Beat The Panda Update
We’re going to discuss how you can resurrect an extremely successful, autopilot cash strategy that many internet marketers thought Google had made obsolete with it’s latest algorithm update – The Panda Update. I want to walk you through how you can adapt the quick, small and easy sniper website strategy to the new Panda update with some small changes. This allows you to still take advantage of the sniper site, (now dubbed the Panda Sniper site) and it’s quick route to cash.
These panda sniper sites are made up of just four web pages that contain content specifically designed to please the new Google update. On top of that we cover extremely powerful backlinking methods that are specifically designed to “please the panda”, boosting you up the rankings to the number one spot,and more importantly, letting you stay there.
So, What is SEO?
SEO is search engine optimization, which is what it sounds like! It is optimizing various things (normally your web pages and the links to your web pages) so that they are more in line with what search engines want. You have to optimize your pages to certain keywords. Keywords are the search terms or phrases that people put into a search engine. If your page is optimized best for that keyword it will appear at the top of the search results for the keyword.
Now as I mentioned, there are two main parts of SEO, on page and off page. The on page optimization is adding your keywords strategically to your pages, controlling their content and making them accessible to the search engines. Off page SEO involves creating “backlinks” to your page. These are clickable links from sites that direct viewers to your page. We’ll expand on this later…
On page optimization is very important, and a lot of people have neglected this part of SEO and as a result, not achieved the rankings they could have. On page consists of a number of different attributes that all add up to better search engine ranks. These include Header tags or H tags, 1, 2 and 3. You also need to italicize, underline, and BOLD your main keyword at least once per post. Your posts should be at least 1000 words each. You should link once to an inner page, and once to an authority site.
Now as you may already know, Google had a large update of it’s main algorithm in early (and throughout) 2011. This update was called the “Panda” update. So next up, lets learn how to please the panda.
A Panda?
Now we are going to go over Googles most recent large update to see how it affects our strategy. Read through this section carefully to have a good idea about the Panda update, and what you may have been missing out on!
Panda’s large focus is on improving the quality of the search results. This is what you need to drum into your mind – quality, Quality, QUALITY! All content needs to be 100% unique and it needs to be both lengthy and valuable. Panda likes each page of a site to be well targeted at a specific keyword. No more making a whole site just to blast a single one (well not quite!).
Sites also need to be easy to navigate and easy to access. No page should be further then about 3 clicks away from another page.
Now a big thing is that panda is a large threat for the classic auto blogs (blogs that automatically get content from all over the Internet and post it) and sniper sites (sites highly targeted on one product). In almost all cases, these sites do not provide any real value; and that is why panda devalues them. We all heard the stories from the forums and maybe friends, that had these sniper sites all over the search engines. A day goes by and BAM! All of their ranks are lost forever. Simply put, this type of site is no longer viable with Google. You have to provide a real quality presence on your site to get Google’s attention, and achieve higher ranks. Just ask the thousands of people who’s sites disappeared overnight ?!
There are rumors that the Panda update will soon start to monitor the average amount of time people spend on your pages to add to their measure of relevance. This is a very natural assumption to say that a good website will hold peoples attention because it’s content is relevant and interesting to the searchers that end up there. This is all just part of a growing trend towards making the search results better.
Next is a short leap from the on page SEO. The Panda update wants high quality backlinks as well as high quality page content. Now more then ever, authority is king. The Panda update is now much more interested in less high authority backlinks then a load of low quality, non-relevant backlinks.
The update is also very interested in social media and social backlinks so this is going to be an integral part of our strategy. Google is now stated that it is constantly crawling Facebook and Twitter for news about what is relevant and what is popular. This is just how the world works now, people link things on social media sites so Google is right to take it into consideration when determining the rankings.
Just to prove how much Google thinks social media is the evolution of the Internet, they have not long ago launched Google+ which they have pumped millions into!
Another large point about panda is the media of your backlinks. Videos are a growing source of SEO power and using them can have a brilliant effect on your rankings. If Google wasn’t interested in video why did it buy Youtube? This is something we will take into account our link strategy.
Now a lot of the update is really obvious stuff, improvements that give better rankings to quality, to relevance, to sites that are deemed popular (through social media). All of these factors would end up putting websites that truly are good sites at the top of the rankings.
Now that is not to say that Google doesn’t like SEO, in fact it encourages it because that makes it’s job easier. What it doesn’t like are tactics that force rankings. Now the Panda sniper sites we are going to make may sounds to you just like the old sniper product review sites that used tactics to force rankings, but really they are much more. The sites we are going to design will contain quality content, they will abide by all of Panda’s rules.
The turning point with our panda sniper sites is the fact that they are targeted at very low competition, buyer keywords as well as containing great, relevant content. Don’t be fooled into thinking that this means they are going to take forever to put together though, once you have revised the formula you will have no problem doing one of these a week and if you follow the outsourcing section you could end up with a self-sustaining group of teams that creates 2-3 per team per week!
Each of these sites will be generating $50 absolute minimum per month! Oh now you are excited! Lets get started.
Which Word is Key?
This is our first important step when thinking about almost anything to do with search engines, after all if nothing is “searched” there are no results. You need to make sure your main keyword and your subsequent keywords are selected very wisely as they will affect the rest of your work (luckily, unlike most ranking campaigns each panda sniper site takes a relatively short time to complete so if you don’t get this quite right, it is easy to refine for your next site).
So what keywords are we looking for? You may have noticed before I used the term Buying Product Name Keywords (BPNKs), these are a lot simpler then they may sound, lets use an example;
“Xbox 360 Review”
Simple hey? That is the name of a product and it is a buyer keyword because people are looking for a review of it, they wouldn’t want a review if they weren’t interested in buying it.
The great thing about these types of keywords is that they lend themselves brilliantly to affiliate commissions (you link someone to a site selling said product and you take a percentage of the profit). This is great because you are usually directing the viewer to a site like Amazon which is respected and which they feel comfortable buying from.
So where to start when selecting keywords? First up you need to make sure you have a product to sell (or more likely, promote).
As I mentioned before, Amazon is a great place to find products to promote. Just select the Amazon Associates program at the bottom of their page to sign up. The process is very straight forward, you get to look through their database and select products to promote. You get a personal link to that product and if anyone makes a purchase through that link, you get a commission.
What you want to do is to select about 10-20 products that have decent commissions so that you can start coming up with keywords for them.
First you will want to use Google Insights to get an idea about rising trends in keywords for the products you have selected.
Insights is a great tool for research, it shows you information about interest and is great to see if something is becoming more popular or in decline. Or if it has a yearly season such as weight loss products that have a massive decline in December and a high in January for New Years resolutions:
I have decided that 3D Tvs are a good niche to target based on my Amazon’s affiliate program. Looking at it’s Insights information it is easy to see that sharp recent rise in interest as well as the regional interest (good for pen-names/personalities, you can create an alter-ego from the part of the world that has the highest interest to boost trust and thus boost conversions).
These are all factors that you should be noting down about every keyword you analyze. If it suits you style you may want to make a spreadsheet of keywords and have columns for relative search growth, peak search month, demographics, exact searches and competition. These are just some of the aspects we will look at when we are seeing what the best keywords to target are.
This may all seem like a lot of effort now but trust me it will make your life much easier down the line. When you get into the swing of it you may identify 5-10 great keywords out of your 10-20 selected products. That means you are set for the next 5-10 niche sites you make!
Further down the Insights page you can look at keywords that may be worth looking at:
Google Panda
This is a great tool to use but I would suggest that you make the search range smaller when looking at rising searches. This is because Insights will show you percentage increases in searches since about 2004, but since that is such a long time period you can find that search terms may have risen by a massive percent but dropped off again as a fad ends.
There is nothing wrong with a fad, if you get in on it at the right time that is. They can make much more money then a nice stable method but they will not last very long. Make sure if you pick some fad products (newest phones for example) that you also select some stable products (games consoles for example) as well.
What you should do is make notes of these top and rising searches and then go to their insights pages to check out their individual details. After you have found out what searches seem popular (samsung 3d tv for example) then you will want to target some buying variations of the keywords such as “buy”, “review” or “scam” (for scam you would talk about a scam and then point them to a legitimate location to purchase).
