While creating your first webinar sales presentation might seem like a daunting task – it’s actually not that bad, and there are simple, successful formulas that you can follow to create a high converting webinar.

Basically, a successful webinar presentation is broken down into a few key components, which I will break down and explain, and provide examples from my own webinar to help you guys:

1. Introduction & Social Proof

The first thing you need to do in a webinar presentation is actually introduce who you are. Take 2-3 minutes to explain who you are, and why your attendees should listen to you. The goal here is to build rapport, get people to like & trust you. (which obviously helps you later, when it’s time to pitch!)

Ex: I quickly give an introduction – my name, the company or entity I am representing, and why I’m credible (the businesses that I’ve run, the people that I’ve worked with, the results I’ve gotten, etc.) I usually add in some self-deprecating humor that people tell me I look like Jesse Eisenberg or Mark Wahlberg – though I prefer Mark Wahlberg.

2. Benefits – Get Them To Stick

Now that they know that you are smart, handsome, funny, and credible, (because your intro was so killer) it’s time to explain the benefits that your attendees are going to get from watching the webinar. You can either restate whatever was on your webinar sign up page/squeeze page here, or just restate it in different words. You also want to make sure that they not only are excited for the content they are about to receive, but that they have a reason to STICK TO THE END. That is very important as if your attendees leave before you can even pitch to them, then, well, you’re screwed.

Ex: I said something along the lines of “At the end of this webinar, I will show you exactly how I can help you, and how you can get 1 on 1 help from me to get your site ranked – which is a $1,000 value – yours free, ONLY for [friends of webinar host]

This created an open loop (you’ll find out something but only if you finish this presentation) and hinted that they were going to get a ton of value if they stayed until the end (1 on 1 help for free).

 3. Present The Problem & Identify an Enemy

Alright, now we get into the good stuff. This is where you really need to flex your copywriting and sales skills. You need to show them exactly what the problem is (that your product that you are eventually pitching to them will fix), and explain to them exactly what the IMPACT of that problem is – how exactly is this problem hurting them? You also, if it makes sense for your niche, want to present an enemy here – someone who you can place the blame on for causing this problem. The sad truth here is that usually it is people’s own fault for causing their own problems, however, presentations where you berate people on their faults don’t really sell well – so you need to find an enemy that you can place the blame on and tell your prospect “It’s not your fault.”

Ex. For my presentation, the problem is that SEO is overhyped and misrepresented by evil “Guru’s”  (the enemy) that are just trying to make a buck. (This is totally and 100% true, by the way!) The impact of the problem is that most people end up with websites that get 10 visitors a month, and make zero dollars.

4. Empathize and Future Pacing

Here’s where you really get to build up your rapport with your attendees. This is where you explain to them that they are not the only ones who have suffered from this problem, but you have as well (only if it’s true!).  In this section, you want to show them that you are just like them (or were just like them), until you found a solution (which you don’t mention yet) that has provided you with phenomenal results, that they can also achieve. You want to basically show them, through your success, and through painting a picture of their future success, what their life is going to be like with this problem SOLVED.

Ex. For my presentation, I talk about how when I first started, I had no idea what I was doing and my website got 0 traffic, and that I feel any struggling internet marketers pain. I then talk about how I found out the truth about SEO – that it’s easy, systematized, and outsourceable, AND profitable. I use a screenshot of one of my site’s traffic from Google – and show how each visitor that Google sends my site is worth $1.07 to me, and talk about how they can get similar results.

5. Content!

This is where you give the meat of your presentation. The real reason why your attendees signed up for your presentation was to learn whatever it is that you teased them about on the webinar sign up page – so it’s time to deliver the goods. Basically, you want this content to do a couple of things:

• Continue to demonstrate your credibility for the subject you are teaching
• Demonstrate your passion and that you’re a real, legitimate, trustworthy, awesome person
• Provide value, usually basic “What to do” content, but limiting the “How to do it” side of things. Do NOT skimp, though, if your content sucks you definitely won’t be able to sell. There’s a fine line between providing value and just providing filler content – so make sure that you are careful here.

Ex. Ours was our companies “Top 7 Linkbuilding Techniques” that we’ve used on our sites and clients to get them ranked. This was complementary content as the product we were selling is about On-Site SEO, and the whole point of the presentation is that if your On-Site SEO is not setup properly, then all the stuff that we JUST taught you becomes less effective. So the solution is to buy our product and learn On-Site SEO.

 6. Provide Your Solution

Now that you’ve presented your badass content, it’s time to start moving into the pitch. The solution to the problem that you had discussed before is, of course, your product. However, you don’t want to make that connection just yet – you want to present the solution as an individual entity, explain it, and then connect that entity to your product or service. At this point, you should put in a testimonial or two of someone who has used your solution and gotten great results from it.

Ex: Our solution to SEO traffic woes is On-Site SEO, and then we have three slides showing it’s value. The first slide is a screenshot of Michael’s traffic increase from our SEO tactics, the next is a testimonial from a successful customer, and the final slide is a screenshot of us outranking a well known “guru” for a competitive keyword.

