Here’s a cool Amazon Review Theme I think you’ll like.  It’s clean and helps you to increase your CTR and conversions.  The guy that actually had it done is seriously into Amazon and has made quite a bit of money using their affiliate program.  You can take a look at the video below and get an overall understanding of what this theme can do to help your Amazon affiliate efforts.

I have rights to sell this theme and give the bonuses as well.  Everything is top quality which is why I decided to by rights to the theme.  So if you have any problems with buying, using or questions about Amazon, just post a comment on this post or contact me privately through my contact form on this site.

 Check it out here!

Here’s a video to a call I was on. It is worth watching if you are curious as to what is going on with link networks and the future of SEO. It’s a long video, but worth the watch as it is from a private coaching program and so they add a lot of content to these. If you want to know more about the coaching program, just click here .

JVZoo is working pretty hard to become the affiliate network of choice for those of you looking to sell your product on Warrior Forum as a WSO. This new news is really an excellent idea. And I am sure there will be a lot of people happy to see it is being implemented.

In case you don’t know any of the back end stuff that goes on on WF when launching a product as a WSO, often times people will launch only to find either the WF crashes and is unavailable. What this means is your new product launch now can’t be accessed and no one can buy your product.

NOT good news! Especially if you just did a mail to your list and you have a bunch of people going there to buy your product.

So what JVZoo has done is created a backup plan. If the WF goes down, another sales page on JVZoo’s servers is launched so that you never loose a sale. And if some affiliate just mailed for you, they are also able to still get heir commissions rather than a bunch of frustrated buyers screaming at them and making their life miserable. Nice!

Here is the email I received from them…

JVZoo has just added a new feature for those of you that sell on the Warrior Forum.

As we all know, the Warrior Forum has a bad habit of going down without notice. Many of us have launched a WSO or mailed for another seller’s WSO, only to find that the Warrior Forum was down. How many thousands of clicks were lost? It can be devastating!

Now, you have a backup plan! JVZoo is now allowing WSO sellers to add a backup sales page URL that automatically switches to your default sales page if the Warrior Forum goes down.

YOU WILL NEVER MISS CLICKS AGAIN DUE TO WARRIOR FORUM GOING DOWN!

JVZoo’s new system checks to see if the Warrior Forum is up and running every few seconds. If it is down, your backup URL kicks into gear. That means all of the affiliate links will now point to your backup!

Setup is super easy too! Simply copy your WSO thread and paste it into a new thread at http://www.jvzooforums.com/special-offers/. You can copy and paste using the WYSIWYG editor or copy and paste the source code (BBC Code) of your WSO thread using our Source Code editor. Either way works like a charm!

Once you make the post, a moderator will review and approve it. You will receive a private message in the JVZoo Forums alerting you that your post has been approved. Once it is approved, go to your post and copy the URL of your new post. Then, log in to JVZoo and edit your product’s settings. There is a new field labeled “WF Backup Sales Page URL”. Paste your backup URL there and click the save button.

That’s all there is to it!

So if you have a product and are thinking about using WF to launch it, you may want to use JVZoo rather than WSO Pro to launch it. I think this feature by itself is reason enough to go with JVZoo for all of your WSO product launches. Don’t you? Check them out here…http://clickmenow.info/JVZoo

So the big G finally decided to take out large blog networks. And even the infamous BMR has been hit hard enough to warrant them to close their doors for good? You can read the full story here.

As you know if you were a user, they required unique 150 word “snippet” posts. So even though they did things a bit differently than the other networks, in the end it didn’t matter.

Now I’d say BMR was pretty much the Rolls Royce of public link building networks. So if they are calling it quits, who else do you think is going to go down as well? Actually, most already have. Which is a shame. Because BMR worked. And well. But that is exactly why they were targeted. Here is what they had to say…

On a daily basis, we monitor our domain network to check metrics like page rank, indexed pages, etc. As with any link-building network, some de-indexing activity is expected and ours has been within a permissible range for the past two years. Unfortunately, this morning, our scripts and manual checks have determined that the overwhelming majority of our network has been de-indexed (by Google), as of March 19, 2012. In our wildest dreams, there’s no way we could have imagined this happening.

And just a quick tip, if you used BMR a lot to rank, it would really be best to remove all of the links you got from them. Why? Because Google will want to hit the users of BMR. After all, you are the ones that are breaking their TOS. And now every user of BMR is on a list that if Google chooses, may begin to look at each and decide if to slap you or worse, deindex you for breaking TOS. So I’d just get off.