Off course there are more buying keywords you can add to the keywords you have identified, just think about what you would type into a search engine if you wanted more information about something you wanted to buy.
Using the buying keywords you can start to look into their insights numbers to really narrow down what to target. For each product you may want to find 3-4 potential keywords. After that we will look at how you can start to get some of these numbers behind your keyword ideas.
There are other places to look for keywords. You can look at Clickbank, and begin promoting Clickbank offers. There is also Commission Junction and other CPA accounts that you can attach to your sites, by using their keywords.
The Numbers Game
By now you should have maybe 3 or 4 potential buyer keywords for each of your selected products (really need about 5 selected products absolute minimum in case none of them prove viable options). Each of these keywords should look good as far as Insights is concerned, either with rising or stable popularity over a year or two.
It should not have taken too long to find this information out by already you should have narrowed down your product options.
Next it is time to use Googles Keyword tool (Google it!) to get some numbers about the keywords. Year your insights information may show a 1,000% increase in interest over the last year but if it only has a few searches per week it is likely no use to you.
What you need to do for Google’s Keyword Tool is to paste all of the keywords you have found into the “word or phrase” box with one on each line. Make sure you select to “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” and also select “[exact]” (this gets you the actual results for the keyword and not results from the keyword and all similar keywords combined.). You can also set the locations via the advanced options to the countries where the most searches were from. Also make sure Amazon or your other affiliate program can deliver goods to the country you target:
With all of that done you can run the search, make sure you select to sort by relevance:
Looking at the results you can see that “buy 3d tv”, “samsung 3d tv review” and “3d tv review” are all good enough keywords to target. The great thing about this is that a lot of keyword research guides tell people to select keywords with over 30,000 broad matches, for a start most of these could potentially not be related to your actual keyword.
Also buying keywords generally have 10-15x the conversions of non-buying keywords so 1,000 – 3,000 doesn’t sound so bad any more. Now the good point is that because so many people just don’t understand good search engine marketing there will be lots of competition for these broad search, non-buying keywords!
If you take advantage of the method we are using you can rank for the same amount of traffic with much less trouble!
This step allows you to remove some of your insights results so that you can more closely target some other ones. At this point you should chop off any results with under 1,000 exact views and make a note of how much monthly views the remaining ones have (up to about 5,000 – 6,000 views max I would say).
After that you can always have a look at some suggested related keywords in the box below. Sort these by “global monthly searches” (check local as well if your selected country has the large majority).
In my example with limited keywords searched for there don’t seem to be any better options then the ones I have already identified (I only did a search on 6 keywords). Our aim at the moment is to find one powerful main keyword for each product (later in our optimization we will add further keywords but they are more for boosting our main keyword then for ranking themselves).
At this point you should have a few keywords that seem reasonable for each product you have selected through insights and some suggested keywords from the keywords tool, each of these should be buying keywords to boost your conversions (buy, best, review, comparison, scam etc.).
Next up we are going to look at the actual first page competition for each result, there is no point trying to rank for a keyword where the first page is full of high quality, highly targeted information about the product you are after because it will be a nightmare to rank for.
Scouting the Competition
To start this chapter we take a look at a big false assumption that a lot of marketers make when it comes to analysing the competition. Let me show you how they do their analysis:
1,860,000 results = 1,860,000 competing sites.
I even put the search in “quotations” so that those words in that order are searched for. Now you may be surprised to find that a lot of search engine marketers actually use that as their competition analysis. Yes sure it is going to give you a very rough idea of how popular the topic of reviewing 3d tvs is but that doesn’t mean at all that anywhere near that amount of pages is optimized to the keyword!
What is the phrase appears once on the page at the end of an article somewhere? That certainly is not optimized to the phrase.
What we actually need to do is to look at the top few websites to judge their threat level to our sniper site ranking for the keyword.
Now when taking position into account you really need to get in the top few places on the first page and here is why:
This graph shows you the average percentage of traffic you will receive by ranking in various positions of Google’s first and second pages. Can you see now why it is so important to get in the first or at worst the a few out of the second, third and fourth places?
Yes the keyword may get 3,000 keen to purchase viewers per month but if you are not in the top spot you are only likely to see about 300 of them at the best of times. What we need to do is scout out the top few places in the search results of our keywords to see if we should be able to take them out.
When analyzing the competition it is important to keep the Panda review in mind. If a site is not panda optimized that does not mean it necessarily won’t be at the top of the page, it may have ranked there months ago and think it is safe. It is important to do this analysis still because if you create a site that the Panda review likes (which you will) then you should have a much easier time overtaking the competing ranking sites.
When analyzing the top sites you want to see how relevant their content is to the keyword. How optimized are these pages to the keyword (ctrl+F to search for the keyword in the page to see if it is in the titles, strategically in the paragraphs, bolded, italicised, in a hyperlink etc.). Does it read well? Is it trying to provide value instead of just trying to sell you something? Is there a load of advertising ruining the experience? Are the posts lengthy and useful? Is the site easy to navigate? Is there a social aspect (comments, likes, +1’s, twitter feeds)?
You should also look at downloading an SEO toolbar, with this we can look at the sites statistics in more detail (I suggest you use Firefox as a browser to make this much easier).
The tool you want to download is SEO Quake – http://www.seoquake.com/
There are lots of great uses for this toolbar but the main thing we will use it for is assessing page rank of pages and backlinks (PR is a number created by Google from 1-10 which denotes how powerful a site is, for example a powerful blog would be about 4, a massive authority site like Amazon is about 8).
Once again it sounds like a lot of trouble to go to but if you don’t spend perhaps just a day or so analysing the keywords you may was weeks to months trying to rank for keywords that are too difficult. You should analyse the top three results of each of the potential main keywords you have found for each product. A PR of 3 or under is likely the highest you can target (but still do the panda checks just to see).
This is a really important step because the last thing you want to do is drop the in depth keyword research by being greedy for faster cash. Properly identifying the best keywords to target will save you a massive amount of time compared to just rushing it. If you don’t do this research then the chances are good that you will either spend weeks if not months longer then necessary to hit the top three or more likely, you will fail to get anywhere near the first page and give up long before you get any results.
Next up we are going to look at getting your site setup and ready to profit.
Site Creation
At this point you should have a main keyword that you are happy with for the product you want to promote. What you need to do with this keyword is to turn it into several keywords to please the panda review (each page optimized to one keyword).
To do this we are going to use what are known as nested keywords. These are where you basically add a word or two to your keyword (not a word like “the” or “then” or “a” or anything like that though) to make it into a long-tail keyword. This will rank for the whole keyword but still contribute to your main keyword ranking. (buy 3d tv to buy samsung 3d tv for example)
Another thing you are going to use to change your keywords is latent semantic indexing (LSI), this is when you change parts of your keyword to other words with the same meaning for example “pill” and “supplement”, “buy” and “purchase”. Just think of it like using a thesaurus, the search engines will still rank them as the same but it will be more Panda friendly.
So what you need to do now is to get a website set up to actually use these keywords on.For the most part I am going to assume you know how to get your domain and hosting linked and setup, if you don’t then it will only take you a minute to Youtube or Google it.
It is important to try for an exact match domain, this is not going to shoot you to number one but it is one of many elements that will make your life easier. By exact match I mean www.[yourmainkeyword].com, if this isn’t available then try to get something other then .com, and if that doesn’t work then try adding a word to make it one of your nested keywords.
You need to get this domain from somewhere like Namecheap and then you need to link it to some hosting (the online space for your website), you can find this from a site like Hostgator. Once again this is something you can easily look up on YouTube if you are not familiar. When you have that all set up you will want to install WordPress on it (trust me, it is extremely powerful) and then get a theme sorted.
Themes
There are two themes (designs for your WordPress website) that work extremely well with regards to SEO and they are:
1. Clickbump Engine
This theme got big about a year ago when it was found to be one of the best themes ever developed to rank naturally with the search engines. With regards to adsense it often gets three times the click rate of the standard theme. This is due quite a lot to the placement of the ads, so placing any ads, Adsense or not (so your affiliate promotion!) will give them a boost over other themes.
2. CTRTheme
CTR theme is more advanced then Clickbump engine and has more flexibility in terms of navigation and looks.