 7. Present Your Product + Build It’s Value

This is where you introduce the product that will provide the solution you’ve been discussing, and you show present and explain each one of the products components, their value, and how they will benefit your attendees if they purchase the product. If you have a specific bonus for your attendees (if the webinar is being hosted by an affiliate, for example), this is where you would also present it and show it’s value. At the end of this product presentation, you want to add up all the value for them (just like in the infomercials!), show them how much it SHOULD cost, and then show them how much you’re going to charge for it if they order TODAY.

Ex: Our product had something like 10 components, so each component got it’s own slide and explanation. At the end, we had a slide with a list of all of the components, what each of their individual values were, and then what the total value of each component was. The following slide was the actual price. “You get $1,327 of real world value for just $67 if you purchase today.

8. Risk Reversal + Urgency

Whew! We’re finally at the end. The last step is showing your attendees what your guarantee is – we had a whole slide dedicated to this – and really demonstrate to them that you believe strongly in your product and you know they are going to love it, so you’re happy to provide a 30/60/90/lifetime moneyback guarantee. And if they are not satisfied with the product, they can get a refund in that timeframe with no questions asked.  Once you’ve gone through the guarantee, it’s time to put up your sales link,  and give some urgency for them to purchase your product right now.

Ex: We offered a free SEO report if prospects purchased in the next 10 minutes, and had a countdown clock in the powerpoint presentation that ran in the background while the 10 minutes ticked down. During the 10 minutes, we took Q&A. However, if you don’t want to do a regular Q&A – or plan on reusing the webinar as a sales tool, my biggest suggestion here would be to have the webinar moderator ask you Q&A questions that answer your average prospects biggest objections. The biggest objections are usually whether or not they can get a refund/the validity of your guarantee, how fast they will get their results, what happens if they don’t get results, is the solution easy, etc. 

And that’s it! That’s how we put together our webinar presentation and it’s worked out pretty well for us so far. One thing to note is that the first time we ran the webinar, we didn’t have a slide for our guarantee and it only converted at 11%. When we added in the guarantee slide, it doubled to 22%. Granted, I could have done a better job presenting the webinar the second time, however, I am firmly convinced that making your guarantee extremely clear to your prospects is HUGE for conversions.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments!

The post How To Sell With Webinars appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

The answer is “Yes,” of course you do. What I mean by “Google-Proofing” your website is simply protecting yourself from Google’s algorithm updates — making sure that you never lose any search engine traffic because of an algorithm update.

You are likely aware of Google’s most recent “Panda” update that hammered a lot of huge sites such as EzineArticles, Hubpages, and Mahalo, along with tons of smaller sites (including, unfortunately, one of my own). And I’m sure that at least a few readers of IncomeDiary had their sites hit as well.

The reason for this update was to filter out low quality content from Google’s search results. The reason for this is not to “screw the little guy” or ruin your affiliate earnings — it’s simply a way for Google to help provide it’s customers (meaning, searchers, NOT affiliates or advertisers) with a better search experience. And if they have a better search experience, they are much more likely to use Google again to search — and not defect to another search engine like Bing or Yahoo. And, ultimately, the goal is that the more that people use Google, the more people will click on Google’s ads, making the company more profit.

While this update was a painful experience for a lot of people, it did actually provide some benefits for internet marketers who put in a little extra effort. Specifically, this algorithm update  removed a TON of spammy, low quality sites (not every bad site, unfortunately) from the competition. Which means that a lot of keywords that were filled with spammy, low quality sites are now wide open — and ultimately, for the internet marketer who wants to put in a little extra effort to make sure he’s “Google-Proofed,” ripe for the picking.

The truth is this: this is not the last time Google is going to make an algorithm update. If you do not have your site setup properly, then you are putting yourself at risk of losing search engine traffic at any time, basically at the whim of Google. While one might argue that if you are relying on search engine traffic, you are always at the “whim” of Google and are putting yourself at risk — there are ways to mitigate that risk, and prevent your site from being hammered from any future algorithm updates. Not every site got hit by the Panda update — IncomeDiary’s search engine traffic actually has doubled in the past 6 months from 5,000 search engine visitors a week to 10,000 — so what made these sites protected? And what will keep these sites protected in the future?

It all boils down to just a few, specific things.

Guidelines For “Google-Proofing” Your Website

1. More Emphasis on Social Factors

While the jury is still out on Google +1’s success, you better believe that Google is moving more toward social factors like Facebook likes, Tweets, Stumbles and +1’s. If Google making it’s own social network isn’t proof enough to you that Google is focusing more on the social aspects of search, then I don’t know what is.  It’s extremely important to have these social buttons on your site, and you want to ESPECIALLY make sure that you have the +1 button setup in a prominent spot so that you can get the most +1’s possible. Google has experimented a ton with re-ranking sites based on how many +1’s they have – and it’s likely that they will continue to put heavy emphasis on boosting sites that have a lot of +1’ed content.  Make sure that you are getting your subscribers to “Like” and “+1” your content — do NOT leave this out of your strategy.

2. NO Duplicate Content

This has been a rule for a long time now, though it seems that Google is now much more stringent and penalizing sites more heavily for duplicate content. So make sure your SEO strategy doesn’t rely around duplicate, automated content — because this will NOT work and only get your site penalized in the search engines.

