The two reports that have come out contain a few interesting stats and some solid bits of content, but most of it wasn’t new to me and won’t be news to anyone who’s done much search engine optimization. He starts with the ‘Perpetual Traffic Report’ showing some stats on the decline of pay per click traffic and a switch back to organic traffic which was (if true) pretty interesting, I have to admit I didn’t realise that sponsered ads got such a small percentage of clicks these days although I don’t do much PPC so that’s not surprising.

Getting to the meat of the first report, he claims that a combination of content, backlinks and activity will boost your rankings but that you MUST do all three and most people just concentrate on the first two. He emphasises that if google doesn’t see activity on your site in the form of comments, feed subscriptions and changing content then they will not rank your site highly. I’m not sure whether this is true, he talks about a google algorithm shift but seeing as google never realeases information like this I am currently taking his claim with a pinch of salt. It seems his course will teach you how to use google tools like feedburner to make it look like your site has a lot of activity, although he’s making the assumption that google uses these tools in it’s website search engine rankings.

Of course, results are king in my book. I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with in his course next week and if implementing it shows the massive gain in traffic that he is claiming it will then he obviously knows what he’s talking about!

The second report, the authority codes, is useful if you don’t know them but they’re not really secret codes they’re just search expressions to find high PR blogs that you can comment on to get links. If you don’t know how to do this then download them by all means.

I’ll keep you updated on what I think about the Perpetual Traffic Formula once it has launched.

The merchant, on the other hand, would agree to pay the associate in whatever technique they have concluded into. This would generally mean simple revenue for the affiliate , as he would do nothing apart from place the retailer’s ad on his site. This would also be really favorable for the merchant, as getting affiliates to publicize their products would be more reasonable than hiring an advertising firm to market their products.

There are a spread of techniques on the way the merchant would compensate the associate for his services, and for the web-master, these techniques simply translates to the strategy by which he would earn simple money.

Among the more common systems of compensation are the pay per click strategy, the pay-per-lead strategy, and the pay-per-sale system. The PPC methodology is the technique most preferred by affiliates , for their site’s visitor would only need to visit the marketer’s site for them to gain cash. The other 2 strategies, on the other hand, are better preferred by merchants, as they’d just need to compensate you if your visitor becomes one of their registrants or if the visitor would actually buy their products. What about Google Adsense? Google Adsense is basically some variety of an internet marketing program. In Google Adsense, Google act as the intermediary between the associates and the merchants. The merchant, or the promoter, would simply join up with Google and supply the second with text adverts relating to their products.

These adverts, which is basically a link to the marketer’s internet site, would then appear on Google searches as well as on the web sites owned by the affiliates, or by those website owners who have enrolled with the Google Adsense program. While one can find a large amount of likenesses between Google Adsense and other affiliate promotion programs, you may also see a large amount of differences. In Google Adsense, all of the web designer has to do is place a code on his site and Google looks after the rest. The adverts that Google would place on your site would usually be important to the content of your internet site. This would be satisfactory both for you and for the promoter, as the visitors of your internet site would kind of be really interested with the products being publicized. The Google Adsense program compensates the affiliate in a PPC basis. The advertisers would pay Google a specific amount every time their ad on your internet site is clicked and Google would then forward this sum to you thru checks, though only after Google have subtracted their chunk of the amount. Google Adsense checks are usually delivered monthly.

Also, the Google Adsense program provides web designers with a tracking tool that enables you to monitor the takings you get from a certain ad. So, where do all these lead us to? Where else but to profits, profits and even more profits! Affiliate marketing programs and the Google Adsense program simply work, whether or not you are the merchant or the affiliate . For the merchant’s side, lots of cash can be saved if advertising effort is focused on affiliate marketing instead of on dealing with advertising firms. For the website manager, you can simply gain lots of profits by doing what you do best, and that’s by making web sites.

And if you mix all of your profits from both the Google Adsense program and other affiliate marketing programs, it might certainly convert to an enormous quantity of money.

So how do you know which keywords are better to rank on than others? Or, more specifically, which keywords are going to have more commercial value to you if you rank well on them? Well, I recently purchased an SEO and keyword research tool called Market Samurai that has loads of really cool features that most of the other tools out there don’t have. Take a look at the video below where it is explained how you can compare similar keywords to find which one has the most commercial value. Using this you can concentrate your efforts on ranking for keywords that will bring in more revenue to your website.

I will quickly go through how I set up my campaign. I am not using the google content network at the moment as that needs to be set up in a different way.