BMR is really doing the right thing by giving refunds and giving you a way to get your sites off their network…

We will be processing refunds for unused outsource credits and subscription payments for the current month, pro-rated through March 19, 2012; however, it will take some time to process these refunds, so we ask for your patience and understanding as we work through this process.
We plan on adding a function that will allow you to download all of your live, pending and queued posts so that this content can be used elsewhere. Details will be forthcoming.
If you want to remove posts from our network immediately, please follow the steps outlined here:  http://buildmyrank.com/support/knowledgebase.php?article=56

So now what? You still need links, right? And now PR links are counting more then ever. Not less like some predicted. But how do we get them?

I still firmly believe in building your own smaller private high PR networks. But with all of the carnage going on, is that really a smart move? Absolutely!

But you need to be smart about it. Stealthy even. I’ll bet you will be hearing a lot more about guest blogging and paid per post systems. In fact, I advised a large network to change their business plan and go to a paid per post model selling “guest articles” with PR for specific niches rather than an open “free for all” model. This dramatically lowers a footprint. And is “legal” as far as Google is concerned.

If you’d like to know more about how to build your own high PR network and benefit from having great links pointed at your sites, check out HighPRBacon.com. The membership site is a step by step instructional site that clearly lays out how to buy high PR domains and not have them loose their PR the next day, how to set up the site, how to host, and even how to profit off of the network.

And the best part of HighPRBacon.com is that there is an interactive forum where you can ask questions when ever you get stuck or are looking to help or be helped by the community.

So in closing, high PR links are worth more than they ever were. If you need them for your site, then you are really going to need to think about how you plan to get them. Building your own high PR network may be the solution. Or maybe not. Let me know how you plan on getting your links in the comments below.

Can you really find expiring domains that are already ranking in the SERPs, know what keywords the domains are ranking for, buy them, set up a site and be making money ASAP? I know this sounds a bit “salesy”, but it is possible. Domain Espionage is a web based software program that go through sites like GoDaddy Auctions and others and searches for expiring domains you can bid on that are currently ranking for any number of keywords.

The program will tell you how many keywords the URL is ranking for, where it is being auctioned, exact searches, how old the domain is, CPC for AdSense and it even gives you the exact URL of the top 50 ranking keywords so you can see the titles and URLs of the ranking keywords. Plus a host of other useful information. And unlike most other software, all of the follow up research can be done without ever leaving DE. A serious time saver!

This program will even do backlink research for up to 1’000 of the sites backlinks giving you the URL of the backlink, PR, you name it. Everything you’d need to know to make a very well informed buying decision using DMOZ information and SEMRush.

If you want to start a site with links, rankings and traffic already included, this software is great. And right now, there is nothing else like it on the market. Just imagine how much cash you could make on Flippa. You find a domain that is already ranking, has traffic and buy the domain. Build a website and write some content using the old post titles so you continue to keep the links and the rankings, then flip it.

How long would it take to do the same thing with a new domain? And although the software costs $39 a month, if you just flipped one site with an aged domain and rankings, you should be able to make a few hundred dollars per flip easily, and most likely more. This software makes that so easy to do! There is even a full use 3 day trial you can get for $4.95. So you can be sure this is something for you.

Or you can just keep the domain and monetize it and continue to rank more keywords. The sky really is the limit here. And there is so much data given about each domain that I really can’t do this tool justice on this post.

Check out these screen shots to see what you can find…

This is a keyword laden URL that was selling at GoDaddy autions cheaply that was already ranking for a lot of different keywords.

Like I mentioned earlier in this post, there is a trial, so why not at least check it out.  I am 100% sure you will be impressed.  I sure was.  Here’s the link again, let me know what you think!

Believe it or not, too many post tags is really a bad thing when dealing with WordPress. Sometimes I see people with something like 30 tags for each of their posts. Not a good idea, especially if you have a lot of posts.

Why? Because Google give each site a quota on the amount of pages it will index for each site based on a bunch of criteria. And each time you tag a post and it is indexed, it counts as one indexed page. That means, if you have a page with 30 tags, you are taking away from your total 31 indexed pages. 30 for the tags and one for the article.

Now if you have a ten page site, this shouldn’t be a big deal. But if you blog often, that means your older stuff is most likely being taken out of the index. And too many tags can also slow down your site and if they are older tags that have been taken out of the indexes, they can be giving your visitors error messages as they are no longer connected to an indexed post.

So you should be managing your tags wisely. And if you want to speed up your site and do a little spring cleaning, you can delete old tags that are no longer needed. There is a great post on how to actually do this.