3. LONG, High Quality Content

According to my buddies over at SERPIQ.com, they ran a study of 15,000 keywords, and found that on average the top 10 results for those 15,000 keywords all had over 2,000 words of content on the page that ranked in the top 10. One thing to keep in mind is that it’s not necessarily one 2,000 word article — but 2,000 words of content on the entire page. So for example, on IncomeDiary’s homepage — there are paragraph long previews of posts that add up to over 2,000 words of content — so to Google, it’s a page with over 2,000 words of content. The survey data doesn’t lie – longer content ranks better. Plain and simple. Just make sure that it’s high quality, (i.e. written over an 8th grade level), it has different forms of media if possible (videos, images), and that it gets shared (like I mentioned before!). Ultimately Google wants you to put REAL EFFORT into providing a high quality experience for your website visitors. If you can do that – they WILL reward you with more search engine traffic.

4. Strong Emphasis on On-Site Fundamentals

Again, as Google’s algorithm’s are constantly refined, high quality, useful, and interesting content is always going to be rewarded. However, it’s impossible to have your high quality and interesting content rewarded if your on-site SEO is setup improperly. If Google cannot interpret your content and know exactly what keywords to give you traffic for, then your high quality content will get you ZERO search engine traffic. And sticking to these strong on-site fundamentals will help make sure that your site not only GETS ranked, but it KEEPS it’s rankings through all future algorithm changes.

The real truth is, if you want to rank for high traffic, high profit keywords, you need to make sure that your on-site SEO is up to par (because your competition’s DEFINITELY is). Without proper on-site SEO, you’re building your site without a proper foundation.

“So, where can I learn more and make sure that I’m setting up my site for success in the long term?”

Well, we’ve got a program called The WordPress SEO Blueprint in which my business partner (Tom Lambert) and I go through everything we do and have done to get our WordPress sites ranking at the top of the search engines — and how you can do the same with your own WordPress sites. It’s an incredibly useful and easy to follow resource that will have you ranking your sites at the top of the search engines in no time — and I promise that  it will help fully protect you from future algorithm updates.

So check it out, and let us know if you have any questions in the comments section!

The post How To Google-Proof Your Website appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

I had an internship at the time for a gym down in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, and one of my assignments was to create a calendar of all upcoming gym-related events. In a moment of genius (or laziness), I decided to try out this whole “outsourcing” thing to create our events calendar.

I had someone from BrickWorks India, gave them my instructions, and patiently waited for my calendar to be completed.

48 hours later, it was done — and done EXACTLY to my specifications. Which was awesome. I know that a lot of people have outsourcing horror stories (and I do as well, though that’s for another post), but my first experience was flawless. Needless to say – I was hooked.

Since then, I have outsourced hundreds of projects to people all over the world, from Romania, to the Philippines, and to India. I’ve had logos designed, websites created, apps coded, linkbuilding done, and so much more that I can’t even remember at this point.

I’ve become pretty experienced in the “Art” of outsourcing – and because of that, Michael asked me to write you guys a post on some tips for better outsourcing — how to make sure you avoid a nightmare experience, and enjoy the true benefits that outsourcing can offer to you and your business.

Know What You Want

The most important key in outsourcing successfully is knowing EXACTLY what you want. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make when they outsource is that they give vague instructions, and expect the person they are outsourcing to to understand exactly what it is that they want.

The simple fact is this: no one is going to understand your vision unless you tell them explicitly what your vision is. If you just say “Make it kind of look this” without providing specifics, you are likely to be disappointed with the results. This mistake usually ends with you wasting a ton of time trying to get your project right.

So, in order to avoid this, you need to figure out exactly what it is that you want done. If you want a website designed in a certain way – do a wireframe (I will literally draw it out on a piece of paper, scan it, and e-mail it to my designer). If you want an app or piece of software to provide a certain function, make sure that it is outlined completely before you ask the outsourcer to do the work. For logos, provide examples of what you’re looking for with specific instructions.

A lot of people make this mistake when they start outsourcing — and it almost always ends poorly. So make sure that you take the time to figure out exactly what it is that you want your outsourcer to do, before you ask them to do anything. And, along these lines, you want to make sure you’re very specific in your job description as to what you are looking for.

Where To Find People To Work For You

There’s a couple of great sources to find employees online, and I’ll outline a few here:

1. oDesk — While my experience with oDesk is relatively limited, I have had quite a bit of success with the employees I’ve hired from there. They are usually the cheapest, but they provide good quality work. oDesk also has internal time tracking, and will take screenshots of your employees desktop while they work, so that you know they are on task.

2. Elance — I’ve had the most experience with Elance, and out of all of the sites that I’ve worked with, it’s been consistently the highest quality. While the workers here are usually on the more expensive side, you definitely get what you pay for. I’ve never had a bad experience with anyone that I’ve hired from Elance.

3. Craigslist — While not really “Outsourcing” as Craigslist is generally local people, I still list it here as it is a very, very useful resource for finding employees. You can still get cheap work, and depending on how big of a city you live in, you can usually get responses very quickly. However, I will say that Craigslist is best for finding employees that are local (that you will see face-to-face) as Craigslist does not protect you like Elance or Odesk if you are just hiring someone to work for you online.

