Don't Make Enemies Out Of Search Engines

History they say can be negative and at the same time be a great educative means to point to the positive things and the negatives which may have impact(s) on future developments. I know you must have flipped your tops because of the title of this post but with webmasters going crazy when numerous Google updates hit them, there is a correlation, believe me on this.

I am an affiliate marketer and have been having an ample lump of monthly income in the range of about $1500. Not much to some "Gurus" who make tens of thousands but to me this was a dream come true in a country where the average income is just $450.

I relied only on organic traffic with Google being my major source of free traffic. I was overzealous and very aggressive with my link building. It didn't matter from where I got them as long as they were links.

It was not an uncommon thing to see 4-5 of my pages or even sites taking up placements among the first 10 search results in Google for the same keyword.

Then I was struck with a thunderbolt in form of Google SEO crazes. My sites survived Panda but then Penguin got them. Although I still get traffic from Bing, Yahoo as well as from some other minor search engines, things are not the same as they used to be. My income came crashing down.

I knew I can't take Google on. I have always been guided with the advice of my late grandfather - "use your brains and don't take on a stronger opponent. Your life may depend on it".

While I was on the look out to revamp my sites that have lost rankings on Google, while I was frequenting SEO forums, participating in discussions to find out what I must have been doing wrong I came upon a post which at last shed a little light without the poster holding anything back.

Sometimes it's good to read between the lines.
After reading what Akpan was trying to say on his blog, I stopped building links to my already compromised websites, set up new ones and started to keep to Google’s rules to the best of my abilities. The results are that those same new websites now rank higher on Google with only a few links than my old sites which were having over 5,000 sites linking to them and just today I was rewarded. I made $259.98. The new site has only 8 links and just today was #5 on Google SERP page. How that happened I may never know.

The Results
It is never a hard thing for seasoned webmasters to get information about a particular webmaster nor is it difficult to get to their profiles and online presence. Just check for this name Yeremi Akpan and you will get the picture. This guy is awesome.

Now I was not so selfish to keep the information to myself but share it with one and all.

Now you too read between the lines and figure out why your sites are not within the first 10 listed on the first page of Google search.

If you depend on search engines for traffic to your websites as I do, the worst thing you would want to do is make an enemy of them.

A Beginners First Step In Affiliate Marketing

As the internet grows and continues to expand, so will opportunities of making money online increase because new methods, products and services are emerging everyday. A novice may be at an odd though. I am not saying to discourage you. On the contrary, I am aiming to prepare you for what lies ahead. I base everything on my personal experience through the years.

There are two ways you can earn a residual income over the internet.

1. You can have your own product or services which you can monetize. There are people who create products and services. What they do is promote these themselves and/or get people to promote and then offer them a cut of the proceedings. The percentages of commissions vary from affiliate program to program. The ones I am in offer up to 40% of total earnings.



As a product creator, you have obstacles and development time which may take even years to complete. My best man is a very brilliant programmer who has created a series of products. It took him almost 2 years to complete just one. Testing, looking for bugs, marketing strategies, promotional tools etc. He even wanted to go through Clickbank and a few other affiliate networks but unfortunately, our country is not listed in any of them. He had to give up and wait for better times.

2. Join an affiliate program.
This is by far the easiest and shortens the curve. All you have to do is find a network, read their terms, payment options etc and if you think you can do it, register.

Note* I will advise against affiliate networks where you have to pay before you can join. I am talking about personal experience here! There are thousands of affiliate programs you can join free. Some will even award you a few dollars upon sign up and confirmation.

The best affiliate networks will provide you with enough tools to get you started. Such tools include pre-written contents which you MUST rewrite in your own words in order to escape the hammer of duplicate contents from search engines with emphasis on the biggest of them all - Google. Also you are given tons of banners, videos, press releases and in some cases even free hosting. I love these free stuffs.

Now that you have joined an affiliate program, it is time you started to promote the products you have chosen. Under normal circumstances, you should have access to more than one product.

As a newbie, I would not go and buy a domain and hosting just yet if I were you. You have a few preparations to make before you can jump in.

A. Research your keywords
Keyword research is the most important step in promoting any product online. You want to have a list of phases which people type into search engines. There are various keyword research tools available both free and paid. I would suggest that you get a paid one (if you have the funds) because experience has taught me that the free ones have limitations.

B. Use free blogging like this blogger.com or Wordpress.
These are very popular and have great features. By using free blogging sites, you have the opportunity to learn as you go. After gaining experience (and have made a few dollars) you may take it a step further by getting a doman and a hosting. I made my first affiliate commissions by using free blogging services and then I started to have my own websites hosted on differnt servers.

Write good articles about the product you are promoting and focus on your chosen keywords (at the onset, I would suggest 10 posts) and start posting them to your blog. Make it a priority to write and publish blog post at least once per week. If you can do it every day fine! Search engines love fresh contents therefore keep your blogs fresh.

Now the next step is to start building links to the articles you have on your blog. Search engines see links to your webpages as votes so the more you can build the better but... There is a catch here. The most common mistake novices make is to over do it. A moderate link building should be about 2 to 4 links per day. If you over do it, search engine especially Google may see that as spam and then all your efforts are nothing but wasted.

Watch for my next post since I will be reviewing the tools which a beginner in affiliate marketing should get. I am going to show you the ones I use personally so stay tuned till the next post.