Now for our purposes with the small panda sniper site I think it is going to be best to stick with Clickbump. It will be easier for you to use and since the sites do not need to be too detailed it is a great choice to stick to.
Plugins
This section covers one of the reasons that WordPress is so powerful – plugins. Once again there is not much I can change here from my other products, the plugins I always use are still very viable. Plugins are small programs that you can install to your wordpress site to make many aspects of your ranking much easier.
To get them just search for them here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
Lets look at the essential plugins you will want:
W3 Total-cache
This plugin is really useful, especially with the panda review. What it does is make your pages load faster and also stores static versions of your site so that it requires much less CPA power then using WordPress normally. It is essential to cater for the loading speed preferences introduced with the new review.
Headspace SEO
This plugin is a brilliant new SEO plugin that gives you all of the features you need to optimize your website for the search engines. On page optimization (as opposed to off page optimization or backlinking) can make up about 25% of your ranking efforts, with this plugin you can get that boost and concentrate all of your efforts on providing great content.
WP Onlywire Autoposter
This plugin sends your blog posts to over 20 social networking sites. This is a very good one to get about a week or two into your ranking when the search engines are regularly visiting your site to index your new posts.
Google XML Site Map
This will create an XML Sitemap which helps search engines to navigate your site and thus index new pages better. Additionally this notifies all major search engines every time you create a new post.
SEO Smart Links
This is a brilliant plugin that lets you easily link your posts using your keywords. This gets readers to visit more of your site to pass PR. Internal linking is a big factor in the Panda review so this gives you a bonus.
TweetMeme
Here we have another great plugin. Tweetmeme is a plugin that adds small green boxes to the top right of blog posts. This acts as an eye-catching way for readers to share your post with a click to Twitter. It also comes with tracking capabilities so you can see lots of great information about how your blog posts are doing on Twitter.
Make sure you configure the plugin as soon as you have installed it to change the source of the tweets to your twitter handle and not Tweetmeme’s.
Digg Digg
This is another plugin that will give you more social capabilities. Digg Digg adds social media sharing icons for sites like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Stumbleupon and +1 so that people can easily share a post they like with their social media following. Once again this is an essential point that the Panda review loves.
SEO Friendly Images
This little plugin just updates all of your images with ALT and TITLE tags for SEO purposes.
With all of that done you should have all of the plugins you need to move on. All you need to do is make sure you install them as per the instructions on the download page, if you have any trouble then as always just put it into Google or Youtube and a solution is bound to pop up.
Next you need to change a few of the settings on your website to give it an extra SEO boost. Start off by copying and posting all of these into the “update service” field so that when you post pages they notify these pinging services so that your page will get indexed faster:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://mod-pubsub.org/knapps/blogchatt
http://ping.amagle.com
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping
http://www.blogoon.net/ping
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogroots.com/tbpopuli.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/knapps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
These make your posts much more visible which is always a great boost.
Now you need to make sure that the privacy settings are correct. Go back to settings and select “privacy”. Make sure the option “I would like my site to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers. If this box is not checked, no one will be able to find your blog!
Under settings go to Permalinks, click on custom structure then enter –
/%category%/%postname%
This ensures that your posts are search engine friendly as well.
With all of that done your website should be all ready to go. What we need to take a look at next is just getting some good content up on the site to flesh it out.
Content Creation
At the moment you should have a website all finished and optimized, you now need a reason for the search engines to take note of your site in the first place. What you need is some great content to grab their attention. You need to know that when I say you need some great content, it really does need to be great because of the sniper style of our sites.
As you should know by now, the review is all about quality content, without the quality your rankings will drop like a stone (or never rise in the first place).
The content needs to be designed for the end user and not the search engine (well it does, but don’t sacrifice readability for keyword placement).
So what content do you need to make exactly?
Luckily you only need about 6 good information posts to rank well with the Panda update, but they do need to be high quality!
Every post needs to be at least 1,000 words long and completely, 100% unique. The review loves long, detailed, quality posts. I would say 1,000 up to about 1,500 should be fine for each.
Each post needs a title containing your targeted keyword first (and another time if you can make it look natural) and paragraph (meta) description containing the targeted keyword about three times.
Each post should have quite a high keyword density (about 3% so 30 – 45 times in your long posts) but don’t stuff keywords. You need to make sure it reads well instead of just trying to go for keyword numbers.
Each post should make use of Bold, Italic and Underline, when mentioning keywords. Also making sure the targeted keyword is included in the hyperlink for the post is very important.
So what should each individual post contain SEO wise?
• Number One should target your main keyword identified for your product. It will be posted on your home page on day one.
• Number Two should target an LSI keyword variation of your main keyword. As we covered before an LSI keyword is a keyword that changes words to others of the same meaning (an online thesaurus may help you with ideas). It will be posted on your home page on day six.
• Number Three should target a nested keyword variation of your main keyword. This is just your main keyword + another word so “buy hdtv” could go to “buy samsung hdtv” or “buy 3D hdtv”. Just make sure the new keyword still describes your product because you are going to have to write about it. It will be posted on your home page on day 11.
• Numbers Four, Five and Six will each target other nested keyword variants of your main keyword. Each of these has to be unique. These will be posted to an inner page each at 16, 21 and 26 days respectively.
The actual submission day is not set in stone, just to space 6 post out over a month is one every 5 days (also gives you loads of time to write them). The search engines like constant content so doing this for a month should keep them happy. Usually for the sake of these small sites targeting low competition, low traffic keywords, six is all the content you need because it will shoot your site so far above the competing sites (with some backlinking) that you shouldn’t need more.
If at any point your rankings start to slip you can always add another inner page and just get some more backlinks done. If you want to go a step further you could create an account with Google Webmaster Tools (once again, Google it!). This is a really brilliant online program you can use to get inside the head of the search engine.
It is a really great idea to do this so you can actually see what keywords Google is picking up from your site, what keywords are ranking and also how many people are actually clicking through to your site from what keyword searches.
These are just a few of the great uses for the webmaster tools, you really should give them a go as it will optimize your SEO and save you time over all. That should be all you need to do to finish all of your content work at the moment! Next up we look at building links to your page to raise it’s rank.
Loving the Links
In this chapter we are going to look at how you can build up backlinks that the panda review is going to love. These are all strategies that have the reviews main aims fresh in their minds. I have added pretty significantly to this area since version 1,so be sure to read up!
Press Release
Our first port of call is the press release. These work very well for new sites (like an offline business, when you start you make a big press announcement) and should be taken advantage of.
A press release is just like a more formal article or post and a good one can end you up on the first spot of Google within 20 minutes (all be it often only for a short time), but this still goes to show the link building power of press releases.
Lets look in a little more detail at what a press release actually is. A press release is pseudo-news story, written in third person, that seeks to demonstrate to an editor or reporter the newsworthiness of a particular person, event, service or product.
As with all things Panda, the most important thing about a press release is it’s content. What you are writing about has to be of interest to the journalist or they won’t cover it. First and foremost it has to be newsworthy.
News has to be new. There is no point publicizing an event or activity that happened a few weeks ago – it’s been and gone. You need to talk about what’s happening now or what’s about to happen. In this case it is likely to be the launch of your new website (better still if this is also the launch of the product that your website is promoting as this adds credibility).
You can submit your press release to sites such as PR log to distribute it to major sites like Google News. As I mentioned before, this is what gives your press release the chance to appear on the first page of Google within about 15 minutes if you write a compelling report.
Here is a great template for you to use for your press release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The Headline of Your Press Release Goes Here (Your headline should follow case title capitalization rules, and generally fall in the 80-120 character range. Is should give the essence of the news contained in the release, without blatantly trying to act “cute” or “catchy.” A solid news angle is catchy in and of itself.)
This is where you should include your press release summary, especially when using online press release distribution, as many distribution services require one. A press release summary should be approximately 1-3 sentences long, and should give the reader more details on the news, and at least a mention of the company or person distributing the release.
City, State – Month Date, Year – After you’ve listed the release date and hometown in your dateline, you should begin the intro paragraph for the body of your press release.
Press release paragraphs should be short, and no more than 3-4 sentences in most cases. Your intro paragraph should very basically answer the questions of who?, what?, when?, where?, and why?