Some other resources for hiring that I have only limited experience with are:

Guru
RentACoder
SitePoint
Freelancer
OnlineJobs.ph

Getting Started With Your Outsourcer

Before you dive in and give your outsourcer the reins to your business, you want to make sure that they are reliable, provide quality work, and communicate well with you, first. You don’t want to give them a huge project (that is important for your business) before you even know if they are legitimate or not. That is simply a recipe for disaster. Trust me, I’ve been there.

What you want to do is give them a small test project first. Something simple that is of minimal consequence to your business. For example, if you want them to eventually redo the design of your entire site, maybe have them redesign a banner or a specific portion of your site first, to test their skill.

The biggest thing you are looking for in this test, aside from actual skill — is reliability. Will they get the project done when they say they are going to get it done? I can tell you from personal experience that there are a TON of skilled workers out there to hire, however, only a small portion (I’d honestly say less than 5%) of them are actually reliable and can get things done by specific due dates.

And when you find the reliable ones – make sure that you hold onto them, as they are an extremely, extremely valuable resource to you and your business.

Keep Things Business

Another big mistake that you can make working with outsourcers is becoming friends with them. Now, that might sound a little strange, but hear me out. If you are hiring employees on a regular basis to do projects, there WILL eventually come a time when you have to fire someone because they are not getting the job done. It is an unfortunate inevitability when working with employees. I honestly wish everyone always got their work done on time, but that simply does not happen.

When the time comes to let go of someone because they aren’t getting their work done, if you are emotionally attached to them (by having become their friend), it makes it much harder for you to fire them. You might give them second chance after second chance because you don’t want to hurt their feelings. This is a mistake.

This is going to sound cold hearted – but what it comes down to is this. You have to decide which is more important to you – this persons hurt feelings, or your livelihood. If they are not getting the work that you need them to get done on time, it is THEIR fault that you are firing them, and you should not feel bad about it. They are taking advantage of you and you need to let them go.

If you are truly planning on being successful online, this is a hard lesson, but one that you need to learn early on, or it can be devastating to your business.

So because of this, it’s important to separate business and friendship – and keep them separated!

Questions? Comments?

I hope this post was helpful to you guys — let me know in the comments if you have any outsourcing or hiring questions, I’ll be here to respond.

And, if you like what I wrote here, chances are you’ll probably like our blog over at Real World Traffic. Make sure to check it out as well!

Read more: ‘What 40 Successful Entrepreneurs Can Teach You about Hiring a Virtual Assistant!’

The post My Top Tips For Outsourcing Work on The Internet appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

One of the easiest and FASTEST ways to get exposure online is through leveraging other people’s audiences. Be it through them e-mailing their list about you, writing a blog post about you, or, as with this post, them letting you write a guest post on their blog.

I am a huge fan of guest posting, and it has done a great deal for my business — as you can see in my screenshot below — 90% of that traffic was from guest posts that I did on assorted blogs. 

So, let’s talk about guest posting – and how you can use it to help grow your online business.

How To Find Blogs to Guest Post On

The first thing you need to do is find blogs that are A) in your niche, and B) allow or want guest posts.

The best way to find blogs to guest post on (that I have found) is Technorati. Technorati is basically a huge blog directory that you can search by topic.  They have a “business” and a “blogging” section that has a lot of the top blogs – you can peruse through the list and build a list of blogs to potentially guest post on.

I went through the list of all of the blogs that were relevant to my niche, and put them all into an excel spreadsheet.

What Should You Write About?

For each blog that you’d like to post on, take a few minutes to look through their current posts. What are the most popular topics? Which topics get the most response from readers? Are there any topics that AREN’T covered, but are relevant to the audience? (i.e. Michael doesn’t really talk about SEO in his blog posts, which is why writing SEO articles was a good fit for IncomeDiary)

Take some time to look through these blogs so you can start to put together a list of post ideas that you could write about. Heck, if you’re not sure what to write, e-mail the blog owner and ask him if there’s a specific topic that he or she would love to see covered. It never hurts to ask! J

I will basically come up with a list of topics for each blog that I’m interested in, get some feedback from the blog owner via e-mail, and begin writing.

Something else to note is that the more that you interact with the blogger you’d like to guest post for, the more likely it is (unless you’re a jerk) that he will approve your post (assuming it’s well written) when he sees it come through.

As with any business relationship – the best way to connect with people is to be their friend first. So don’t approach bloggers with a “ME ME ME” attitude. Ask them how YOU can help THEM and I promise you, you will have much better results and a much higher chance of getting your blog post up on their site.

And ultimately, the more bloggers that you contact, the better chances you’ll have of getting one of your guest posts up.

