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Darren and Andy’s take-home study course on how to become a six figure blogger (about $10,000 per month should do hey?) just launched, and the special five day discount period that I previewed will end this Friday USA time.

If you plan on blogging your way to online profits then there is no other course you need and no other course on offer that will teach what this course teaches. To be honest though the main reason I recommend this course is because I know Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) and I know how much money he makes from blogging. He’s definitely living the dream and the most qualified to teach how you can join him as a six figure blogger, although he’s closer to seven figures now.

Affiliate Program

I’ve made over $100 (***Update*** Make that $400) in referral income from selling the Six Figure Blogging course. I don’t have to ship any products, offer any downloads, provide any customer support at all - just send traffic to the course website and get paid a referral commission for my troubles. I think the product is great, so I don’t feel like I am cheating anyone, in fact it’s win-win-win. I earn some income that indirectly is a result of my efforts blogging and building an audience over time, the people that offer the product get paying customers and the customer gains access to a great product that will probably lead them to make money online too.

The most successful online marketers make use of affiliates extensively, but I’ll leave that topic for another day. For now I recommend you join up to sell Andy and Darren’s Six Figure Blogging course to your audience, especially while the discount period is still on (you have about 3 days left at the time I write this). If you have a popular blog or website, especially one focused on blogging or online business and you feel it would be appropriate to advertise this course then the affiliate program is for you.

How To Sign-Up As An Affiliate

The sign up to become an affiliate is at the bottom of the six figure blogging page - click the link that says “Affiliates”.

Note that this is Andy Wibbels affiliate program so it gives you the ability to sell not just the Six Figure Blogging course but also the other courses and products Andy sells.

How Much Will You Earn?

Andy and Darren offer affiliates 50% of the total fee, so during the discount period while the course is $245USD each sale you make earns you just under $125. Not bad for simply typing a blog post with some links. There is a lot more to affiliate selling than just putting up links of course, your ability to presell and the amount and quality of the traffic you already have will greatly impact your results, but there is no harm in trying.

If you are new to the affiliate selling game this is a great product to start with if you run a blog. Join the affiliate program, do a blog post about it linking to it with your unique affiliate URL and you never know, you might make some referral money. If nothing else you will get a feel for affiliate systems. For those seasoned affiliate marketers you will already know the best way to sell to your audience and given this product has a high commission and solid credibility I suspect it will appeal to you.

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I joined Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club to get my copy of the Definitive Guide To Google AdWords at the discounted rate, however I’ve started to realize there is a lot more value in it than just the AdWords eBook, which I guess makes sense since Perry wants people to stay subscribed to his club, so he must keep dishing out good stuff.

Just this morning I had a listen to one of the CDs you receive when you first join the club. This one was with Brad Fallon, the search engine optimization (SEO) expert. It formed the third part of the Jay Abraham’s Power To Profits seminar series that was completed earlier this year with Perry, Brad and Ken McCarthy. You get this CD, titled “The 8 Essential Things You REALLY Need to Know About Search Engine Optimization“, when you first join Perry’s club, along with the two other CDs that make up the seminar.

Who Is Brad Fallon?

You have probably noticed Brad Fallon’s name, his free e-course and SEO product, Stomping The Search Engines, pop up in the yellow boxes on this blog lately. This is because I know Brad is the real deal after reading his material and listening to his audio and I feel confident recommending him to you as one of a handful of SEO experts that I trust. Much of my understanding of SEO, in particular about sitemaps, has come from Brad. He also has the credentials to back up his products, having grown his business My Wedding Favours from brand new in January 2004 to about $700,000 per month operation 15 months later, mostly thanks to his position in the search engines (his site is number one for most of his key phrases, including “wedding favors“).

As a result of his success with his online store he went on to teach others how to get great results in natural search engine rankings. The audio CD I just listened to had some fantastic materials on the 80/20 of SEO activities we should all be doing. Brad’s skills have come from testing things on his websites and research - lots of real life testing to see what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps more importantly he knows what might be sound SEO practice but falls into the 80% of activities that only have 20% impact on your search engine performance, so shouldn’t be prioritized, and the 20% of activities that have the greatest impact that you need to devote most of your time to.

