme Template List

5.  On the right hand side of the page you need to select the Main Index Template (index.php).  This is the main file for your public site so be careful not to modify the wrong thing.  If you are unsure on how to backup the file off an FTP then I recommend copying all of the text from the text-area into notepad and saving it for safe keeping.  If things go wrong you can always copy the text back.

6. The next step will vary slightly depending on the theme that you use and the way it outputs the posts.  You need to browse through the index.php file and find where the content of a post is sent to the browser.  The easiest to find this is use your browsers find function and look for “the_content(“.   This should be positioned in between a <div> tag with an id of something like “content”, “entry”, or “story”.  This is all theme dependant.

To display your ad unit before the post’s content  simply add “<?php echo show_ad_camp_1(); ?>” before “the_content(” but after the opening <div id=”content”>.
7.  You can now save the changes to the file and have a look at the result on your home page.  There should be a Google Ad Unit displayed before the content of each post now.

One of the problems of adding the ad unit to each post is that Google only lets you display three units per page.  If you look at posts after the top 3 you will either have a large chunk of space or a non paying ad in its place, depending on your Google AdSense settings.

To get around this problem a counter can be added to the index.php inside the loop that makes the posts.  When this counter is less than 4 display a Google Ad, when it is equal or greater display nothing (without the large blank space) or display an ad from another affiliate.

Adding a counter is quite simple.  Firstly find the start of the loop used to display posts.  For most themes it will look something like

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Directly above  this line add the following code so it looks like this:

<?php $totalPosts = 0; ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

To increment the totalPosts  counter add the following code directly under the opening of the while loop:

<?php $totalPosts = 0; ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php $totalPosts++; ?>

Now go down to where you added “<?php echo show_ad_camp_1();  ?>“.  Change this to:

<?php
     if( $totalPosts <= 3 )
     {
          echo show_ad_camp_1();
     }
     else
     {
          //add other ad campaigns here
     }
?>

If you have other ads to display that use php code then simply place that code inside the else statement {}.

Save these changes and go and look at your home page now.  It will no longer have blank spots or ugly unwanted ads on post four and after.