10 Tips To Maximize The Value Of Your Guest Posts

1. Sell Yourself: By “sell yourself”, I don’t mean selling yourself like a streetwalker. I mean in your blog post, demonstrate to your target readers that you are credible, trustworthy, and likable. Show them that you’re a cool dude — if you did something interesting that day, start off the blog post talking about it. For example:  “Yesterday, while I was riding on my Jet Ski…” this sentence might seem like nothing, but you’re easily demonstrating that you are a) interesting, because interesting people jet ski, obviously, and b) are at least somewhat successful, as if you were broke you wouldn’t be able to afford a jet ski. And this is all done without saying “I’m interesting and I’m successful!”. Something to think about with ANY content you write, really, not just guest blog posts.
2. Link Back To Your Stuff: It’s silly to write a blog post without sending people SOMEWHERE to learn more about you. You should always have a direct response element in your guest blog posts – and that direct response is that they go to YOUR blog. The best way to do this is to link to relevant blog posts on your blog inside of your guest post. So if I’m talking about exact match domains, I would link back to my blog post about exact match domains somewhere in my blog post. (see what I did there?)
3. Capture Clickthrough Traffic: Most blogs probably won’t let you link to a squeeze page after each blog post, however, they will almost always let you link back to your blog.  If you want to make sure you grab that traffic while it’s coming through, make sure you have PopUpDomination setup, so you can at least capture a portion of the leads that come visit your site.
4. Tell a Story: The best way to demonstrate and persuade is through the use of story. Story is an extremely powerful tool – you can use it to show your audience your credibility and trustworthiness without telling them “hey, I’m credible and trustworthy”. Story is awesome because it drops people’s defenses, and allows you to persuade them without them resisting the whole time. If you want to learn more about story in persuasion – read the book “The Story Factor” by Annette Simmons.
5. Write WELL: The easiest way to sabotage a guest posting opportunity is to write poorly. Make SURE that you have proper grammar, spell check everything, and really spend some time making sure everything sounds good and makes sense. The best way I’ve found to make sure that everything I’m writing sounds good is to read it aloud. If I can read a blog post aloud and it flows and makes sense, then I know it’s good to go. If you’re still struggling, I’d recommend reading the book “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser.
6. Write With Personality: Don’t be bland. Include your personality in your writing. If you’ve got a dry sense of humor, use it. The key here is to not be afraid to let your personality show through your writing. If your writing is bland and looks like everyone else’s stuff, you’re not going to stand out – and your blog post will not do as well.
7. Respond To Reader Comments: If your post happens to get a lot of comments and questions, make sure to respond to them! Not only does interacting with your readers help build rapport between you and them, but the blog owner appreciates it when you’re there to help beyond just writing the post. The better experience you can provide for their readers, the better off you will be (and the more likely you’ll be able to do future blog posts)
8. Write A Badass Headline: You should spend a good amount of time coming up with a killer headline for your blog post. Headlines do most of the dirty work in determining how many people end up reading your post – so make sure you spend some time on it. For some examples of headlines that work, just look at publications with large readerships like Men’s Health, MSN News, Yahoo News, and the National Inquirer. There’s a reason why the copywriters of those companies get paid the big bucks – so if you need some inspiration, look through there.
9. Use Quora or Yahoo Answers To Help Write: If you’re still struggling for writing ideas, you can use Yahoo Answers or Quora to find popular questions about the topic you’d like to write about. And then you can incorporate them, and answer them in your blog post.
10. Be Persistent: If Edison gave up after one try, would we even have lightbulbs? The point is, if your blog post doesn’t get accepted on a certain blog – it’s not the end of the world. Keep trying – keep writing good content, and keep submitting new stuff. Don’t spam blog owners or anything, but I promise you, persistence pays off.

Bonus Tip: Leveraging Guest Blog Posts for SEO

As I mentioned before, you should be including links in your content back to relevant content on your own site. This is good for general click through traffic, but it also has an added SEO benefit. One thing to keep in mind when you’re linking back to your content is using the proper anchor text. So for example, if you’re linking to something about WordPress SEO, try to use the anchor text “Wordpress SEO”. This will help tell Google what the page you are linking to is about, and ultimately help your rankings for that specific keyword.

Before You Begin Guest Posting…

Oh, and, before I go – one thing to keep in mind before you begin guest posting (especially if you’re just doing it for SEO benefit), is that you should most DEFINITELY have your on-site SEO in check. If you’re building links through guest posting, and your on-site SEO is all messed up, you’re not going to get the full value of your work. It’s like getting paid $20 an hour for a $40 an hour job.

Fortunately for you guys, we have a complete guide on how to do this over at The WordPress SEO Blueprint. I highly recommend any aspiring blogger checks it out, as I know it will dramatically increase your traffic and the value of your SEO efforts.

I hope you guys enjoyed this guest post, and let me know what questions you might have in the comments!

The post The Ultimate Guide To Guest Posting appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

As I talked about last week, with proper on-site SEO, you massively increase the effect of your linkbuilding campaigns. So I figured a good follow-up post would be about getting more backlinks — enjoy!

You may have heard that backlinks are “CRUCIAL” to SEO and ranking in search engines. It’s true — they are. If you really want to maximize your search engine traffic you need a solid backlink strategy that works for you.

So what is a backlink and why are they so important? Backlinks are a simple concept: when another website links to you that link is considered a backlink. Search engines look at backlinks to evaluate how popular a website is and rank them accordingly.

Each backlink is given a certain amount of “juice” based on it’s own reputation, history, and authority in the niche. Backlinks from established and legitimate websites are more effective than low-quality backlinks from websites with no credibility.

With all that said, if you want to rank for competitive keywords, you need backlinks.