The 80/20 Rule For Search Engine Marketing

When I say 80/20, I mean the 20% of activities that account for the 80% of results you get. In this case it’s the 20% of things you should spend the most time regarding optimizing your website to get the 80% of results in search engines. Wasting time with the other 80% that produces 20% of the results is obviously not a good idea. If you are at all familiar with this principle, and you will be if you read my blog regularly since I reference to it a lot, then you know that the 80/20 equation is not a strict mathematical rule but definitely is something that every business should heed.

There are very few variables in any organisation that account for the majority of results. When I say variables I mean anything from people, marketing methods, customers, infrastructure, systems, suppliers, products, pricing points, seasons - anything and everything, can usually fit nicely into a 80/20 relationship. In this case I am discussing the 80/20 of search engine optimization techniques - these are the activities that you should spend the majority of your time on.

The Top 8 Search Engine Optimization Techniques

I’m going to list the top 8 techniques that Brad discussed in the seminar. Bear in mind that I’m only going to briefly review them since it wouldn’t be fair to Brad, Perry or any of the guys selling this stuff if I simply reposted all their materials. The fact is I couldn’t do it anyway, it would take a 50 page post to cover everything Brad discussed in the audio CD. If you are interested in having a listen to this CD I suggest you try Perry’s Renaissance Club.

Brad broke down his top 8 list into two categories - On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. On-Page refers to things you can do to your website, Off-Page refers to the things that happen to your website from other sites (usually talking about incoming links from other sites). Let’s start with On-Page since you can action these items immediately and test results.

On-Page SEO

1. Title Tags

If you are at all familiar with SEO then I’m sure you would have seen this one coming. The fact is, and this has been proven time and time again, what you put in your title tags is the most influential variable to determine how your pages show up in natural (organic) search results.

Brad gave an excellent example of how he played with slight changes to the title tag of his Wedding Favors home page causing a dramatic change to his search engine result page (SERP) placement. He was sitting at number 2 on Google and was testing methods to get his site into number 1. With Google you can make a change to your title tags and within 24-36 hours you will see the results. His results were often quite dramatic, dropping to number 9, then completely gone, and finally finding the combination of title tag phrases that resulted in a number one ranking. He now owns the number one ranking in Google and Yahoo!.

During this process Brad recommended that you optimize for only two to three key phrases per page. The keyphrases that start the title tag (the ones on the left) have the most power, so should be selected very carefully. His example was interesting because it showed how his three key phrases for his homepage were adjusted to create a number one ranking for all three of his phrases (Wedding Favors - Wedding Party Favors - Bridal Shower Favors). It wasn’t very complicated, just moving words around and seeing what happened. Not rocket science, just practical testing. I have since added an entry to my ‘to-do’ list for BetterEdit.com to start testing title phrases again.

2. Keyword Density

Keyword density was listed the second most important on-page factor in the 80/20 of SEO activities. Keyword density is the percentage of times your keywords appear on a given page. There is no strict rule or percentage to aim for but Brad offered a very sound practice to determine what works - copy what your competitors do. Search for your key phrases, the phrases you want to show up for in the search engines and see what the current top result site’s keyword density is.

To do this Brad gave away this fantastic little gem of a resource - go to this website - www.Ranks.nl and use it to test out the keyword density of your competitors pages and your pages. See how the number one site handles their keyword density - how often in title tags, heading tags, alt tags, body content and other areas of their site certain keyword phrases appear and then copy their techniques. Once you have your on-page keyword density equal or better than your competitors then all you have to do is worry about your off-page SEO to beat them (and test test test!).

3. Site Structure

Site structure covers the way your site is linked together internally. Brad didn’t talk too much about this and I know why - he’d need a full seminar just to explain all the different things you can work on! However I think there is one really important thing to mention regarding site structure and I know Brad would agree with me - it’s your sitemap - whether you have one to begin with and how you structure it. My suggestion is you do Brad’s free e-course that covers a lot on site structure and in particular sitemaps. It’s free so there is no reason why you shouldn’t do it.

4. Internal Links

You have to remember that Google treats each webpage as a single page, not as a part of a website, so when it comes to linking to your own pages it’s very important you take great care to optimize your keyword linking methods. The beauty of this technique is that you can control it, it’s an on-page technique that in lets you add backlinks to your own pages (What is a backlink and why should you care? Read this - The Backlink FAQ and this - Monitoring Your Backlinks - How Popular Is Your Website?).