You should try to add at least one solid quote into your news release (perhaps from a chairman of the company that launched the product you are promoting).
A quote can be broken down into multiple parts, and is often the most ideal way to mention the individual’s expert status or credentials in the topic area of the news angle, as well as mentioning their company, website, and live URL for online distribution and PR SEO efforts. Only use quotes for information that needs to be quoted, such as needing the clout of an executive behind it.
As you continue writing the body of your press release, you should keep thinking like a journalist. Write with an inverted pyramid style, where you would present your most newsworthy information first, and work your way down to the less significant supporting facts. Remember that you only have a few seconds to grab the attention of a journalist. Any information that won’t help you do that should be reserved for later areas in the press release body.
About Company XYZ
After you’ve given all of the necessary information pertaining to your news angle in the body of your news release, you should add an “about” paragraph commonly known as a boilerplate. A boilerplate is often identical on every release sent out by a company, and serves as a means of providing journalists with additional, and more generic, background information about the company or individual sending the press release.
For more information about Company XYZ, or this particular news angle, please contact [Your Name at Your Phone Number.] (If you distribute online, you might not want to include an email address here, as it can subject you to spam. Many distribution sites will protect your email address from harvesters, and some don’t allow them at all in the body area of a press release.)
Contact Info:
Your Name
Your Title
Company Name
Phone: 555-555-5555
Email: your.name@yourcompany.com
Web: www.XYZcompany.com
(You can include your mailing address as well, but it’s not often necessary.)
### (This mark, among others such as -30-, tells the journalist that they’ve reached the end of the press release, and there aren’t any additional pages to come.)
This should give you more then enough of a template to work with when it comes to creating your press release.
Now as I mentioned your press release getting a chance to make it to Googles number one spot if it is good, that means there is all the more reason to optimize it extremely well.
You should use all the rules that we covered with regards to keywords in the website posts (B, I, U , hyperlinks, density, placement etc.) to make sure that your press release gives the maximum kick to your panda sniper site’s rankings but at the same time also gives you the chance to pull in some good traffic from the number one spot of Google for your keyword for a while (can be a good traffic tester).
Now I would say you only really need one of these releases as you should only really be submitting to the top directory (Google first and foremost) but you can submit to other directories if you want. If you do want to do this though I would suggest that you try to redo a good 40% of the press release as duplicate content is not brilliant for rankings.
Remember unique and quality are two things that the Panda Review really loves so try and stick to those. For the link from this you should direct it to your main page and it should be submitted as soon as your first post is live.
After you have the two to three press releases pointing at your site, then link to the press releases with some social book marks.
Video Marketing
Video marketing is an essential part of marketing now days and it is something that the search engines are taking increasing notice of. Now I know that you may have tried to get some success with a video before and that it can be tough, but the search engines also know that and because of this it seems anecdotal that they do give a big boost for videos as long as they are relevant and useful to the viewer.
The Strategy…
Here you are going to create videos and upload them to video sharing sites like Youtube and Dailymotion. Then you will place a link at the bottom of the video to your site. Then the videos will get backlinked by Article Marketing Robot to boost their PR (page rank).
Now relevance of a video is a very hard thing to judge for a search engine as an algorithm cannot watch a video to decide what it is about. All the information has to come in the title and description (which will be fully SEO optimized) as well as in the figures from people watching the video.
As you should know from Google Webmaster Tools, Google tracks things like click through rate so naturally if lots of people click through the link in your video description or embedded as a video watermark, your videos is likely to be of good quality. You should also know that Google owns Youtube and because of this it is very likely that they could monitor the average percentage of a video that is watched by people and by this judge how good the quality of the video is.
Now what are you going to make a video about? Well off course the product you have reviewed would be a good start. If you actually own the product you are going to be at an advantage but you don’t need one. Using pictures of the product can work just fine for a video review or test. Try to create a good quality video that is informative and useful to the viewer. This is a very easy step for you to just figure you should gloss over and skip but trust me it is not hard and it does make a big difference.
If you use a screen capture program like Camtasia (if you have already used it’s free trial then searching around online may find a key for you) it is very easy to put together a short video to review your product choice. You need to upload this video to Youtube using all your usual SEO methods such as keywords in the title, keyword rich description, relevant tags etc.
Have a anchor text link with your main keyword in back to your main page and post this video at the end of week two.
Don’t worry too much about views, you can always use a site like Fiverr (a great site we will cover later) to pay someone to get views to your video (requesting that each person watches the whole video as long as you keep it short shouldn’t be too much of an ask).
Social Media Marketing
Here we come up to the link building for your third week. At this point the search engines should start to take notice of your site so it is time to get the big guns out. Social media is a massive part of the new update and it is a massive part of Googles game plan (just look at Google+).
At this point we are going to start looking at a more intense link building strategy, though it is one that should keep your rankings at the top.
Google takes a lot of notice of sites with social influence and it is well documented that sites that have their work syndicated through Facebook and Twitter do very well in the rankings.
This strategy is going to look at creating a Twitter network and a Facebook network and then linking then via Google+.
First up we cover Facebook.
1. What you need to first is to get a Facebok page set up. This first page will target the main keyword of your website and will be your main FB page.
You will want to check the vanity URL (a permalink, check settings) of your Facebook page to see if you can change it to your main keyword (or at least a nested version) for SEO purposes.
With this done you would end up with; http://www.facebook.com/yourmainkeyword
Finding an image for your page is going to help (this is a social place so you page will need to at least look nice for people to take any notice). Maybe a brand picture with photoshop or GIMP, or maybe you could find someone to outsorce to for a quick picture. (If all else failed then a happy picture of you smiling can sometimes do the job!).
You need to customise your page with relevant information about your website – optimize this with your keywords.
Upload your Youtube video and create a quick slideshow review of the product – upload it to slideshare and then download the slideshare app to FB.
A great step to go further and one that the Panda review really loves is if you link to authorities in your niche for quality information. To do this well you can create an RSS feed in Google Reader, find about five authority pages relating to the product you have reviewed (tech sites or manufacturers for Tvs for example). If you are stuck for these you could find FB pages with a few thousand likes and get their RSS feed. Clicking this icon opens up a window with the Feeds URL, you can paste this to Google Reader (if you haven’t already, you got it, Google it! ).
You can then use Yahoo Pipes Feed to combine this RSS feeds into one Feed which you can put on to your FB page (try something like RSS graffiti app for this). There you have it, great quality content that automatically updates to your page and you don’t have to do anything (best of all, the search engines love this).
Finally, make sure you have a link going from this main FB page to your website homepage.
2. This is the second stage of the FB part. You need to create another three pages that each target one of the nested keywords that you are using for your website inner pages.
Same as last time, add some nice related pictures, add some information (if your posts have been indexed then you can think of using them here – ONLY if they have already been indexed and are showing up in the search engines though), optimize the page to your keywords, claim the vanity URL (if possible) etc.
For these you can add the RSS feed from your website, this does not do wonders in an SEO sense but it gives more chance to actually get people to your page. People visiting your page from FB pages is seen as social and therefore is beneficial as far as the Panda in concerned.
If you want you can combine your feed with some authority ones as well in Yahoo Pipes for more SEO benefit (you should have one unique feed per FB page you create though).
You should link you nested FB pages in to your main page, which in turn links directly with Anchor Text to your Website.
With all that done you can leave the FB pages, these should be fine as they are (though once again, you can use a site like Fiverr to buy some likes if you want).
3. Here is our first step for the Twitter Network. It is very important for ranking, even more so then FB in most cases.
Lucky for you, the Twitter set up is very similar to what you did with your FB page network.
First up you want to try and get your keywords as your username (try adding words that Google ignores if not such as “the”, “a”, “how” etc.) this is going to help for SEO reasons.
Once again you will want to add a picture (this time a personal picture can be more accepted), you can then put down your name and you location (both up to you, may want to put your location as your identified main demographic from your keyword research).
You need to add your home page URL with your main keyword anchor text as well as a bio (optimize it!).
With all of that done you can start to follow some people (unless you want to get templates etc on your profile to make it more pretty, which isn’t wrong!).
