There is a secret to succeeding with the search engines when you are trying to get a site ranking and that is … ready for it … are you sure … you might want to sit down … patience!

That’s it … patience.

Don’t go rushing out building thousands of links to your site in one day, it will raise a huge red flag to the search engines and is almost guaranteed to hinder your sites ranking. The brains behind the search engines are smart, very smart … in fact they have brains the size of a planet, and they know that if a lot of links appear to a site all at once it is suspicious.

The key is consistency. Be patient in your link building and build the links naturally because it will look more natural in the eyes of the search engines and help your site rank higher. On top of this, if you can ensure that your links are coming from multiple sources then it will look even more natural.

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter if you build 10 links a day or 1000 or even 10,000 in the eyes of the search engines so long as you build those links and keep it consistent. It’s when you build 10,000 links in a day and then none for a month that it becomes suspicious.

Be patient when you are building links because the search engines do not find all the links in a day nor do your rankings move in a day. Don’t be obsessed with checking your website rankings every day, just check them once a week and see where you are.

The search engines don’t move quickly in adjusting their rankings and you may have to wait a week or more before you see results from your link building. Also, don’t get too excited if your site appears in the top 10 and then disappointed when it disappears again, this is perfectly natural and a part of the way the search engines work. Keep building the links and it will settle down sooner rather than later.

Search engine optimization isn’t something that happens overnight, it takes time so please be patient, keep building links and you will see long term, definite results.

The key is to learn to manage your cash flow by promoting a variety of products. As you get going and you start to see four figure months this isn’t perhaps as important because you have more money coming in, but certainly when you get started you do need this cash flow management.

So how do you manage your cash flow?

Firstly you need to promote products from a variety of different networks to ensure you have money coming in more frequently.

Amazon, for example, pays out 60 days after the end of the month you made the sale in. This can mean up to 3 months waiting for your cash to arrive. Whilst Amazon is a great affiliate program to promote, it isn’t going to help your cash flow unless you get up to a 4 figure income pretty quickly. Definitely use Amazon, but also use some other programs too.

Clickbank is a good marketplace to promote though some people say it is harder to make sales on Clickbank than on Amazon. However, Clickbank pay out twice a month so this is a great program to get involved in because if you can hit your payment threshold, you only need to wait a little over 14 days to get your money.

One of the best programs to promote is anything on Rapid Action Profits (RAP). The key feature of any products promoted through RAP is that you get paid instant commissions. This means you get the money straight in to your Paypal account without any waiting. Now obviously this is very very good for your cash flow!

And of course, let’s not forget Adsense which is a great earner and pays out once a month.

I would recommend to any affiliate marketer who is starting out to pay attention to cash flow and promote products from a variety of different sources. Use all of the above programs to make money and split your efforts between them unless you want to wait for one particular program to reach your earning targets.

My personal method is I promote 50% Amazon products, for long term cash flow and stability. This is the foundation stone of my business. On top of this to help cash flow I promote probably 20-25% RAP products and 20-25% Clickbank products. Adsense is thrown in to the mix and included on some sites. A few sites, probably less than 10% are pure Adsense and that is only for higher paying keywords.

If you are working as an affiliate marketer then you need to think about your cash flow and ensure that you have income from multiple sources. There is, of course, another advantage to this in that if there is a problem with one affiliate program you haven’t lost your income. You have multiple streams of income coming in to your business so you have a degree of insurance against potential problems.

The trouble is, a lot of these people are coming online with the attitude of they want to make money rather than they want to build a business. Now you may think that the two of these approaches are very similar, but in fact they are worlds apart both in their way of thinking and in the actions you take to achieve those goals.

For example, someone who is building a business provides outstanding customer service and is always looking to add value to their customers. They over deliver, provide excellent quality information and generally try to retain their customers so they buy repeatedly.

Someone who wants to make money online has a very different approach. They may not be overly worried about customer service because all they want is the money. They don’t care about over delivering or providing value because as far as they are concerned the money in their account is the end of the transaction with the customer.

Now there may be times when you genuinely do need to make money in which case you take a much different approach from building a business. Ebaying unwanted or under-used possession will make you money. Providing a service to other marketers such as article writing and so on will make you money and in some cases (when approached right) will build a business.

If you are struggling to achieve your goals on the Internet then you need to sit down and look at your approach. Are you trying to make money or build a business? Which do you actually want to do?