The two most important things to consider is how you anchor your internal links (what phrases you use to link) and that you take advantage of all the opportunities to link your pages together. Make use of a footer by linking to all your most important pages using the appropriate anchor text keyword phrase (especially your sitemap) and make sure your navigation structure links with keywords, not just blanket statements like “click here”.

Two words of warning with this - don’t forget about usability and don’t over optimize. Brad mentioned that Google recently added technology to their algorithms that penalizes sites that appear to be over optimizing. This is usually indicated by too much use of a particular keyphrase, for example always using the exact same word or phrase to link to one page in your site and all incoming links from other sites are also use the same phrase. To avoid the penalty just mix up your phrases a bit and, leading to the other warning to watch out for - usability -keep it human, use phrases that humans will understand. Afterall your goal with all this SEO is to get humans to your site and there is no point if they can’t figure out how to navigate to what they want because your linking text is all the same or poorly labeled.

Off-Page Search Engine Optimization in Part 2

That’s it for the on-page SEO tips. In part two of this series I’ll go through the final 4 tips Brad Fallon mentioned regarding off-page SEO and then you will have a complete picture of the top 8 most important search engine optimization factors. Part two will be posted in the next couple of days.

Part 2 is now available - The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 2

Yaro Starak

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I just spent my Sunday doing some wardrobe updating (shopping) followed by a swim. I was in a “Mather’s For Shoes” (shoeshop, duh!) shopping for some sandals and a lovely female shop attendant was helping me to pick an appropriate pair (I always take the advice of girls when it comes to fashion, they know so much more than me in this area).

We chatted a bit while I was trying on sandals and it turns out she just graduated a Business degree with a major in PR/Advertising. She was a little forlorn regarding her future job prospects, lamenting on the difficulty of finding work in her newly qualified-for industry, especially without experience. Her shoe selling job was quite casual and clearly she was suffering in the “just out of university and I don’t know what to do” phase of life (I feel the need to mention this article right now - Personal Congruency… At 21? How To Be Confident At Any Age ).

My mind briefly fluttered back to my days studying at university and I felt a momentary kinship with this girl as I remembered worrying about my ability to get work in my chosen study area after graduating. It was a short lived worry however as I quickly decided that having a “career” was not for me, unfortunately replaced with a new worry altogether - how exactly could I earn money without a “career”. Of course fast forward to today and it’s not a worry at all, but confidence is a lot easier in hindsight and with experience tucked into your belt.

I mentioned to my shoe-sales-lady that I also did a business degree and of course she asked me what I ended up doing (what job I got). Nowadays I don’t have an exact answer for this question, which I think is way cool, I like being mysterious.

Perhaps the most common question in the western world when two people meet each other is “what do you do for a living?”, and yes I partake in this ritual with genuine interest, however most occasions I’m given responses like - accountant, retail sales, admin officer, lawyer, IT, music, architecture, etc. All nice square boxes that clearly label what a person does in life. When it comes time for me to explain my calling in the working world the story isn’t so clear cut.

In the past I’ve run with “I run my own business” or “I have my own Internet business” or similar. Then after a few probing questions I’ve dully explained I run a student editing business, which hardly makes me the life of the party since I’m quickly labelled as an “editor”. I’m so far from being an editor that I always feel the need to explain that I run the business and do not do the editing.

Now though I don’t feel right saying that BetterEdit.com is my job either since I don’t devote the majority of my working time to it. It’s the whole Internet “thing” that I feel is my job (bordering on my life at times!).

In many ways I feel like a writer and the romantic in me wants to say that I am a writer. While I do draw some income indirectly as a result of my writing and I use my creative output as a pillar of my online projects, I don’t feel quite right stating I’m a writer, at least not yet. When I’m locked up in some apartment by the beach writing my first novel or even an eBook I might consider myself a true writer and state so with bravado when questioned about my life, but it’s not my label now, it doesn’t fit, at least not yet.

I’m really an online marketer, but that is a very blurry title - What is an online marketer? Internet business entrepreneur, that’s a good one, but doesn’t feel quite right either. I’ve made or make money from affiliate products, advertising, selling websites, referrals, hosting, design, eBay and other ways, but none of those activities fit nicely into a box that I feel comfortable stating as my job.

