New Discounts, Backlink Strategies, & Amazon Keyword Tips

Published: Sat, 04/20/13

Grumblings on the Front Line? Don't Give Up!

Well, it's been a roller coaster of a ride the past few months for affiliate marketers and I'm sure many of you are feeling the impact. From changes in Google to changes in Squidoo there's a lot that could be negatively impacting your business and sending your spirits into the ground.

Don't despair! There are solutions and some things you need to know in order to keep your own business moving forward. Amazon is still a very attractive, very profitable affiliate program but we do need to adapt to an ever changing environment.

I've got so much to cover with you that this is almost a newsletter. That's what I get for not emailing you very often. I'm hoping you'll find some great tidbits of useful information in the following, though.

It may seem I've been silent the past few months but that's because I spend a lot of time discussing strategy and changes inside the Online Business Insiders forum rather than sending emails but I assure you I've been just as active online as ever.

3 Day 50% Sale on My Products

First, I want to announce a limited time offer. I've set up special discounts of 50% off of my most popular products - the ones I still use regularly in my business and that have the most to do with my online income.

There are nine products in total PLUS a free download link for the updated version of the backlink strategy I use with my Extreme Review Amazon review sites.

The page is password protected. Enter "ericastonedeals" to see the list of discounts here: Limited Time Offer

Save 50% Off Current Prices

Valid through 04/23/2013

Offer good only through http://www.extremereviewer.com/sale-on-erica-stone-products/

Backlinking in Today's Environment

Backlinks are both important and necessary but if done incorrectly, they can ruin your rankings entirely.

Google's algorithms continue to penalize sites that build unnatural links and/or overuse keyword anchor text in their links.

Google's Quality Guidelines and articles on link schemes make it clear that you should not build links that are "meant to manipulate search engine rankings".

We know that natural backlinks are best but if no one finds your content because your post or site are too new, how can you ever earn the all important natural links to improve your rankings?

Fortunately, Google hasn't completely tied our hands here. Nofollow links do not pass link juice and are not counted by Google as links meant to manipulate search engines.

This means you can build or buy nofollow links to get your site in front of your target audience in order to draw them into your site. Then you need to give your visitors an easy means for sharing your content to help you build up those natural links.

Forget mass bookmarking, article directories, and numerous RSS feed submissions. Use those things sparingly to get content indexed but just one or two placed in sites that get crawled regularly would be sufficient. If you overuse them you could end up with lots of backlinks that all have the same anchor text. (Read my Penguin/unnatural links update further down the page for more information as to the damage these links can do.)

Go above and beyond to make sure each post or piece of content offers something of unique value to your reader. Do some product research that other affiliates have not done, take your own pictures, do your own video demonstration, or put together a comparison table that doesn't exist elsewhere.
Make sure you have a method on your post or page that allows users to share that content through Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. For my WordPress sites I use the Twitter, Facebook, Google + Social Share plug-in (free).
Share links to your content yourself through your Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ accounts.
Install the NoDoFollow plug-in for Firefox and use it to check whether links on sites are nofollow or not before you use the site for a backlink. If the links are not nofollow, weigh the benefits of using the site carefully against the risks of building unnatural links.
Use web 2.0 sites that rank well and have strong authority in Google to target low competition keywords for your niche. Only use web 2.0 sites where the links are automatically made nofollow by the site or where you have control over coding the links as nofollow. Create a unique, useful piece of content that covers the low competition keyword subject thoroughly and drive traffic from that page to a relevant page on your site.
Guest posting and blog commenting can still be useful for getting traffic from popular sites in your niche. Use the NoDoFollow plug-in to make sure that the comments are nofollow before posting and then add a useful, hand-written comment for the post.
Read up on using Twitter hashtags and include popular, relevant hashtags when you share links to your content through Twitter.
Download the updated backlink strategy for my Extreme Review product for free on the page I linked to at the top of this email where I've listed my 50% off products.

In summary, build something unique, make it easy to share, and use nofollow links to draw attention to your content. Let your visitors build links for you.

Changes on Squidoo

Squidoo lensmasters the world over must be aware of the changes that have taken place on Squidoo in the past couple of months. They've been cracking down on lenses to weed out those that are thin on content.

Out of over 450 lenses, I had only seven that received a warning and of those seven, only four were sales lenses. It took me only a few minutes to fix each of those four.

I'm still building new lenses and testing out a few new strategies, too.

However, Squidoo also took a hit in the March 15th Google Panda update and traffic has been slipping. Squidoo has been through hits like this in the past and has recovered but it's hard to say how much time that will take.

The overall strategies still work but don't be afraid to test them out on different sites that allow you to promote Amazon products. The keyword and the order of content I outline in my books can easily be adapted to other platforms - even to your own sites.

Squidoo has also made changes to their coding so that all outbound links are now nofollow. As discussed in the backlinking section above, that's not going to stop me from using them to drive traffic to my own sites. Just be aware that the change has taken place.