Are you looking for a long term income which will replace your day job and provide you with financial security? Or are you looking to just bring in a bit of extra money for whatever reason?

There is no right or wrong answer here. Not everyone comes to Internet marketing to build a business, some just want to make a bit of extra cash. Whichever category you fall in to it’s the right answer for you.

Think about what you are trying to achieve online and then make a decision about how you are going to approach Internet marketing. If you are struggling to achieve the income you desire it may be because you are focusing on making money instead of building a business.

Once you take the right approach you will be stunned in how your attitude to your online efforts change and how your results will also change. Making the conscious decision to build a business rather than make money will transform your approach to Internet marketing and help you to make even more money!

I found the WP Policies plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-policies/ a couple of days ago which creates all of the pages you need to keep on the right side of companies such as Adsense.

Something like this can make a big difference because having these pages can help improve your page quality score which reduces your PPC costs.

It’s a free plugin and may well be one that you need to start using on your WordPress sites.

Whilst this is big news it isn’t something that should rock your world and mean you rush over to Facebook and start marketing on there. You need to look at who is telling you about this and stressing its importance … it’s the people who are selling Facebook marketing products.

Whilst Facebook is a good place to market and has over half a billion users it remains a social network where people go to socialize, talk to their friends and play games. It’s not a place someone goes when they are looking to buy a new digital camera, car, television or their kids toys. They go to Google for that.

Facebook marketing works if you are market the right things to the right audience. Sure you can target demographics accurately and get a lower cost per click than Adwords, but if you are marketing something that people there aren’t going to buy then you are wasting both your time and money.

On my Facebook account I see advert after advert for mobile phones, test driving cars and similar items. The trouble is, these are not the sort of thing people buy every day. The chances are I may look at moving my mobile phone contract once or maybe twice a year maximum and as to test driving a car, that’s even rarer.

The issue is that people are taking a scatter gun approach to Facebook marketing figuring if they display an ad enough to enough people someone will buy. Yeah great, but how much time and effort is it going to cost you? Not to mention the click throughs of people who are just looking.

Whilst there are things to market on Facebook, I’d avoid the herd stampeding over to it because you will find shortly that advertising prices will increase significantly and click through rates diminish … particularly as users can “vote off” an advert. You will find Facebook swamped with all sorts of ads as the herd follow the “guru’s” advice and start to market there.

If you are thinking of marketing on Facebook then ensure you have done your market research and know that it’s the best place to market. Alternatively, stick to Google because you know you can get buying traffic and some great results … personally, I’m loving the results from Google and am going to stick there for the forseeable future building a long term business based on passive income streams!

What do you do?

There are two schools of thought on this matter

The first, ultra conservative school, says don’t touch that domain name. This is a very sensible approach because you are not going to get any nasty letters telling you to cease and desist.

The second is to go for it and hope for the best.

As someone who has had a few of these WIPO letters about domain names I can tell you from experience that if you let them have the domain name back without a fight it doesn’t go any further. In fact usually you will get an email before it goes to WIPO from the company asking you to stop using their tradename. If you hand it over to them at that point you haven’t lost anything except $10 registration and it will go no further.

Usually in these cases by the time the company has noticed you are using their trademark (and usually because your site is doing better than theirs) you have made much more than your $10 investment back through affiliate sales so are in profit.

There is some middle ground between these two approaches which I have found to work very well and this is to contact the company and ask them. You explain you are an online marketer, a fan of their products and would like to promote it through Amazon / Commission Junction / Whatever.

In most cases they will come back and say yes go for it and in a few they will tell you not to use the domain you have suggested. In these cases you can usually find a way around it by using non trademarked terms. In a few cases the company won’t reply in which case you have to decide whether to go for it or to leave it.

Ultimately though, remember that even if they send you a cease and desist letter, so long as you do so, it goes no further.

However, there are a few downsides to it.

Firstly, the commissions are very low indeed – you start at 4% or 5% depending on where you are. In the UK, your commissions are capped at £7, so if you sell a £1000 television you get £7 and not a percentage like you do in the USA (4% for the electronics category).

Secondly there is no real time reporting. Reports are generated daily and it appears at random times! Sometimes I can access the previous days report at midday, other days I can’t get to the report until early evening. It’s frustrating because you can’t accurately track your results and sometimes it’s just nice to go and see the commissions rolling in.