Uniformity is Key for Tag Topic Authority and Usability

Tags can help your website topic authority if you allow tags to be indexed and use them correctly. Tag uniformity is important so get into the habit of choosing from “most used tags”  rather than make redundant tags for the same topic. Tags are also case sensitive so make all your tags upper case or lower case and stick to it.

Let’s say for example that you write a post about foreclosures in North Carolina and tag your post “Foreclosures North Carolina.”  Down the road you write another post and tag it “North Carolina Foreclosures.“ Further down the road you write another post and tag it “foreclosures (lower case f) North Carolina.”

In the above example, three separate tag feed pages were created for the exact same topic and tag topic authority was diluted.  Not only that, when a visitor clicks on ”Foreclosures North Carolina“ within the tag cloud, they access only those posts tagged in the exact same way, even though there maybe other posts on the same topic, tagged in a slightly different way.

You should really read the rest of this as this is one of those topics that I think most people aren’t even aware of. I know I wasn’t until someone mentioned the “post tag cap” on a webinar and I started doing a little research to see if it was true. Yes, it is. And I also found that too many tags actually slows down your site as well. Not something I ever would have looked for as the culprit.

Here’s the whole article… http://www.getfoundnow.com/how-to-use-tags-for-wordpress-blog-seo.htm

Let me know if you have something to add to this in the comments below.  Or other things we all should be watching out for.

Everyone is cashing in on affiliate marketing, maybe even your mom! And why not? If you are working from home and you have created a website or blog that is actually getting traffic, whether it be a simple recipe site or site that heps others by giving helpful tips on getting the laundry done correctly, why wouldn’t you want to monetize your efforts? After all, if you want to really help your readers, then the best part about affiliate marketing is that you get to choose what ads your visitors see.

In this way you get to be the gatekeeper of your own little community. After all, if your visitors are looking to buy, they can either buy from you where you are leading them to useful and cost effective products that work, or you can let another maybe not so moralistic marketer push their offers on them. So in other words, you are actually helping your visitors by protecting them from the bad stuff by offering them the good stuff. And getting paid for your “protection” to boot. Sweet!

If you area work at home mom or dad, here is a nice starter top 10 list from Cas McCullough to get you thinking about affiliate marketing and what’s involved…

1. Choose businesses that are in alignment with your business and branding

If you try to promote products, events and services that are out of alignment with your branding or products, you will be unlikely to attract affiliate income. It may sound obvious but there are lots of websites out there with dubious advertising…

2. Ask how can this program help your niche market

Align yourself with other brands that can offer something valuable to your ideal customers and clients…

remember, if you have a site that talks about household chores like doing the dishes, laundry, keeping a great house, then don’t try to promote products like horse saddles or turtle food or some other product that has nothing to do with your potential market.

Rather, offer things like the best dish detergent, laundry soap, even the water filter you trust to clean the water you give to your children each day. The products must match the site. No exceptions.

3. Make a spreadsheet of your affiliate programs to keep track

Once you sign-up for a few programs, it can be really difficult to keep track of logins etc…

4. Follow your affiliate businesses

Follow your affiliate businesses on social media and have special inboxes set up on your email to keep track of new programs….

5. Ask how much you need to put into this for a return on investment?

Before promoting an affiliate event or product, ask yourself how much time you’ll need to spend in relation to the return on investment…

6. Look for programs that give you all the information, links, ads etc.

Some are great at doing this, some are not.

Affiliates that hold your hand through the process make it easy for you to promote their events and products….

7. Disclose your interest when you promote

You can simply state this on your website or put it into your post as a testimony. It’s really important to be up-front with your visitors, followers and customers….

This is also now the law. The easiest thing to do is create a Legal Disclaimer page and place a link to it on your footer. This way it isn’t intrusive to your visitors, but it is acceptable in legal terms and helps to cover you if any legal matters arise.

To get an automatically generated one, go here http://www.easyriver.com/free_disclaimer.htm and just enter the required information. Then add it to your site. If you are using WordPress, add it as a page with a link in the footer. That’s it. Easy!

8. Take guidance from pro-formas

Use your own words and speak from the heart but take guidance from pro-formas….

9. Be consistent and regular, but don’t over promote

When you do promote an event or product, be sure to promote it regularly at different times of the day and in different ways.

10. Commit to fully promoting the affiliate program

If you do things half-heartedly you’ll not reap the rewards. Use social media to get the word out as you would your own campaigns….