Here are 8 ways to get easy backlinks to help rank your website for your target keywords:

Testimonials

You can easily leverage testimonials into backlinking opportunities online. Whenever you buy a new product, service, membership, or anything else online, leave a testimonial. Testimonials will commonly have a link to your website within them to prove the testmonial is real. This will give you a free backlink if the company likes your testimonial and uses it on their website. And — it doesn’t hurt to ask them to put a live link in the testimonial!

Pro Tip: Leave honest and real testimonials (they’ll get used more).

Social Bookmarks

How about some free backlinks from high PageRank sites? Social Bookmarking allows you to save your favorite bookmarks online to read later and share with others. (Lucky for us that also gives us a free backlink.)

Press Releases

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be a public relations expert to run a successful press release.  You can have a press release written and distributed to thousands of different news sites and publications without doing any ‘real’ work. I love press releases because you get HIGH quality backlinks and your business gets put in front of readers, not a bad deal! Websites like the New York Times and USA Today can pick up your press release giving you a gem of a backlink (and a ton of free traffic). Though we will say that your press release better be high quality if you want to get on one of those sites!

Submitting a press release to all of these news sites manually would be a HUGE hassle. To avoid wasting our time we use a distribution service called PRWeb. PRWeb has an extremely strong track record and come highly recommended from most search engine optimizers.

RSS Directories

All over the Internet there are “RSS Directories” which serve the purpose of letting people explore different blogs/websites on a particular topic. By submitting your RSS feed to these directories your website gets a link back to it.

To submit your website to RSS directories automatically we use a program called Fast RSS Submitter. Fast RSS Submitter will submit your RSS feeds to over 100 RSS directories automatically, saving you a lot of time.

Joint Ventures/Partnerships/Co-Branding

If you have any partners or JVs ask them if they will link back to your website. If you think they might be hesitant, just ask if you can do a guest post with a link, it’s hard to turn down free content. And as a double bonus, you get extra traffic back to your site.

Wait a sec…a guest post about guest posting? How meta…

Link Bait

Link bait is content that is so useful, high quality, or powerful that people are compelled to share it naturally. If you put up content that people enjoy so much they tweet, like, blog, and comment you can rank for A LOT of keywords. Utilize link bait and structure your content towards your audience, always. If you can do that consistently your fans and readers will do a big chunk of your link building for you.

Some examples of great link bait are: top 10 lists/roundups, hot topics, breaking news, and infographics. Honestly, if you’re looking for great examples of linkbait, you don’t need to go much further than IncomeDiary.com. Michael is great at it!

Article Submissions

There’s a myth that goes something like this: “Article marketing is dead.” It really isn’t, but if you want to pass up on great backlinks you can believe that.  Article marketing is one of the most effective forms of link building I use every single day. I have websites ranked in the #1 position for their primary keywords JUST from article marketing, so don’t try to tell me it doesn’t work!

The key to article marketing is VOLUME. The main argument I hear against article marketing is that only xx% of the links get indexed/counted/etc…which is why you have to do big numbers.  (We’re talking about thousands of submissions) Submitting 2 articles isn’t going to rank your website overnight like some miracle cure. Do lots of submissions and see where you’re at – if you didn’t hit number 1 keep going.

Submitting articles is another time sucker, so we use syndication software that does it automatically. For article submissions we use nothing but Article Marketing Robot. This software is amazing and automates the entire submission process for you, all you have to do is put in the information and let it run.

Awards

Holding some type of annual awards can generate a lot of buzz and backlinks for your website. To do this (successfully) you do need SOME level of credibility in your industry, though. Create awards for the best in your industry and give them to the ones that are crushing it. These are usually the most popular and followed people, so you can really leverage their popularity to grow your website. I’ve seen this used very effectively in the fitness industry — people can’t resist sharing with their friends that they have won an award — even if you just made it up on the spot

This can do a couple things for you:

• Bring in new readers, fans, and followers (because its fun & different)
• Attract those ‘big name’ winners and potentially get links, tweets, or mentions from them
• Build rapport for your brand/company/website

These 8 methods alone can rank your website for competitive terms if used correctly, so use them! Experiment to find out what works best for your website and keep doing more of it. You should always be testing new and creative link building methods to keep things fresh and organic for the search engines.

Are there any cool link building strategies you use that I didn’t mention here? Tell me about em below!

Want to learn more about getting traffic to your website through search engines? How to get more people to link to your site? Check out David’s SEO eBook here now! David’s influence on IncomeDiary has been the most important investment to my online business this year. Make sure you do the same!

The post 8 Easy Ways To Get Backlinks appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

When we’re talking about the “quality” of your traffic, we’re talking about:

1. Buyers intent – are these buyers?
2. Demographic match – is this traffic your actual target audience?
3. Cost effectiveness – can this traffic reach my CPA (cost per action) goals?

Web Traffic Tools You Should Be Using!

1. Google Analytics

First and foremost, Google analytics is absolutely crucial in driving quality traffic. The ultimate mistake in driving traffic is not tracking your results. Google Analytics allows you to track conversions (goals), tells you which traffic sources are converting the best, and lets you segment your data so that you can go out and find more high quality traffic. As far as I am concerned, it is the most essential tool in internet marketing. Visit Google Analytics!