Thirdly the payment schedule is terrible. In the USA if you earn enough commissions you will get paid a month (or so) after the month you earn them. In the UK you have to wait 60 days after the month you earned the commissions.

On the plus side, their helpdesk is very friendly and helpful and have always been incredibly efficient (unlike Paypal’s) and so there are no complaints there.

Whilst Amazon is a great company to use as an affiliate marketer, their policies make them frustrating in many respects. If you are an affiliate marketer, don’t put all your eggs in the Amazon basket. It could take you anything from 60 to 90 days to get your first payment from them which can serious damage your cash flow.

I would recommend that you split your affiliate marketing efforts between Clickbank, products hosted on Rapid Action Profits, sites like Commission Junction / Affiliate Window and Amazon so that you have a range of incomes from the short term to the longer term.

This mix of commissions will ensure you have a good cash flow and make sure there is money in your pocket when you need it. You are also building a good long term sustainable business with multiple streams of income.

We all build backlinks to our sites – it’s how we rise up the search engine rankings. The trouble is – how do you monitor these links and discover which sites are using your content? I mean you’ve just submitted your article automatically to 800 sites … how many actually get indexed by Google? How many of your automated social bookmarks get picked up?

It’s a question you’d love an answer to because them you can see what is working and what isn’t. To be honest, it surprised me. I did a 800 site article blast a few days ago and so far Google have only found around 8 of the articles! I bookmarked my site on 100 social bookmarking sites and Google has only found 6 of those, so far.

How do I know this? How do I know that one particular social bookmarking site had my site indexed by Google within 20 minutes of it being bookmarked?

It’s through Google Alerts. If you go to http://www.google.com/alerts you can sign up to get Google to send you free alerts to your email address every single day.

This is a very useful tool and doesn’t cost a penny!

Firstly, put your domain name in to Google Alerts so that you can track references to your site, e.g. “mydomainname.com” using the quotes. This will notify you anytime Google finds your domain name lurking anywhere on the Internet. It’s great for tracking where you are getting links from.

The second use is to put your keywords in.

This allows you to track what content is being posted using your keywords. This allows you to monitor where your content is being used (hint – try putting your article titles in here) and also allows you to spy on your competition.

If using Google Alerts you see your competitors gaining backlinks from a particular site then head on over and get links yourself from there!

It’s a really useful tool and I personally set up Google Alerts for every single domain name. It’s interesting where some of the backlinks I get come from and where some of my content ends up. It just helps you track what is working for you and what isn’t.

Watch this video and then check the site out, www.fiverr.com and have a look around – it’s a good site on both a personal and a professional level.

Remeber to let me know how you get on with it.

Many marketers when they come online don’t realise the sheer volume of niches available to them because they don’t really understand how to research niches.

These marketers leap into two of what I consider to be the most competitive and difficult niches … weight loss and making money online.

They aren’t making money online and yet are trying to sell themselves as an expert on the subject! You often see posts on forums saying, “I want to make money online, how do I do it?” and a link in the signature promising to show you how to earn a fortune doing nothing.

You can imagine how quickly these people are laughed out of town.

When you delve into niches you will discover there are SO many different niches you don’t ever need to venture near the making money online and weight loss niches.

If you watched the video in the previous post then you will realise just one of the many methods of niche research can reveal a massive number of potential niches. Add in some of the other techniques available and you can quickly have more niches than you could possibly ever market to in a lifetime … seriously!

When it comes to picking a niche take your time picking it. Don’t just leap into it. Make sure there are buyers in that niche. Make sure the keywords you target result in buyers rather than browsers. Make sure the buyers are in the country you are targeting with whatever you are offering.

And most importantly, set up your website tightly focused on marketing to that niche and promoting offers that will make you money! We’ll talk more about that in a forthcoming post!

These people tend to jump into the make money online niche or weight loss niche because they are niches they know of and think are easy money.

How wrong are they.  These are really difficult niches to make money in when you are starting out.  There are other, less competitive niches where anyone can walk in and start making money in just a few days … you just have to find them.

I want to share with you now a new niche and keyword research technique that I’ve discovered.  It’s shown to you in the video below.  Have a good look through it and then try it … I’m already making money from niches I’ve discovered through this technique and I only recorded the video a few days ago!

Click the link below to be taken to the video.

Please leave a comment with your thoughts on it – I’d love to hear your feedback.

New Niche Research Technique