I’d like to say I’m a student of life - as corny as that sounds - it feels really good right now. I have so much to learn and what I really want to do is indulge in learning in areas that my motivation takes me. That doesn’t just include the Internet and business topics, although they are areas I’m always furthering my education. There are other areas I work on and study such as, psychology, spirituality, existential thought, sport, human interaction and whatever comes my way.

I’ve decided that the best answer to the what do you do? question is to say that I make money through the Internet, quickly clarify that no, it’s not through pornography, leave it at that and see what happens. Sometimes it’s easiest to follow up with “it’s difficult to explain”, especially to those that are not heavy web users, whose eyes gloss over when I mention words like “blog” and “AdWords”. If they are web savvy then perhaps I’ve found an interesting person, someone that shares my affinity for the online world that I’d like to get to know or even better, another solopreneur that may share my lifestyle or have aspirations in that direction. People are always interested when I tell them that I make a full time income with only a couple of mandatory hours of work per day and that statement can be enough to garner interest in a topic they had previously limited to activities like “email” or “browsing” or “research for assignment”. There’s an amazing world working online, and I’m happy to introduce people to it if they show genuine interest.

To the girl that helped me with the sandals today - I haven’t bought any yet so I might be back. She showed enough interest in what I did that I gave her the URL for this blog when I left so you never know, she might be reading this. To everyone else, I’m curious, if you work online how do you describe your daily life to new people you meet that ask that all important question?

Yaro Starak
Student of Life

Yaro Recommends Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club Join today and get Perry’s Definitive Guide To Google AdWords Thrown in as a Bonus, Plus Hot New Material from Jay Abraham’s Power to Profit Seminar, with 5 CD’s and 5 Special Reports. Read more…

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No no, I didn’t interview Perry - though that would be fun (*scribbles note*) - this is Perry’s latest audio call that he just sent through to his subscribers. Those business-to-business types should enjoy this one.

I did an interview with Robert Spiegel, editor of the newsletter “Marketing Smarter with Google”:

Download The MP3 [ 6 MB - 26 Minutes ]

Here’s what you’ll discover when you listen to our conversation:

• What most people do wrong when they’re getting started.
• An interesting trait shared by almost all successful companies who use AdWords.
• Why sales & marketing departments always seem to be at each other’s throats.

Enjoy!

Perry Marshall

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The Six Figure Blogging course has finished up and they are just about to launch the home-study version that no doubt draws heavily on the resources developed from the live course (teleconference recordings etc). Andy Wibbels just informed me that on Monday (Nov 28th) USA time a discounted version of the home-study course is going up for sale for five days. The course will be $245 at the discount rate and after the five day sale will be priced at $325.

Right now I love blogging. I love writing and enjoy the feedback, contacts and intereaction that blogging provides. I’m fairly motivated and considering I make next to nothing from my blogging efforts I can’t imagine how motivated I would be if I was earning even 25% of what Darren Rowse of ProBlogger earns (he makes about $30,000 per month from blogs). Darren is by far the most well known professional blogger and is probably in the top 1% of earners as well. Therefore he made the perfect trainer for the Six Figure Blogging course and I have no problem recommending it to you.

Darren and I are often in touch during the week through MSN and while the live Six Figure Blogging course was running he certainly seemed to be enjoying himself, helping others to learn how to profit from blogging. His partner trainer in the course, Andy Wibbels of Easy Bake Weblogs, provided a nice counterpoint to Darren. No one can ever say it’s easy to make money blogging - you have to become an efficient writing robot if you start getting into managing multiple blogs like Darren and Andy, but clearly the rewards are significant if you commit.

Right now I wouldn’t mind being a professional blogger, especially while my motivation to write is high. To earn even $2000 per month from a blog or three would be an awesome achievement. If you are passionate about a specific topic and enjoy writing about it then professional blogging is a fantastic way to get into online business. It can also act as a springboard for all kinds of other Internet business opportunities and certainly is the best tool for personal exposure that I have ever used. If you are the type that prefers to have a clear blueprint to follow, you have a little cash to invest in quality education and think that blogging is the way you would like to go to make money online, then Six Figure Blogging is perfect for you.

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