To keep from hitting these new filters at Squidoo with future lenses, make sure to include your personal opinion and thoughts about products and niches in your content. Just because you haven't purchased a specific product yourself doesn't mean you can't have an opinion about it. You might also have experience with a similar product and that gives you something to write about. If you have a lens on Halloween decorations, for example, write about your favorite decorations, how you choose new ones, and how you use them in your yard or house each year.

There was also mention by Squidoo about having too many links in your content. Squidoo's Amazon modules can have as many as three affiliate links per product. I use SquidCrafter to help me do the HTML for my product layouts and that has only one affiliate link per product so I haven't run into any issues continuing to put a good number of products in my lenses.

Speaking of SquidCrafter...

Did you know that Leiif put out a new pack of SquidCrafter compatible templates all with holiday themes? The pack includes 33 sets of templates you can use for Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day, July 4th, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas!

He did a fabulous job coming up with eye-catching color schemes. Visit his page for more information and make sure to click on the link in his page to see the templates in action: SquidCrafter Holiday Templates

Getting More From Your Existing Content

Last time I wrote, I mentioned that I'd be working through a series on how to get more from your existing content and I have some tips to help you earn more commissions and find the best keywords you should use in your lenses and posts.

First, the lenses in my portfolio that make the most Amazon commissions per month all target products that cost between $200-500 and are things people can buy at Home Depot, Sears, and local furniture stores. Scour those sites online and look through their products to find niche ideas to research for your lenses and posts. If you can sell just four $300 products a month on Amazon and can get to the 7% commission rate, you're looking at $84/month from a single lens.

Second, the more long tail related keywords you include in your content, the more chances you have for traffic. It helps if you use the long tail keywords that get the most traffic, though, too.

While I've been using Ubersuggest.org for quite some time to help with keyword research, I didn't know a certain little trick. If you click on the green plus signs next to keywords in Ubersuggest it will build a list of those keywords for you.

At the top of the Ubersuggest page, you can click the Get button on the right hand side of the screen to see a text list of your selected keywords. Take the full list of those keywords and paste them ALL into the Google Keyword Tool. Click the search button in the GKT and it will return results for all those keywords you gathered from Ubersuggest.

Click on the heading for the Global Monthly Search column to rank order the keywords by search volume and you'll be able to pick just those that have the best search volume. Make sure to look at the ones Google came up with, too. Use those as module titles in your lenses or subtitles in your posts and make sure your content matches your keyword topic.

Finally, Google likes LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) which means using synonyms in your content instead of repeating your keyword over and over. Use this free tool to find LSI phrases that match your keywords: LSI Keyword Tool

Penguin/Unnatural Link Penalty Update

Some of you may recall that I've been working for a year now on recovering one of my Amazon sites from a manual unnatural links penalty imposed on the site by Google. I wanted to update you on my efforts in case any of you are in the same position.

It has been GRUELING, to say the least but I've learned a lot about how Google analyzes backlinks, which backlinks are good, which are bad, and which are neither. Some of that learning was the basis for the material above relating to backlinks.

I spent a solid month going through all of my links from my Google Webmaster Tools report, categorizing them as nofollow (which requires no action), natural, and unnatural. I removed links where I could do so myself and emailed webmasters to have other links removed.

My biggest problem was that this site had a lot of articles in article directories. All of those articles had the same anchor text for the links. There's an eBay strategy out there that calls for the webmaster to pull in articles from article directories. My articles were picked up by hundreds of sites and almost none of them applied nofollow to the links. All had the same exact match anchor text, too.

Getting someone to remove a link to your site when they legitimately used your article from an article directory is a big pain. Hence my note above about using article directories only very sparingly if you have concerns about keeping a clean link profile. Better to build your links where you can control the application of the nofollow criteria and then draw in natural backlinks with the quality of your content.

I've removed over 600 links so far - bookmark links, article directories, article syndication, etc. I submitted a new disavow file and a new reconsideration request several weeks later. I documented everything in a spreadsheet I submitted to Google Docs and linked to in my reconsideration request. I also included copies of the emails sent to webmasters.

The reconsideration request was declined and I was told Google still sees unnatural links.

Turns out this is the result of two things. First, the link reports in Google Webmaster Tools is not complete. I've now taken several months worth of those reports (I'd saved them all along the way), plus free link reports from MajesticSEO.com and Ahrefs.com, combined them all, stripped out the duplicates and have another 1000 links to go through manually.

The second reason that Google still sees these links is because some of the pages which no longer have a link to my site have not yet been crawled again by Google so the cache version is still showing the link almost two months after the link has been removed.

I've mentioned in the past that I might move the content to a new domain and start over. The issues with that approach are that I'll lose all the strong natural links that I have and I'll also lose authority. If I start over, my content won't be seen as the first version of the material since so many sites have portions of my content on their site through article syndication.

I think the good links I have are worth giving it one more shot but it's going to take some time to wait for Google to recrawl the pages where links have been removed.

Nope - it's no fun, however, I'm learning a great deal about what does work and that's helping me strengthen my method going forward. It's always worth looking at the silver lining.