One of the things that you will need to do when performing keyword research on Google is to get accurate information for what it is that you’re doing. If you’re an article marketer (or ‘bum’ marketer) then this is especially important: if you’re targeting a keyword you need to know exactly how many hits there are in Google for any given keyword. If it’s a low number you will stand a good chance of being ranked fairly highly, and this is important if you’re submitting articles and other content to article directories.

Most people just do what’s called a ‘quoted keyword search‘ for their phrase. This involves simply writing out their keyword into the Google search engine surrounded by double quotation marks. This will tell Google to only come up with the sites that have that exact phrase in their index. Now we know how important this is to search engines, they rank things a lot higher when they get an exact match. continue »

SEO… the three little letters that strike terror into some, and make others talk for hours and hours about how they’ve managed to achieve a PageRank of four (!!) with just 4,000 backlinks! And of course the latest tricks that Google is up to (since they’re the only search engine that really matters).

SEO appears scary!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. You may have heard of the phrase before. It’s usually lumped in among various free forms of traffic gathering. It’s the Daddy, the Gold Standard of free traffic. Play your SEO cards right and you could get endless free traffic… play it wrong and you could be Google Slapped. Ouch.

OK Mark, What is it actually?

SEO is basically a number of techniques you use in order to improve your rank in the search engines. Your ‘rank’ is the position that you appear in (in the search results) when someone searches for something. If, for example I was promoting a website on how to bake delicious chocolate cakes, I might want my website to appear in the top few results and I’d use some Search Engine Optimization techniques in order to achieve that. continue »

It can only make sense that the first post on my new site, Mark’s Affiliate Marketing answers the question, just what is affiliate marketing? It’s banged about the internet, literally, all over the place. But everyone has a different opinion, it’s often confused with internet marketing (there is a difference) and then of course it’s all wrapped up in the slightly scary world of making money on the internet.

So what is it?

Let’s use a real world metaphor to understand what affiliate marketing is.

Let’s imagine for a moment that I am a rich Chinese businessman and I want to sell my latest product to America. Let’s imagine that it’s, oh I don’t know, a wind up budgie.

I know, it's it's not a wind up budgie. Just pretend that it is!

I know that this wind up budgie could be the hottest toy this Christmas… but there is a problem. I don’t have any stores in America! How on earth am I going to sell my product to the people who are going to be buying it.

So I pick up the phone and talk to Wall Mart. I talk to Toys ‘R Us. I talk to many many different stores, brick and mortar stores as well as online ones like Amazon and ask them if they would stock my wind up budgie for me. I meet with a few executives, I show them the toy and any sales projections I have come up with and just like that, the hands are shaken and my toy is ready to go on the shelves directly to the customer. continue »