As before you should go to find some authorities in the niche of your promoted product. These are the same types of people or companies that you looked for with your FB RSS feeds.
A good judge of authority is a Klout Score (representative of social influence). This is quite simple to understand, just Google it and use it to get the score of some niche authorities. Select the ones with the Highest Klout to follow!
For the content you use on your Twitter site you can easily just use snippets of information from your website content posts as well as new information from the people you follow or your FB pipe feeds.
It is a good plan to do a few small tweets per day. I suggest two small content tweets and one re-tweet from an authority you follow.
That should be everything needed for your main Twitter Site.
4. Here we come to a similar step to the FB network, you need to set up three additional accounts to represent the three inner pages of your website with the nested keywords.
You really just need to do the same steps as you did with the main site for this but make sure everything (bio, location, tag etc.) is optimized to the different keywords.
Once again you want to find some relevant authorities to follow on each of these and you want to follow some of these authorities’ more prominent followers (apps like Tweepi – Google it!, are good for finding out more information about Twitter accounts).
You then want to syndicate your various RSS feeds (from your FB Pages, Your Website, Authorities etc.) and use them on your Twitter pages as they automatically generate content for you. It is also a good idea to look for more influential people and blogs to get RSS feeds from, by searching what people in your niche on Twitter are talking about and following the links.
You then connect these Twitter accounts up to your main Twitter Account with nested keyword anchor text links and bob’s your uncle!
Please don’t fear, even though this may sound like a lot to do, compare to most link campaigns it really is not that much to get great rankings. Another point to add to this is the fact that these networks can easily be added to if your new niche sites are promoting similar products instead of making completely new networks.
Social media is a very big part of rankings now days and most marketers are still just scared to get into it for marketing. Use it’s power, it will make your life much easier!
5. Now we use some Google+ integration. Google+ as I am sure you know is Googles Social Network, it’s creation alone shows you how important Google thinks social media is.
There are two forms of the social site we will be using – Google+ and Google+ Business.
You need to set up a Google+ profile in a very similar way to your FB profile. Upload an image information with main keyword optimization.
You also need to add a link to your website home page where on the side bar it says “Contributor”.
You then need to great a Google+ Business page. Once again this is a very simple process, you select a category, select a keyword specific page name, provide your websites URL, a few more steps and then you create it.
After that you customise it with a tagline – make it gripping and let it contain your main keyword. Get an image selected (similar to the style of image we used for FB) and then share the business profile with your main Google+ profile.
There are just a few things to do after that such as adding a description to the “About” section – use keywords! Once again add your website link to the sidebar as well as your Main FB and Twitter profile links (also selecting a few non-competitive authority sites related to your product is a good idea).
At the moment Google+ is not a massive authority so you should be fine using just the one profile targeting your main keyword but in the future that could change and it may be worth setting up a network similar to on FB and Twitter.
The final stage of this then is to add <a href=”[profile_url]?rel=author”>Google+</a> to your main website (replacing [profile_url] with the actual URL of your Google+ profile) and your main Twitter and FB pages. This shows that you are the author of the Google+ page and will give you an authority boost. You should also link your main page to your FB and Twitter pages (not often you link out from your ranking page but in this case it is more natural).
This should be done in the first week with the links from the main hubs of each social network pointing to your home page. You should post a small amount of content to most of these networks at least each every other day for a few weeks. For a boost you can always look on Fiverr for people selling likes, re-tweets or +1’s as that helps to boost your social media image to the Panda.
High PR Blog Comments
Our final backlinking method is a simpler one and is one I use often (sorry if you have read my other products but this is a great technique I use often and cover in a few of them!).
What you essentially do is you find blogs with a High Page Rank (usually also a .edu or .gov page) and you post high quality, relevant and useful comments on them as well as leaving a link to your website that works as a reference.
For this the links are going to go to the inner pages you have created (this is also useful because the inner pages can be less sales-ey and about things like scams, faults or something like that and thus is more likely to leave the link on the comment in tact).
So here is what we do … we are going use SEO quake (an SEO toolbar – Google it!) so that we can learn the PR of the blog article pages we find.
We are going to find these pages by using search strings to get Google to quickly show us the types of blog that we want to find.
Search strings are very useful to use as SEO marketers, they allow you to refine search engine results so only the specific site types that you are looking for gets returned. Now we have mentioned that .edu and .gov backlinks are often targeted and this is because they are trusted, so that is a good place to start (although this is only a generalization, .com, .info etc. can be just as powerful): .edublogs
inurl:.edu+inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -“Login to post a comment” -”you must be logged in” “keywords”
This just means that it will search for urls with .edu in them, that it is a blog, that it contains the words “Post a comment” but does not contain the phrases ”comments closed”, “Login to post a comment” or ”you must be logged in”. You then type your keywords into the box that says “keywords” so the blogs will be related to your website.
Now there are a few options you can think of changing here, first of all you could think about changing the .edu to another domain prefix and you could also remove the -“Login to post a comment” -”you must be logged in” section if you don’t mind registering with a blog before you can post comments (This is often a good idea as it is more credible, setting up a profile on the blog helps boost this).
What we will want to do is just put these strings into a Google search and it should return lots of .edu blog posts.
You should notice that you have to use shorter keywords as you are doing a very specific search “TV” might work following the example we have been looking at through the product, this way we will get more results and have more blogs to pick from.
As I mentioned before, you are likely to be safer with a blog that you have to register with first though as this discourages a lot of lazy search engine optimizers, these may be the best places to look in order to keep your links safe from moderation on the blogs.
Now another problem you may run into is that when you try to post a comment you get a message saying you are not allowed. This will generally be down to tracking where the blog does a check on how you found their site and if it is with a search string or other method that “natural” traffic wouldn’t use then it blocks you.
The work around is to just copy and paste the url into a new browser as that will show different tracking.
If this doesn’t work then try searching for the home page url in your search bar and just try to navigate to the article you were at through the website.
Lets just run over how you should comment (yes I am sure you can guess that it will be similar to all of the other panda optimized content that we have been doing!).
It is very important that you give a great full reply to the blog post that contributes and expands on it.
To make sure that your post has the biggest effect, you should try to use this format ;
name: your targeted nested keyword
website: website page you want to rank
email: website domain based email address
comment: As I mentioned before, you need to give a very detailed, on topic relevant and thoughtful comment, the longer the better! You should absolutely not put any HTML in the comment as it will be seen as spam and removed or not even put up in the first place, you should only leave a backlink in the website box.
Using this method to send high quality, SEO optimized backlinks to your inner pages you can really help to give your SEO that extra push!
This should be started in your fourth week and continued with your Social Network linking until you hit the top spot (or maybe until you are happy with the recurring income you are getting).
You should be using the webmaster tools to analyze your ranking efforts to see if they are getting better with time.
And that is that (well almost), with that done you should be able to either start over making another site to start profiting from whilst enjoying the income from this one or……… you could start looking to outsource the process now that you are familiar with it so that instead of creating one site a month, a team of people create 8,16,24 or more sites for you each month!
Tools
There are a number of tools you can use to help you automate things as far as backlink building. I wouldn’t recommend using too much of the super automated tools; at least, not blasting thousands of links at your sites at once. The following tools I am going to show you are really all you need to build links to your site, and in a coming email I will advise you the steps and tools required to start your very own seo service!
One tool which can be utilized is Article Marketing Robot. I showed you above the social bookmarks and AMR blasts to your press releases for your webistes. This is very effective. However, AMR can also be used in moderation to build diverse article links directly to your site. Just remember not to blast the whole thing at once to your sites, use it carefully.
The two other tools I use to build links regularly are Build My Rank and Linkvana. Both of the tools build high PR backlinks to your site and have great qualities. Once again, I reccomend signing on to both and AMR for link diversity and a serious mind made up before doing so! Signing on to all these tools are WAY cheaper than hiring a pro SEO service for your site, especially when you get more than one website. And of course, you can even start your own SEO agency, which I will mail you about in the future; just something to think about!
Another really great way to pick up backlinks is by placing high PR comments on websites with authority. All you have to find is websites accepting comments, with High PR pages. When you register and leave your comment and it is accepted, you have yourself a high PR backlink!