The best part of affiliate marketing is that once you set everything up, that’s it. The “work” is over. But it does take time an effort to find great products to promote, and get traffic to your site. It isn’t an over night fix. But if you already have the traffic, and you can find a great product to promote in your niche, then you might just wake up in the morning and find some extra cash in your account.

You can read the article in its entirety here… http://www.startupsmart.com.au/women-in-business/10-affiliate-marketing-tips-for-work-at-home-mums.html

Recently I received an email asking me if I wanted to sell my domain. I have gotten a few legit ones, so when he stated in his email that he already had a client offering 9k to buy StreetBacon.com for 9k, my interest was peaked.

No, I wouldn’t have sold it, even for 9k. This site is my baby. But I wanted to know who and why they wanted it. So I sent a reply to see if this was legit or not.

Now, I get SPAM and BS stuff all of the time. But this guy is a bit different as he is obviously a person, so he answers your emails and everything looks “real”. But again, it is a scam and all he is trying to do is get people to sign up on his site. Man I hate this sort of thing! So beware this guy and his site!

Here is the first email I received…

> From: john487357806@gmail.com
> Subject: interested to buy your domain.
> Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2012 17:16:13 -0800
>
>
> Hi
> We have a customer interested to buy your domain . If you are interested to sell it let me know your asking price
>
> Thanks
>
> John Sean

I sent a reply to see if he was a robot, spammer or a legit business. After a few days I received this…

Sorry for delayed, i lost your email in bulk folder.
my customer offer is $9000 for your domain
i want buy though www.ToSellDomains.com its secure for both

You just list domain on there, then make buy now price is $9000, send me your link so i can purchase domain on your aution
let me know asap,

So of course I checked out the site. If you notice, each domain is either selling for the 9k he told me someone wanted to buy my site for, or $300. Pretty big footprint dipshit! But whatever. Just wanted to let you all know what was happening.

I’d stay way clear of “John Sean” and www.ToSellDomains.com! Anyone else getting this?

Update:  I just checked the site and he is obviously changing it up a bit.  But if you look at the older domains on the older pages, you can see what I am talking about as far as all of them being the same price.

Are you using the “author” tag when publishing your content? If you’re not, you really should be. Why? Simple, using the author tag does a few things like building up a portfolio of content directly connected to you that in turn builds trust in your readership over time. In addition, the tag also makes it easier for people who feel you are a someone worth reading easier to find more articles written by you.

And it can really help you keep your content. I get scraped all of the time. Adding an author tag can let the search engines know that the scraped content is owned by you. Most scrapers do not take out meta data. So they end up publishing your content with your author tag. Nice!

Here’s how to use this. In any article you write on a given domain, include the rel=author attribute in a link back to your profile on the same domain. If I write a blog post on ChristopherSPenn.com, in that blog post I should link back to, say, my about page on ChristopherSPenn.com. It’s really that simple.

For example, I could put a byline on this blog post when writing it that says something like “By Christopher Penn“, and then link that up to my about page on my site. In the link, I’d add the rel=author attribute, like so…

Now I’ve attributed this post to me on my site, linking back to another page on my site. When the scrapers come by (and they inevitably do), they’ll pick up this post and reprint it word for word on some other site, but now there’s a mismatch. Rel=author on ChristopherSPenn.com points to my about page on ChristopherSPenn.com, but the same article on IScrapedYourJunkAintNothingYouCanDo.com will be linking off site – an indicator to Google that the scraper is not the real thing.

That’s not the only authorship change you should make, though. Google also included a rel=me attribute in their documentation to address authors who write on multiple sites. If you’re contributing in more than one place, Google is asking you to link your profile pages. For example, if I write regularly on someone else’s blog, I should put a link on my profile page on that blog to ChristopherSPenn.com and put a reciprocal link on my about page on ChristopherSPenn.com to the guest blog. This tells Google I’m the same author, and I suspect then shares the “AuthorRank” across both sites.

This is also another ‘social signal” that can help bring more people to your posts and sites which in turn give you stronger analytics. And if people are looking for your material as an author, they are, hopefully, actually reading the stuff. That means low bounce rates and more time spent on your sites. Again, better numbers for Google’s algorithm, better rankings. And then there is the “like” or “share” prospect as well.

Obviously if you are writing crap content, this isn’t going to help you at all. But if you are really writing great stuff, which you should be doing always, then this is a great way to turn a one time reader into a life long fan.

Bonus tip: use rel=me on links from your about page to your social networking profiles. It may be difficult to add the reciprocal link (I tried on LinkedIn and Twitter to no avail, Facebook I was able to from my page’s app, and Flickr allowed me), but at least you can signal to Google that those are your profiles on the major social sites. If the concept takes off, I suspect some of the social networks will start allowing you to add the attribute, or do it automatically.