2. Quantcast

After tracking, you need to make sure you’re doing your market research. If you don’t know anything about your demographic or target customer, you’re going to end up driving untargeted, low quality traffic to your site that doesn’t convert. Quantcast gives you a demographic profile of your site, or, if you’re too small, your closest competitor – so you can get a feel of what audience you should be targeting.

We also use it for buying advertising – it tells you what demographic usually visits whatever site you want to advertise on, so you know if your traffic is going to be targeted or not. For more on quantcast and market research, check out our Market Research series over on our blog. Visit Quantcast!

3. Google Website Optimizer/Visual Website Optimizer

The thing that really sets apart top tier internet marketers and the rest of the crowd is simply this: split testing to increase conversion rates. It not only separates them from the crowd now, but will keep their advantage for years to come.

Basically, Google Website Optimizer and Visual Website Optimizer are split testing tools that allow you to test different versions of your website against eachother simultaneously to determine which version generates a higher ROI. The higher your conversion rate, the more you can spend on traffic, the more you can spend on traffic, the better you can compete. For example, if you are able to pay $40 per conversion, and your competitor can only pay $35, you can basically wipe the floor with them.

It’s the ultimate competitive advantage and if you are selling something online – if you are not split testing, you absolutely need to be. Visit Google Website Optimizer!

4. ClickTale & CrazyEgg

Another tool in optimizing websites – Clicktale and Crazyegg give you in depth information on how your visitors behave when they get to your website.

Crazyegg offers heat map tracking – showing you what places your visitors click on the most. It can show you places where you should have something for sale – for example, you might have an image that gets a lot of clicks – maybe that means you should link that image to something.

Clicktale goes a little more in depth, offering actual recorded sessions of how your visitors interacted with your page. You can literally see them scrolling through your site and moving their mouse (a little creepy), and make business decisions based on their behavior. These are both massively useful tools and highly recommended. Visit Clicktale and CrazyEgg!

5. Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools basically gives you an in-depth look into how your website is functioning. It shows you what your pageload time is (according to Google), which is a known ranking factor, it shows places on your site where there are errors or broken links, and it shows you your impressions/clickthrough rate/positioning for keywords.

It’s a useful tool in determining how well your SEO efforts are going, and we use it especially to see if we need to optimize our title/description tags (if our clickthrough rate is lower than it should be). Visit Google Webmaster Tools!

6. RankTracker

Ranktracker is one of the most powerful tools we use – it allows us to track our organic search rankings for hundreds of keywords at a time. Whenever we begin SEO work, we put in our keywords into rank tracker, and it allows us to see what gets us the best results. For example, we’ll buy a linkwheel package and see how many spots it moves us up in our rankings – and based on those results, determine what kind of linkbuilding we need to continue with. Tracking your results online is essential – and RankTracker is a must-have in your SEO arsenal of tools. Visit RankTracker!

7. SEO Spyglass

SEO Spyglass allows you to see your competitor’s backlink profiles. Now, that might not seem like much at first, but it actually is incredibly powerful. When Google has ranked a site #1 for a keyword that you want to go after, the best place to start is by mimicking that #1 person’s backlink profile.

SEO Spyglass doesn’t just give you their backlink profile, it shows you the pagerank of each backlink, as well. Using this data, you can go out and essentially copy their backlink profile, moving yourself up in the rankings and dominating your competitors. Visit Seo Spyglass!

8. Market Samurai

One of the best internet marketing tools there is, Market Samurai is absolutely clutch when it comes to keyword research . It allows you to masterfully research any niche – you put in your target keywords and it will tell you how competitive they are, and if you really stand a chance to rank.

We use it every time we are beginning an SEO campaign to help us to determine which keywords to go after first. If you want to learn more about market samurai specifically, visit MarketSamurai.com!

9. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a tool I recommend all internet marketers and bloggers use. It pays for itself.

You can find out all about a sites search engine optimization. I’m talking, backlinks, social media shares, all the keywords it ranks for, 404 pages, broken links and much more. This tool will show you where you are going wrong with your SEO and how to fix it.

And that’s it! Those are 9 of the best tools that we use to maximize our quality of traffic. There’s plenty of other tools out there that you can use as well – what are some of your favorite tools for internet marketing?

Read more: ‘25 Best SEO Tools For Successful Blogging’

The post 9 Tools That Help Us Drive Higher Quality Traffic appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Sometimes it seems extremely hard to get those first 100 visitors to your articles and it can be frustrating when this happens; especially when you are new to the world of Internet Marketing and you just don’t know what you are doing wrong. Well I’m here to help you with these ’10 Ways To Bring Visitors To Your Articles’ admittedly this is not going to be a masterclass which draws on and on; this is all about helping you to get to your first 100 visitors as quickly and easily as possible without a ton of jargon. So here you go guys I hope this truly helps some of you out. If you enjoy this post, you should also check David’s other posts such as 10 WordPress Plugins for Bloggers!

1. Yahoo! Answers

Yahoo! might be losing the search engine market share battle but they still dominate in the Question and Answers arena. People ask thousands of questions every day in almost every niche and industry you can imagine. A quick search for “Search Engine Optimization” shows over 1,300 questions that can be answered. The key to driving massive amounts of traffic from Yahoo! Answers is to give genuinely helpful answers. Instead of trying to create a blatant advertisement for your website work on becoming an authority in your industry. This technique has the potential to send you far more than 100 visitors. When people use search engines to look for the questions you answered often times a Yahoo! Answers result will appear near the top of the search results. This will give you and your website a ton of exposure if you answer commonly asked questions!