Outsourcing Your Fortune
Now we are just going to look at the possibilities for outsourcing the whole process to make a large, scaling, autopilot income. The first thing you will want to do is to sign up to a website such as oDesk or eLance (not freelancer, that’s awful!). From there you can post jobs and outsourcers will bid for the job, allowing you to select which ever suits you best for price and sample quality.
Now as you might suspect, you will need someone for every step of the process. You need a content creator to create the initial six posts for the site, you will need a website designer to get the website set up and optimized and you will need someone to sort out your backlinks for you.
Now the great thing about having multiple people is that they can all run at the same time getting one or two websites set up and going each week.
By multiplying everything up you can see that 6 posts per website is going to be 6,000 – 9,000 words, doing even up to 36,000 words (so 4 whole websites worth at the higher content end) in a week is not a massive work load.
If you stick to 12 of these posts per week then you should be fine. Then as soon as one post is done you can get your content creator to start sending these over to your website designer/optimizer (as well as sending them to you) so they can start automatically uploading themselves every 5 days.
As soon as the first post is ready and uploaded you can also get your backlink creator in on it so they can start boosting rankings. Hell, in most cases you don’t even need that much of a backlink creator if you just look at sites like Fiverr. Using these sites you should be able to get all sorts of parts of your backlinking done for just $5 – videos, social likes etc., press releases, all sorts!
Off course this doesn’t just happen smoothly from the get go, you will want to spend a week or two training up your initial team so that they are familiar with this whole course as well as writing out schedules for each one (important!).
The schedule is a really important thing for not just your work force, but for you to get your head around. Each website’s ranking will last for about one month but every half a week to a week a new site will begin so it will end up with the ranking or 4-8 sites overlapping. You have to factor this in so that each person knows what site they are doing what for on what day.
Still saying this, don’t worry too much, a pattern pops up pretty quickly and the work load is not too much because it is spread between at least three outsourcers.
This really is a great way to make cash because it builds up. Perhaps you end up paying your outsources $500 in one month for creating getting 4 sites up and say that each site only makes $100 (easily achievable), your balance under by $100. Next month they make another 4 sites (now 8 in total) that all make $100 again, carrying over your final loss you now have ; 8 x $100 = $800 and $100 + $500 fees = $200 profit.
Sounding okay now hey?
Want to follow it on a few months?
Month three = $900 total profit, month four = $2000 total profit.
Sounds good seeing as you hardly did any of the work!
This is only if you are keeping things small as well, really every 3 – 4 months you can think of hiring another team and yeah they may start with a small loss and yeah you may have to spend a week or two training them, but after a month or two they will also be giving you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of autopilot cash.
What about when you have too many team to manage? Simple!
You get a virtual assistant to manage the teams for you, you should be able to get one to look after perhaps 4-6 teams easily for maybe $500 per week. You would get them to take charge of everyone as well as giving you daily reports on progress (as you sit on an exotic beach in the Indian ocean sipping a cocktail..).
You can imagine scaling this up still by hiring managers to look after the virtual assistants when you have several of them. The manager can take on your roll by analysing the daily reports and fixing any issues as well as giving you reports perhaps twice a week.
By managing your new autopilot business like this you also create a ranked system that can leave room for promotion as an incentive to work hard.
The sky really is the limit and since you are creating these sites just to rank on Google there is literally an unlimited source of business!
Video Marketing
I wanted to add a little more about creating video marketing for your website because the new Panda algorithm truly pays more attention to those sites that have rich text like video as opposed to sites that don’t. Now that Google owns YouTube, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise because YouTube is the biggest video site on the web, so Google has a huge self interest in promoting it.
Creating video content is not hard and you don’t need to purchase a lot of expensive equipment of download huge programs to do it. I’ve already mentioned using Camtasia to capture screen shots, but now I want to talk about easy ways to create even better videos that will attract even more attention.
Stepping out of the internet and into the real world for a moment, nearly every modern smart phone, digital camera, even desktop PCs come with cameras built into them nowadays. Most shoot high definition video as well, making it a simple task to create an engaging, high-quality video you can use to promote your product.
If you have any of these devices, play around with them for a little while until you can figure out how to get the best quality video you can. If you have a digital camera, for example, use your tripod if you have one to stabilize the image. If you don’t own a tripod and are planning to create a lot of videos to promote your products (given the importance the Panda algorithm gives to videos, this would be a good idea) then you may want to consider investing in a tripod. You can find a bare bones one that will suit your needs quite well for just a few dollars. Or bid on one on eBay. If you aren’t sure you will be shooting a lot of video and don’t want to invest anything yet, at least set the camera on a flat surface so that your video isn’t shaky.
There are a number of different kinds of videos. Take a few minutes to research videos about products like the ones you are promoting and see what your competitors are doing. This helps you create something unique and also learn from their mistakes.
One kind of video is just someone talking about their product.
If you own the product you are promoting, shoot a video showing how it works, explain what its benefits are, how it will improve the lives of the people who buy it. Keep the video short, less than 10 minutes certainly, better yet less than 2 or 3. Remember, the Panda takes into account not only the number of people who click on your video, but also how many watch it all the way through to the end. It’s a good idea at the outset of the video to promise to reveal something important at the end so that they keep watching all the way through.
If you are familiar with the product’s benefits and how to sell them, you don’t necessarily have to write a script. But you will probably want to map out some talking points at the very least.
If you are using the camera on your computer, you can put your script or talking points on the screen to make it easier to remember what you want to say.
If you are just shooting yourself talking about the product, the video should have this kind of structure:
• Greet your viewers and introduce yourself.
• Introduce your product
• Talk a little about the product’s benefits
• If you can demonstrate how it works, do so
• Near the end, reveal something special about the product
• Conclude with the Call to Action: Tell your viewers exactly what it is you want them to do, ie. Visit your website, buy the product
If you are not used to being on camera, try to relax as much as possible. Remember to be friendly and helpful. One helpful tip is to talk with your hands more than your normally would. This creates inflection in your voice and is more interesting to listen to than just a monotone.
The second kind of video is a series of static screen shots, such as a PowerPoint presentation. They can actually be created with PowerPoint, if you already have the program, or you can download a program that will allow you to build one. There are dozens of free sites out there, so go ahead and Google it if you need to.
These kinds of videos are a little bit different than videos of you talking about your product. They are going to be more like commercials than testimonials or sales pitches. For these kinds of videos, you definitely are going to want a script. If you are not confident about your script writing abilities, there are many experienced writers on eLance, Guru or even Fiverr who would be happy to create a script for you for very little money.
But if you want to give it a try yourself, the script should be set up so that there is one line for each slide. The lines should be very short, usually not more than ten words, which means you will have to be very economical with your writing. And obviously, the line should be relevant to what is displayed on the screen.
Each slide will be on the screen only for about 3 seconds, no more than 5, except for the last slide which will stay onscreen until it fades out. That means for a 2 minute video, you are going to need about 25 to 35 lines of text. When you type out your script, it should look like this:
Success Dynamics
Total Lines: 15
Total Running Time (approx. minutes): 1:00:00
Success Dynamic Video Script
1. Have you always dreamed of making money on the internet?
2. Working from your own home and setting your own hours?
3. Making money by owning your own online business can be easy
4. As long as you have the right tools
5. But where can you learn what those tools are?
You computer may have come with a program for recording audio. If so, you can use that to record the audio for your video. Just play your slideshow presentation and use the audio recording program on your computer to put down your audio track following the script if you go. Don’t worry if it’s not professional quality. Just speak slowly and clearly and enunciate your words. Avoid the urge to rush through the script.
If for some reason your computer doesn’t already have an audio recording tool, you can download a program such as Audacity. There are a lot of them available, most of them with free trials. Google it.
It’s normal for people not to like they way they sound on a recording because we aren’t used to hearing our own voices the way other people hear them. So don’t get upset if you are unhappy with the way the audio for your video turned out. If you truly hate it, you can always ask a friend to record the audio for you. Or you can hire a voiceover artist, but unless you are recording a commercial-grade video, this probably wouldn’t be worth the expense.