To read more on this topic and get some information on a great plugin to automate this, check out this link and share this post with your friends on FaceBook and Twitter. And feel free to tell me what you think about the author tag in the comments below. Do you use it? Is it useful? What are some other great ways to exploit it?

http://www.christopherspenn.com/2011/06/how-to-use-relauthor-tags-for-seo/#.T2K0heKcGfg

Right now a lot of people are freaking out. Most high PR services are getting massacred and there is some major deindexing and PR losses on practically all larger networks right now. So it begs the question, are high PR services like Build My Rank, SEO Link Monster and others dead?

Well, I don’t think they are dead per say. But I do think the writing is on the wall. It seems that not only have people who have been using these networks finding huge drops in the SERPs for their keywords, it seem some feel the are also acquiring some sort of penalty because they have used the service. While I don’t think this is true, I could be wrong.

So what does all of this mean going forward? The keyword here is going forward. Not just today or tomorrow. We need to start thinking one year to five years down the line. Because it may also be a possibility that some of these sites are even loosing rankings because of using a particular network even a few years ago. So that means you may, in five years, get penalized for using the wrong networks today even if you have stopped using them.

Scary, right? I think so. So what can you do? From further research, it seems Google is putting more reliance on high PR backlinks now more than ever, and I don’t see this changing in the future. And why wouldn’t they? If you think about it, how else is Goggle ever going to be able to determine which backlink should be more valuable than another?

Google needs to have some way of rating backlink value. And they currently use PR (page rank). And I strongly believe they will continue to use PR for a long time to come. What other option do they have? Even if they change from PR to something else, it is still some kind of indicator that they can enter into their algorithm that can decipher the strength of a link. So there will always be a PR of some sort. A rating system that can tell the search engine which websites carry more weight/juice than another.

The biggest problem with all of this with the recent Panda 3.3 update is, networks that were selling high PR backlinks to loads of people have left huge footprints that Google is now systematically going after. So that means that if you created a backlink campaign from a high PR network provider, as their sites either loose PR or get indexed, your rankings are dropping in accordance to the new number of links you have. Or don’t have

So now that we understand the problem better, what is the solution?

The solution, as far as something that is long term, and by long term I am talking 3 years into the future, I think is rather than trying to use large networks to rank, you should be using much smaller networks. Networks of 10 to 50 sites and no bigger.

Why? Firstly, if the creator of the network set up everything the way I explain in HighPRBacon.com, they should never have a problem with a footprint. They should also have some of the major problems when dealing with a network figured out. Some of the factors that seem common with the new Panda update that are affecting the larger providers are things like…

• the network has a lot of high out bound links (OBLs) in relation to the content. I would guess this is the biggest factor. It just isn’t “natural”.
• the network has a backlink footprint too similar to each of its other networks on different servers, or even exactly the same basic sites, themes, plugins, set up, etc… on too many of their sites.
• network website backlinks are irrelevant to network website content and theme. This will be a growing issue in the future I predict.
• seo hosting companies are used for different ip addresses, but all coming from the same server or city.
• High PR sites that are basically one pagers that have a ton of OBLs and googly goop as content that obviously, in the real world, would never count as a website to begin with. You need a lot of pages indexed. The more, the better!So the first step is to NOT do these things. I know it should be obvious, but it is still worth mentioning. Next, think seriously about what constitutes a “real” site and what would happen to it as far as SEO. Meaning, do you think a normal site would receive 1000 forum profiles every month? I doubt it. But would it get a few high PR links from other “authority” sites? You bet! In the same niche is best, but not a must.

So that is what we need to be. An “authority” with a lot of link juice. Now I won’t go into too much detail on how to do that or how to get a lot of IP diversity while still looking natural. I already wrote about all of that in my membership site. But just think realistically. It isn’t such a big secret as just being common sense mixed with some creativity.

So, in closing, do I think high PR networks are dead? Nope. They’ll adapt and move on, or at least some of them will. Others like homepagebacklinks.com will close their doors forever. Do I think building your own high PR network that you can control and insulate yourself from any further algorithm changes make the best bet for most smaller marketers? Without a doubt!

But it takes work and some money. Just like anything else worth doing. If you are willing to invest in your future, I see no other viable long term solution available, which is why I created HighPRBacon.com in the first place.

Hope this answers a few questions. And as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of the ruckus going on out there at at the moment.!