What Can I Do?

I’ve worked as a freelance SEO for several years and have created several of my own profitable websites by attracting search engine traffic to my projects. Many of the sites I’ve optimised rank at #1 in Google out of millions of other sites – and the methods I use are only those recommended by those who work at Google and other search engines (I keep my knowledge up-to-date and my rankings once achieved, can usually be easily maintained).

Some of My #1 Rankings Include:

Google Search for Lishi – ‘NorthLondonLishi’ charity site ranked #1 of 915,000 Sites [Last checked: 24/03/10]

Google Search for Free Comedy Videos – FreeComedyVideos.com blog ranked #1 of 44.8 Million Sites [Last checked: 24/03/10]

More examples are available on request.

For A4U Expo I booked into the Ibis hotel for 2 nights which was straight opposite the ExCel Centre where the conference was being hosted. A hotel stay felt a little extravagant seeing as I already live in London, but I’d been told it was a good idea if I wanted to maximise sleeping time between the ends of late night parties and early morning starts! (It was also a good excuse not to have to travel home on a night bus). I thought the hotel was lovely and clean and as it was fairly cheap too, I’d definately stay there again.

My Favourite Sessions

The sessions at A4U I was most looking forward to were the Super Affiliates panel, the Affiliate Doctors panel, Dave Naylor’s SEO Strategies and Nadeem Azam’s ‘My 12 Biggest Mistakes in Affiliate Marketing in 12 Years’ talk. Thankfully I made it to all of these, and I got a lot out of all of them. My site Where Can I Buy Online? was reviewed by the ‘Affiliate Doctors’ and I came away with a lot of ideas which I’m now putting into action. I found the days a lot like my busier days at university and it made a nice change to be sat amongst other people working in the same industry who also have a passion for affiliate marketing.

On the whole I found the talks where speakers related their mistakes and best practises were most helpful to me. Some of the other talks I went to which were more educational were less help as I had studied most of the concepts already, and was looking for more practical tips I could use.

Networking and the Social Events

As a newcomer to conferences and networking, meeting new people and forming new friendships was a high priority for me but also quite a worry. While I love meeting new people, I’m naturally a shy person so I was glad I’d arranged to meet up with one of my affiliate managers at the start of Expo, and later bumped into a few contacts I’d made through Twitter.

Apart from a couple of hours where I wandered round talks on my own, I found myself with a great group of friends – most of whom I met on the first evening. A highlight was going to dinner with Zak from Prezzybox, Graham from Buyagift, Naomi from Firebox, Chris from Home and Garden Gifts, and fellow affiliates Mark Ward and Fraser Edwards.

The parties were great too although the first one in a club in the O2 was a bit too loud for talking, and we were all too tired to stay till the end. The final night was spent at the Fox pub which had been hired out for dinner and drinks. I met plenty more great affiliates here, including Keith Bond who I’d spoken to for a while on Twitter, so in all it was the great friendly atmosphere at this party that really helped me decide that I want to be at the conference again next year.

My only regret is not getting more photos!

I decided to assess GVO for myself, and signed up for the low cost 14 day trial as they had done – as did some of my other online contacts who work in marketing.

Is GVO Hosting Any Good?

During my trial with the company, I did not move any of my websites to the GVO hosting service as I am happy with my current hosting. I checked out the features and services on offer at GVO, but didn’t find any I thought were worthwhile or particularly useful to me. The price also seemed extortionate – GVO costs $49 per month which includes:

• access to an autoresponder (similar to that at Aweber)
• services such as irritating popups and popunders
• a lead prospect capture system
• a private web conference room
• access to a members forum

I currently pay $9.95 a month for the top package offered by Bluehost, and if I were to use Aweber, I would pay $19 a month for that. In total that would amount to just over half the monthly cost of hosting with GVO – which is probably why their attention is mostly on promoting the affiliate programme and the high profile users who vouch for the service.

The GVO Affiliate Program Money Making System

When you sign up the GVO hosting, you are automatically enrolled in the ‘affiliate program’. Likewise, if you leave, you are removed from it. There is no possibility of promoting the service if you are not a paying member also, which I suppose is fair enough.

If you search around for a GVO review online, chances are you may think it is only a new money making system and hear little about the hosting – I believe there is good reason for this.

I had heard that the affiliate programme was rather unique and was a major feature in itself, and this part is true. It is a new MLM scheme whereby existing members pass some of their commissions, known as ‘overspill’, down to newer members, and all members earn lifetime commissions from those they recruit.

Many people were joining the service when I did in the pre-launch stage simply because the affiliate programme alone promised residual income, whether or not the hosting was of use. Also GVO is promoted as the hosting of choice for well known internet marketers including Mike Filsaime and Ewen Chia.

Does it Work?

A few days after joining, several of my online contacts began reporting large commissions being credited to them already. I was near the top of the pyramid when I signed up, and it is likely I might have made a lot of money each month after the launch date, possibly even without any promotion. Unlike most others who signed up only days before me, I personally didn’t receive any ‘overspill’ or commissions, although I did not actively promote the service and was merely observing how it worked. But because of this, I would not feel comfortable asking others to sign up in the hope that they might earn money.