The last option is kind of unique. There are programs you can download that will take the text from your website and automatically convert it into a video, complete with background music, voiceovers and different slides. Here’s a link to one of them:
http://download.cnet.com/Article-to-Video-Converter/3000-2650_4-10912741.html?tag=mncol;4
It’s free to use, but you have to pay if you want them to distribute your videos for you. Don’t bother, it’s easy to do yourself, especially if you are just going to post it to YouTube, Dailymotion or the other big sites.
Once you have created a video using one of these techniques, try creating a second and third using the other two techniques. This will triple your exposure and give you experience with different types of video production. With internet marketing relying more heavily on videos, this experience is going to pay off in the future, believe me.
Finally, the most important thing: The whole point of creating videos and posting them on popular video sharing sites is to create additional backlinks to your website, so don’t forget to post a link to your site underneath your video. You would be surprised how many people forget this step!
Videos promoting your products are one of the best ways to improve your site ranking on Google and other search engines, and it is guaranteed that future upgrades of the algorithms will rely even more on this medium, so you may as well embrace it because it’s the new reality.
Press Release Marketing
Earlier I discussed at some length the structure of the press release. Now I just wanted to touch base on why this kind of marketing should be an important element of your marketing campaign.
Two things have happened which have changed the way we live in our modern world: The internet has allowed anybody to access information anywhere at any time instantly. And advances in technology have made smart phones, portable electronic tablets, laptops and eReaders affordable enough so that almost everybody can afford to buy them.
While this has been a boon for internet marketers like you and me, there have been some industries that have been destroyed by these two developments, namely traditional media such as newspapers, television and radio.
As recently as ten years ago, these three forms of media monopolized the advertising industry. If a business wanted to promote its goods and services, it was forced to do business with the local newspaper and the local television and radio station.
Today, however, more people are getting their information from the internet, streaming their videos from video sharing sites, and looking for goods and services by using search engines.
This has spelled doom for many long-standing newspapers. Some of the biggest and most important newspapers in the world have shut down or severely reduced the size of their publications. Those that remain are desperately trying to find ways to digitalize their content so that they can hang on to their dwindling influence. Ad revenues have been decimated as loyal readers flock to media that is easier to use and quicker to respond.
In the same way, TV and radio stations are cutting back on their news reporting budgets and focusing more on getting content from other sources. One example of this is how “news” shows are beginning to use Twitter posts from celebrities and sports figures as a regular part of their content.
While Edward R. Murrow may be spinning in his grave, the result of all this is that the press releases now have a better chance of being used by traditional news media. While in the past, editors may have had enough reporting staff to go out and find news on their own, today newsrooms are almost empty and editors must rely more on news releases to fill their newspapers, radio shows and television programs.
Plus there are more places today that require content than there ever have been in the past. Not only has cable and satellite television increased the average viewer’s options in to the hundreds, but online websites, podcasts and streaming media are quickly becoming one of the most important ways people get information.
And all of those outlets need a constant supply of content. As a result, press releases that may have been given a lower priority in the past now take on a new and improved status.
In order to get maximum exposure for your press release, you are going to have to be your own press agent. That means reaching out to the leading media outlets to make sure they are aware of your press release and asking them if they would like to do a story on it. Make yourself available for an interview, either over the phone, in person or, more commonly these days, online via Skype. This will have the dual benefit of promoting your product and improving the profile of your brand.
Because more people are searching for content online than are reading newspapers, watching television or listening to the radio, your press release gives you the opportunity get your message directly to the public, without the filter of reporters or editors. This lets you spread the exact message that you want to distribute.
Now that your press release can get more attention, let’s talk about some ways you can maximize its impact.
The first thing to remember is to use the same keyword techniques you used when creating your web content to SEO your press release. This will ensure that people searching within your niche will be able to find your press release quickly.
The second thing is to keep your brand information consistent with every press release. For example, people love tag lines. These are short phrases that “sum up” the message you are trying to get across. Here are a few examples:
“Just do it”
“I’m lovin’ it”
“Things Go Better With Coke”
“Have it your way.”
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”
“Even a caveman can do it.”
Tag lines just get stuck in people’s heads. They are a great way to build a brand’s presence, if you choose the right tag line, that is.
Tag lines should be brief and catchy. The longer a tag line is, the less impact it will have with your reader. Once you find a great one, make sure to use it frequently because they are a fast, easy and effective way to keep your brand information consistent.
Finally, make sure you get the most out of your content. Once you create a press release, don’t just post it on a press release circulator such as PR Newswire and forget about it. Use that same content again in blogs, articles, videos, podcasts and any other way you can repackage that same content.
Break out your key points and create Twitter posts out of them. Post links to your press release on Facebook. Search for blogs relevant to your niche and post replies containing the key elements of your press release. And in every case, don’t forget to include a link back to your website.
You can rewrite the same content in your press release in endless variations. Identify the top 10 points in your press release and then rewrite it 10 times with each of the key points as the press release’s primary focus. Once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to do and will give you ten times the exposure.
But be sure to keep your press release newsworthy. Think about what the “hook” of your press release should be. What is it that will capture the attention of your readers?
For example, if you are promoting a particular product, such as roller blades, that’s not necessarily newsworthy. Roller blades have been around for a long time.
But if there has been some sort of substantive design change to the product you are promoting – these roller blades have three wheels each! – then there’s your “hook”.
The same hook can be repackaged in several different ways. Here’s how to get nine news releases out of a single hook:
1. Announcing a new product or design change
2. Primary benefits of product or design change
3. Secondary benefits or product or design change
4. How product or design change came about
5. Why product or design change will change the industry
6. What’s the best way to use the product or design change
7. Who are most likely to benefit from the product or design change
8. Why is the product or design change timely
9. What differentiates the product or design change from competitors
Another benefit is that online press releases can be tracked so you can know how many times your press release was clicked on or downloaded. You can also track how may clickthroughs resulted from each version of your press release. You can use these tracking tools to determine what works well and what doesn’t, and tweak future press releases accordingly.
Writing Influential Copy
We’ve talked a lot about the best ways to market your content through on-page and off-page SEO, identifying the best keywords, creating your site and building backlinks to drive traffic, easy ways to create video marketing, and the newfound importance of press releases.
Before we sign off, however, it’s important to touch base on one of the most important elements of your marketing program: How to create influential content.
It’s one thing to get people to click through to your site. But how you engage them once they arrive there is truly important to converting visitors into customers. Fortunately, there are several proven techniques for creating great content that I am going to share with you now.
In order to write persuasively, it is necessary to grab your reader’s attention quickly and intensely. You need to provoke a resonse, not because you want to get your reader’s attention, but because you want to draw them into the text and want to keep reading through until the end.
Regardless of you are selling or what your subject matter is, there are five primary tools of influential writing that are designed to provoke a response from your readers.
When you write content that includes one or more of these techniques, you will be far more likely to create a bond between you and your readers. Once you cement this bond, it’s easy to manipulate your reader during your final Call to Action (CTA).
The first technique is one of the most powerful of all: Storytelling. We all love to listen to stories. It’s hard-wired into our consciousness since birth and dates back to pre-history, when cavemen would sit around the fire and share tales of their adventures.
Telling stories is one of the best ways to immediately engage your reader on your niche topic and allows you to convince readers to buy into your narrative.
People love stories because they can relate to the characters and the plot. They associate the details of your story with things that have happened to them in their own lives or in the lives of people they know. As a result, stories provide a social connection between the listener and the outside world.
In most cases, people are hoping for a happy ending when they read or listen to a story. If you can provide one for them, they will be satisfied with the story and be more receptive to your ultimate objectives. Always try to leave your readers satisfied by giving them a happy ending.
Let’s say, for example, that your product niche is an acne cream. You could describe the benefits of the acne cream, or you could talk about the years of scientific research that went into developing the acne cream and how it is based on cutting edge technology that originally was developed for the space program, for example. Or you could just tell the story of Loretta:
“Loretta was an ordinary teenager. She was never the most popular or prettiest girl at her high school, but she had a few close friends and had a lopsided smile that boys liked.
“But one Monday morning, Loretta woke up to find a few zits on her face. And by the end of the week, two or three pimples had become a full blown outbreak of acne. There were so many unsightly blemishes and pimples that Loretta cancelled her weekend plans and spent the whole time crying in her bedroom.