2. Social Bookmarking

If you create content that people enjoy it can easily become popular or even go viral. The important thing is to put your website and content in front of people that are looking for it, right? Social bookmarking is a super easy way to do just that. Social bookmarking sites allow users to bookmark their favorite websites that other people can publicly view and vote up or down. If you bookmark useful content other people will find it, share it, and vote it up so others can enjoy it. Oh yeah, and it only takes about 30 seconds to bookmark your site. The 3 most popular social bookmarking sites are Digg, Reddit, and Delicious. These 3 sites get over 8 MILLION unique visitors a month – funneling off a chunk of that traffic to your website is very doable. (There’s plenty to go around ) Just remember to create content that people will enjoy and/or find useful. The most popular content on social bookmarking sites are usually check lists, “Top 10” lists, tools & resources, and breaking news – so keep that in mind!

3. Squidoo

Squidoo is a website full of 100% user generated content that allows you to create what’s called a “lense.” A lense is a page about a specific topic that you choose to write about (usually something you’re knowledgeable in). After creating your lense other people can find it by searching for terms and keywords related to your lense. Let me just start off by saying Squidoo is an absolute powerhouse in the search engines. Its very easy to rank Squidoo lenses for competitive terms that would prove to be a challenge for websites with lesser authority. Creating a lense on Squidoo gives you 2 traffic opportunities:

• When people use search engines and search for keywords related to your lense it will sometimes show up in the top search results if it’s relevant enough to the search phrase. This means you can get drones of targeted traffic to your lense from search engines that you can funnel into your website.

• Squidoo has a huge community of active users that use Squidoo to find things they want to know more about. Squidoo currently gets over 9 million unique visitors a month and they’re still growing steadily. Look at Squidoo’s traffic growth over just the last year:

Creating a lense or two is one of my favorite ways to get laser targeted traffic without hours of work.

4. Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is a great way to generate free traffic – all you have to invest is the time to write an article. Get in touch with the most popular blogs in your industry and ask if they’ll let you write a guest post. Most website owners will have no objections to having other people write free content for them. (ask Michael how I know…wink, wink) If you’re having trouble finding blogs to guest post on check out www.myblogguest.com – they have a full community of bloggers that are ready and waiting for your content.

5. Forum Posting

There are community forums setup online for virtually every niche, industry, or topic you can imagine. The internet is a prime place for like minded people to talk to each other. 9 times out of 10 you can find a forum for your industry just by typing in [your industry]forum.com or searching for “[Your Industry] Forum” on Google. Find the forums in your industry with the largest user base, start posting there and become an active community member. Most forums will allow you to leave a link to your website in your post signature, so the more you post the more traffic you get.

6. Twitter

Every time I write new content I post it to twitter. If you use the right keywords and make your tweet interesting enough you can get a lot of clickthroughs just from people searching. For example if I write an article about SEO and Google I can tag the end of the tweet with #SEO #Google and anyone that searches for those keywords on Twitter can see my tweet about the post that I wrote. Be sure to write creative headlines for your posts so people feel the urge to click on them.

7.Facebook

Creating a Facebook fan page takes about an entire 45 seconds and is a almost a necessity at this point for every business owner. Considering that 1 in 13 people on EARTH have a Facebook account there’s really no need to explain why you should be there. Pro tip: make sure you create a fan page and not a group. Groups messages don’t show up in news feeds making it hard to get in touch with members. Making a fan page will give you a lot more exposure to not only the current members but members friends as well.

8. Blog Commenting

Commenting on blog posts written by industry experts with lots of followers can bring your website a lot of traffic. When you post a comment (most) blogs allow you to leave a link back to your site for other readers to check out – as long as you leave an insightful comment you WILL get traffic from your blog comments. Make sure you comment as quickly as possible when new blog posts go up. The higher in the comments you are the more clicks you’ll get. I have Google Reader setup to alert me when new blog posts are made on the industry blogs I follow and I comment immediately to lock in my first place spot.

9. Article Marketing

Promoting your websites by publishing articles to various article directories is by no means a new idea but still an extremely effective way to drive traffic. If you write content and publish it to websites like Article Base, and Article Dashboard website owners will pick it up and post it. This idea is similar to guest blogging except that you only have to write one piece of content that can end up on hundreds of even thousands of blogs and websites. The same rule applies here: don’t be boring – be creative and interesting and use common keywords in your article and title so website owners can find it!

10. Link bait

The idea of “link bait” refers to creating content that is so extremely useful or entertaining it compels people to link to it. Put yourself in the shoes of your target demographic and figure out what they would enjoy or what would help them the most. Is there a tool you can make to automate some tedious process? Can you find enough data to make an interesting infographic? Is there a checklist or cheat sheet that would prove handy to your audience? The possibilities are nearly endless – survey your visitors and see what is missing or lacking in your industry and fill in the gaps.

The post How To Get 100 Visitors a Day, Every Day Starting Today appeared first on How To Make Money Online.