Also pyramid schemes seem unethical to me, and I could not promote one or be comfortable making money from one. GVO’s matrix system (the MLM) seems very similar to AGLOCO was several years ago – where you sign up people in the hope that you and they earn money. But that pyramid fell down eventually, with it’s members receiving nothing. (At least it was free to them to sign up to in the first place).

Summary of GVO

GVO is a MLM scheme attached to a genuine web hosting service. It is an expensive service, which is specifically intended for internet marketers, but I believe you can buy better services individually and for a lot less. I was signed up for 14 days, in which time I saw the service experienced a lot of downtime with users unable to access their sites – this wasn’t the fault of the hosting service itself (they mentioned it was due to Dell) but was not encouraging – although they do have a downtime monitor so you can witness the fact you can’t access your site should it happen!

Just to clarify, I signed up in the pre-launch stage which means that further features may now have been added, but I am just judging on what I saw during my $1 trial membership, and for a hefty $49 a month service, I was not impressed with the overall package.

On a more serious note – I find this song inspirational and very relevant to the process of building an online business from scratch.

There is something quite unnerving about taking a different route to most people you know, and this is especially true with affiliate marketing if you are hoping to make a living out of it. Your state of mind reverts back to that of a child (or is that just me?) when you try to dream big and realise there are really no boundaries to what you can achieve. Especially in cyberspace.

It can also take a while to realise that even when you have a somewhat passive income stream in place, you should never sit back for too long and admire the view. Instead you should appreciate what you are achieving, but have backup strategies, new affiliate campaigns and other streams of revenue that you put into place – just incase something slides.

That said though, when you truly love what you do for work, so much so that going to bed at night after setting up a new PPC campaign feels like you’re a 5 year old waiting for Santa to arrive on Christmas morning – then it is definately all worthwhile. The climb is a lot of fun if you can put aside your fear. And the view from each mountain top is just breathtaking. Anyway, now you have an excuse to enjoy the wisdom of Miley!

We know as online customers ourselves, that when you do a Google search, or click on an ad, you expect to find the product you’re looking for at the end of the link you’ve clicked on. And when we end up at a busy homepage, it is off-putting and can distract us enough to leave without making even a necessary purchase.

This is where deeplinking comes into play – often it’s essential to send visitors to a specific landing page, especially when you are using search engine marketing. Many visitors will leave your landing page without making a purchase if they do not find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.

The Commission Junction affiliate network, or CJ.com, is one of the largest networks serving US and UK based affiliates and merchants. But I’ve never found it the easiest network to use, and until recently, I thought it was not possible to deeplink to specific pages or products – the same as with Clickbank. But many merchants do provide a deeplinking option if you know where to look.

How to find out if a merchant offers a deeplinking option:

• Go to the ‘advertise details’ page for a merchant then click on the link type you want to use at the right hand side of the page:

To find out if the merchant you want to link to allows it go to the merchant links area click on a banner or text link if deep linking is allowed there will be a note next to ‘Destination’ which says ‘Advertiser allows URL redirects for this link.’

How to create deeplinks:

• click ‘Get HTML’ besides one of the links from the list of results. (If you select more than one link with the checkboxes, then you will not be taken to the deeplinking page).

When you are given the HTML for the link, you will find out whether you can make this particular link into a deeplink. Unfortunately you currently have to check each link for a merchant to see if you can deeplink with it. This is something CJ are looking into changing, and according to their blog you can give them a call on 020 8785 5870 if you can’t find a deeplink for a merchant.

The image below shows the field you are looking for – a destination link option:

Change destination link to the URL of the page you want to an affiliate link to, then  click the ‘Update Link Code’ button.

Then, grab your deeplink code.

So, it was good timing that as I began to feel this way, I heard about several networking events happening near to me in London. First of all, I bought a ticket for the A4U Expo this year, which takes place in October. But whilst waiting for that event, I came across a free show called the ‘Online Marketing Show’, and I went along to both days of that this week. I even got the chance to sit on an affiliate panel for a debate on ‘the Principles of Affiliate Marketing’ – a nice opportunity to meet new people, especially since it was my first networking event!

There is another affiliate networking event this summer, which is free and specifically for socialising (unlike the Online Marketing Show). Drinks are free drinks and so is the BBQ, courtesy of all the big UK serving affiliate networks!

If like me, you think this sounds like a perfect chance to get out and meet other affiliates (away from a computer screen), then you can get full details and information on reserving a ticket over on the Affiliate Window event blog post, although tickets are limited. (For some reason I couldn’t get the ticket booking site to work through my Firefox browser, so I had to use IE). Perhaps I’ll see you there?

Video tutorial on installing and using phpBB (for Bluehost Users)

Professional ebook graphics are an absolute must for ebook publishers, but are by no means cheap, especially as you need to have them custom created by a graphic designer. Most graphics services will charge around $99 for a single cover design.

Unfortunately I’m not a graphic designer, so I’ve often looked out for a software solution that creates unique ebook covers, but the quality of most of them is far from appealing. However, one piece of software that is widely used is this ebook cover creator. The software is easy to use, costs $67 and does everything for you – creating custom 3D report covers, ebook covers, or boxes. Best of all, you can create as many different covers or boxes as you want with it.