“Loretta felt humiliated about the way she looked and she worried that she would never get another date again.
“Loretta’s mother made an appointment for her with a dermatologist and he prescribed different medications, but nothing seemed to work. In fact, the acne seemed to be getting worse!
“Pretty soon, Loretta started staying home from school because she was embarrassed about the way she looked. Although she had always been a straight “A” student, her grades began to suffer and then she started to wonder if she would get into the college she wanted to attend.
“In no time at all, Loretta had changed from a happy, carefree teenager to a depressed and girl who spent hours in her darkened room crying inconsolably into her pillow.
“But one day, one of her close friends told Loretta about this incredible product that was guaranteed to get rid of acne quickly and make it stay away forever. She tried the product and miraculously her acne disappeared overnight.
“Loretta started feeling happier and more confident. Pretty soon she was dating the captain of the football team and they were named king and queen of the senior prom. Her grades improved and she got into the college she wanted. And all thanks to this amazing product.”
Now, there is no Loretta and the events in this story never actually happened. But that doesn’t mean the reader wasn’t drawn into the story and believed in the benefits of the acne cream.
Telling a good story is one of the most effective ways you can provoke a response from your readers, compelling them to reach the conclusion you desire. In this case, it would be that the acne cream will have a permanent, positive impact on your life.
The second technique to consider is social proof, also known as the bandwagon approach.
This is when you tell your reader how successful your product is and that everybody is using it. It’s a natural human response to want to be part of the popular group. Everyone wants to be associated with winners, whether it’s the champion sports team or the most popular underarm deodorant that everybody is using today.
One of the best ways to use social proof is through the use of testimonials. These are brief, first person accounts in which somebody explains how the product benefitted them. Ask your previous customers if they would be willing to write a testimonial about your product. You will be surprised how many people will be willing to do this.
Then, include testimonials with any of the marketing you create for your documents. Ask the person to send you a head shot with the testimonial because people put more value in a testimonial if is attached to picture of the person.
A word of caution: Read through the testimonial first, don’t just copy and paste it. I’ve seen a lot of testimonials that are off-topic, or in which the person references the fact that you asked them to write it.
Also, don’t make up testimonials. It’s unethical and also unnecessary. Most people will be thrilled to write on for you if you simply ask them.
Used effectively, testimonials are one of the best ways to create social proof for your product.
Other forms of social proof include outside referrals, such as quoting experts or citing scientific reports. We’ve all seen how Wikipedia has been used as a source for “expertise” about various topics. Be cautious when quoting the information directly from Wikipedia because it is not always 100 percent accurate.
The website allows anyone to submit and edit entries. The result is that it can sometimes be factually wrong or at least misleading. A better tool is to look at the footnotes that are quoted in Wikipedia entries and then use these as your source materials. In most cases, they are from academic or professional research papers or trade publication articles that will give your social proof more weight.
One of the most recent forms of social proof is to reference your product’s popularity on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. If you have created a Facebook Fan Page for your product and it has thousands of members, or if your product has a Twitter account with a lot of followers, mention this. Not only will you give your product more credibility, but you may even get more Fan Page members and Twitter followers.
Everybody is on these social media sites now, so they are a great way to add social proof to your products because people can relate to them easily. Success breeds success, and if people think your product is wildly popular on these hot sites, you may even get it to go viral.
If your product doesn’t yet have a lot of Facebook Fans and Twitter followers, it’s a simple matter to get them. There are many internet entrepreneurs currently selling products that will instantly give your product or website hundreds of fans on Facebook and Twitter, creating your product instant credibility among some of the most desirable customers anywhere: internet-savvy young people.
Your first place to look is Fiverr, but these entrepreneurs are everywhere and it is a simple matter to find them. Google it.
The third tool for persuasive writing that I want to discuss is repetition.
One of the side effects of information overload is that people have shorter attention spans. They are far less likely to read all the way to the end of an article or blog post, or watch a video from start to finish.
That means when you do have their attention, you need to drive your point across multiple different times in multiple different ways. In other words, by using repetition.
Reinforcing your point in different ways multiple times has proven effective in getting people to buy into your product.
Readers today are bombarded with information at a rate faster than they can process it. As a result, many modern readers have lost the ability to absorb lots of information at once. Instead, they are constantly processing small bits of information quickly, and disposing of data as quickly as they take it in.
Repetition lets you present your point numerous times so that you readers can absorb it regardless of how quickly or intently they read your copy.
It’s also important to note that if your CTA is to have your readers click on a link or give you their email address, you will want to make sure that they have multiple opportunities to do so.
Post your link at least three times throughout your copy: Near the top, somewhere in the middle, and absolutely at the end. That way, as your readers scan through your copy, you have more chances of them acting on what you want them to do.
If you wait until the end to post your link, there is a high likelihood that the reader will never make it that far in the copy. If you are effective in making your point right at the beginning, your reader may click on your link just to move on to the next thing.
Repeating your key points and making sure you have links posted in multiple places will substantively improve your chances of getting your readers to act on your CTA.
The fourth tool for persuasive writing I want to discuss is Addressing Objections.
We live in a savvy world today. People are naturally more suspicious if they think someone is trying to sell them something. That’s why you want to make your copy as personal as possible. If your readers sense you are a spammer or just there to sell them something, it will turn them off and you will lose your opportunity to get them to act on your CTA.
One proven method to get your readers to buy into your copy is to address objections. That means countering objections to your central argument before your readers can even think of them.
Think about it like this: Back in the Old West, traveling salesman would move from town to town selling “elixirs” that were supposed to help people feel better. In most cases, they were alcohol or some sort of drug, but many of these “snake oil salesman” were successful because they would address objections during their sales pitch.
This had the effect of getting people on their side and created a loyalty bond between the seller and buyer. It was surprisingly effective.
When you think about the product you are promoting, consider what negatives it could potentially have: It is more expensive than competing products? Does it have negative benefits?
An effective way to counteract doubt about your product is to address these potential objections even before they are raised in the minds of your readers. You can beat your readers to the punch, in effect, by addressing these objections on, arguing rationally and effectively against objections even before your readers can think of them.
Let’s say, for example, your product is a tanning light or a tanning bed. Most doctors will tell you that the ultraviolet rays in tanning beds may be linked to skin cancer, and that people should stay away from them. You can anticipate this objection in your reader and address it even before your reader thinks of it.
One way to do this would be to call into question the statements of these so-called medical “experts” who want to link tanning beds with skin cancer, saying there has never been any definitive evidence connecting tanning beds with any kind of illness.
In fact, the deep, glowing tan will make you look better and healthier than you ever have in your life.
Address objectives eloquently and convincingly in your writing and your readers will become your most die-hard defenders and, ultimately, your most loyal customers.
The last persuasive technique involves creating Exclusivity.It’s a natural human response for people to want to think they are special. They also put a higher value on privileges if those privileges are denied to others. That’s the whole theory that has made country clubs successful for generations. You can go anywhere to play golf or swim in a pool, but if you are allowed to do it at a country club and other people can’t, you are willing to pay a lot of money for that privilege.
One way of applying exclusivity to your writing is by telling readers they have been selected to receive an exclusive offer, and that most people won’t ever be given the same opportunity. It targets the natural impulse people have to be part of the elite social group. The best content provokes a response from readers and engages them into the text. You can use the techniques of Storytelling, Social Proof, Repetition, Addressing Objectives and Exclusivity provoke a positive response from your readers and get them to take the action that you want them to take.
Conclusion
In this report you have learned the easiest ways to research for a keyword, and then build your sniper style site properly. You then learned how to rank your site FAST in Google and other search engines. You learned about the backlinking tools I use to help rank my sites the fastest. And finally, you learned to automate the entire process through outsourcing. Now it’s time for one more thing:
ACTION!
Make sure you take action on the info in the book and videos and FINALLY start building an income online. So many people buy every wso and online course, and just let the info sit and gather digital dust on their hard drives. Don’t be that person! Go over my material, and take notes if you have to. Take action and finally start enjoying some success online. It really isn’t rocket science, but it’s not push button riches either. It takes work and dedication. Just follow through once you get done reading the material and you’ll be well on your way!
Tags: Beat The Panda Update