At this point you should already have your keywords, I showed you how I found keywords to target in this post.

Each keyword should go in it’s own adgroup. And within that adgroup I will have all 3 match types, broad, phrase and exact, for that keyword phrase.

Each adgroup runs 2 different ads so that you can continually split test the ads in your campaign as it runs.

When writing your ads, it’s a good idea to include your keyword in the ad. It can help with your quality score and it also shows up in bold in the ad, which will naturally draw the eye of the person searching.

If your domain name is short enough you can also put the keyword in front of the display URL in this format: KeywordPhrase.YourDomain.com so your keyword will appear again and be bolded.

You should also capitalize the first letter of every word in your ad. There has been much testing on this topic and although some people disagree, most will tell you that it helps to draw the eye to the ad. Another way of drawing the eye is using symbols like ?, %, TM symbol, and numbers.

Emotional response words are good to use in your ads, like ‘free’, ‘tips’, ‘tricks’, ‘secret’, ‘facts’, ‘learn’ and many more.

During my keyword research I came up with an estimate of cost per click to get in the top 3 positions. I typically set my broad match keyword bid to 50-100% of this estimate, depending on how low the estimate was. This is because the broad match is typically less targeted so I want to pay less for my clicks. I will then set exact and phrase match to 2x my original estimate. I prefer to start higher and reduce the bids than the other way around.

Other settings I use are to show the ads as quickly as possible, and rotate the 2 ads evenly so you can split test them properly.

Finally I set up conversion tracking within adwords. I’m not going to go in to detail here how I set all that up, it’s pretty straight forward if you look at it in adwords. But it is very important to know which keywords are getting clicks, sign-ups and sales.

I’ve done a fair bit of SEO and keyword research before as a few years ago I set up my own dating website (www.phlirtz.com) and spent a lot of time trying to get the site up in the search engine rankings.

So I started off today with this great bit of software called Market Samurai (http://www.marketsamurai.com/). I was originally using it for adwords campaigns, but its good for general keyword research too. For the full version you have to pay, but the keyword research tool works great with the free version.

Basically, you enter a generic keyword phrase, I used ‘Internet Marketing’ and it goes out to find all the keywords it can, using Googles synonym tool. It can also use SEO digger to generate keywords but this is a paid service so you would have to be a member of SEO digger for that option to work.

This generated 103 keywords for me. I then went to google’s keyword tool and used the option to get keyword ideas using a website’s content. Now seeing as I am trying to get keyword idea for my blog, I thought it would be a good idea to see which keywords google thinks are appropriate to the top blogs that Alex showed us in module 4. So I took 2 of the top blogs in that list and plugged them in. Google came back with a load of keywords that it thought these blogs were about.

I plugged these in to Market Samurai as well. The good thing about doing this is that Market Samurai automatically ignores any duplicates. This bumped my keyword list up to 276.

The next step was to use Market Samurai to analyse these keywords. So pressing the ‘Analyse Keywords’ button gives me a few options to choose. I want to know how many people are searching on these terms and how much competition for them is out there. There is also an option for it to estimate how much adwords traffic you should get with them, it’s up to you if you want to check this, if you’re running any paid traffic campaigns it might be worth it. I also checked the SEO Comp option. Usually the only way to gauge the competition for keywords would be to count the search results returned by google for that keyword phrase. Market Samurai uses a different algorithm to gauge the quality of the sites you are competing against as well. For example, if wikipedia.org or amazon.com are ranking highly for certain keywords, then you are unlikely to ever be able to compete with these and Market Samurai takes this in to account.

Once you have all this data, you can then use something called Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) to determine which keywords are going to be worth targeting. KEI is worked out with this formula:

Searches * Searches / Number of Results.

I worked out the KEI using the the SEO Comp number from Market Samurai as the ‘Results’ parameter, which should be a more accurate reading.

This should give you an idea of which keywords people are searching on in this niche, but that don’t have overwhelming competition for them. The higher the KEI the better. Some keywords I would ignore as they are too broad to be worth competing on at the moment. And some will be out of context. But some of the more specific, high KEI keywords will be handy to know for using in blog titles, anchor text for incoming links, headings, phrases to use in your blog posts etc etc.

And if you can’t be bothered to go through all this yourself, you can download the data I came up with here.

I have hardly touched on the surface of Market Samurai but it looks like a very impressive bit of software for creating traffic friendly websites, and it’s still only in beta! I will probably upgrade to the full version when I have time to sit down and make proper use of it.