Most of you will probably at least of heard about Market Samurai even if you’re not yet using it?

Just in case you haven’t and you’re wondering what it is then it’s quite simply one of the best market research tools for affiliate marketing.

In fact, it goes way beyond just a market research tool because it has a ton of other features as well!

It’s amazing to think that this has been developed over the last two years and even though it has over 150,000 users they’ve only just launched their affiliate program this week.

The thing is with that many people already using it and now that their affiliate program has finally launched, there are bound to be thousands more affiliates getting the benefits of using this excellent tool.

That in turn means that some other folks could be at a bit of a disadvantage if they don’t have a way to do all of their research and the many other tasks that Market Samurai can really help to speed up.

You have to be a fully paid up user to access their affiliate program as well so I’m speaking from experience here, luckily I got it when it was first released and haven’t stopped using it since.

So what does it do?

Well if you just take a look at the screen shot you’ll see that it does a lot more than just keyword research.

• Keyword Research
• Rank checker
• Seo competition
• Monetization
• Find Content
• Publish Content
• Promotion
• Adwords (coming soon)

Although you can do all of this for free and that is what we teach here to start with, when you’re ready to really speed things up this is a great way to dot it.

As you progress your time can become more of an issue so there comes a point when it really is worth investing in tools that can cut down on what you might consider wasted time.

By having all these facilities in just one place it can really speed up your work.

One of the best features of Market Samurai is the way you can check your competition, you can really dig in and find out what you need to do to outrank another website or page, this not only helps you to get where you need to be it can also stop you wasting your time if things are too competitive.

Ever wondered why there seemed virtually no competition because you followed  advice like going after keywords with less than 20,000 competing pages, but then you where left wondering why you never got on the first page of the serps?

Well you won’t have that problem with Market Samurai because you’ll know exactly what you’re up against before you even start.

Anyway as you’ve probably guessed I’m a fan of Market Samurai and why wouldn’t I be when it’s been such a great benefit to me, for the price it really is excellent value and you definitely get what you pay for.

At the very least I’d recommend you take them up on their 30 day free trial while it’s still available, and if you’re serious about speeding up your research from keywords, to competition, then on to content and much more I’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised at just how good this is if you haven’t already got it?

Check it out for yourself here…

When you first get started with building your own website to make money online you probably thought that it would have to have lots of content?

Then you stumbled on niche marketing and realised that it didn’t have to be like that, the Guru told you that you could just build a small site with a few pages, get it ranked really easily and start to make money.

That can definitely work if you know how to do it the right way, but you almost certainly won’t make a good living from just one or two sites like that. It’s just one of the methods we teach how to do properly in the Achievers Inner Circle, as well as how to develop much larger websites using other techniques.

So if you decide to go the small niche site route you’re usually told that it’s fast and easy to do?

Then usually when you get your first three or four websites built reality hits home. Suddenly you realise that you put all that work in and now you have a few websites just sat there not really making any money. It’s probably because you haven’t done enough promotion, or if you have and you’re getting some traffic you’re probably wondering where your time just disappears to now?

Once you have your first few small websites you’ll tend to find that you hit a huge roadblock, all your time is being used just trying to keep up with regular, mundane tasks. Link building, writing and submitting articles, blog and forum commenting, adding content, and a ton of other things need to be done, so where are you going to find time to build more websites, if you do manage to struggle on and build another it’s only going to get harder isn’t it?

This is your wake up call to actually start managing your business!

Sounds a bit boring maybe, but that is what you will have to do to move forwards and continue to build on your success.

One of the first things to look at is how long it takes you to get one simple website built. I bet when you first started it took about 8-12 weeks to build your first site and start making a little money, now you might be doing 2 a month so in 6 months you’ll have 12 websites. What are the possibilities if you could build a site in less than a day though, and how can you do that?

It’s actually not that difficult, all you need is an organised system where you have what you need right at your fingertips to get a website built up really fast. Organise your various files, themes, plugins, tools etc so that you know exactly where they are, then you don’t have to spend time searching or downloading them each time.

Then you need to make sure that your site builder and theme are fast to work with. Wordpress is fine if you know how to use it effectively for this, you can install and optimize it, upload your theme, plugins and content, and have a website built within about an hour, or less if you’re a fast worker.

There’s much more than that to making niche websites a success though!

Then comes the tasks involved in managing your websites promotion over the following weeks, just try doing that without getting organised and using proper schedules and you’ll almost certainly fail. Too much promotion such as link building could see you website receive a ranking penalty or even worse, de-indexed or banned. Not enough promotion means you won’t get much traffic and profits will be small, if anything at all.

So if you decide not to tackle one or two larger sites, and instead go for a larger number of small niche sites, and we’re talking a lot! Then just make sure that you plan in how you are going to manage them all to make a success with your business.

You can find out a lot more about how to do this effectively including planning guides, templates, schedules, and a lot more in the Achievers Inner Circle Membership. Whether you’re a complete novice or already have a few websites, we provide the expertise and training that you need to move your Internet Marketing business on to a whole new level.

Check out the Achievers Inner Circle Membership Club here.

In the previous post we had a look at the pros and cons of PPC, now it’s time to turn our attention to search engine optimization and have a look at the pros and cons of this way to attract traffic.

With PPC we established that getting traffic was the easy part, the hard bit was knowing how to set up and manage your campaigns correctly, then how much time and money it could cost to make them profitable, and finally managing your cash flow.

If you want to use SEO as a way of getting visitors you can do it for virtually no cost, but it will take more time than PPC to build up a decent volume of traffic. If you’re running an established business, you could argue that the time it takes to get traffic with SEO is a cost in itself, because you count the time as lost business?

If you’re only just getting started with internet marketing though, then attracting free traffic by using search engine optimization techniques can be a great way to start. Time is not really an issue because you’ll need some time to learn about internet marketing anyway, and if you’re an individual or don’t have a lot of cash available, then you can do the necessary tasks and work yourself, and you won’t run the risk of losing your shirt with PPC.

As with the PPC post, this is not meant to be an SEO tutorial, but rather a look at why or when you might want to consider which of these techniques to use.

If you don’t really know what search engine optimization is?

It’s basically a term concerned with putting your website and its content together in a way that the search engines like. Sometimes your site will get a manual review by an actual person, but most of the time how well your website ranks will depend on how it appears to the search engine algorithms. This is basically an automated way of judging a number of things about your website and its content such as, what it’s about, it’s relevance to a particular search query, and it’s quality. There are other factors such as load speed, bounce rate, and others that also have an impact on where your site ranks.

In fact when considering SEO, one of the first things to understand is that it’s not really where your website ranks, but where each piece of its content ranks. Although the overall “strength and quality” of your whole site plays an important part, it’s actually each piece of content such as pages, posts, or articles that is ranked individually.

Factors that you need to work on with search engine optimization are usually split into on-page and off-page areas.

On-page concerns things like titles, descriptions, h1 tags, basically revolving around use of keywords and phrases. Off-page is mainly about incoming links and anchor text and all things being equal, tends to be the most important of how high your content will rank in the search engine results pages, or SERPS.

So although like PPC, it does take time to learn about SEO, it’s really all about building trust with the search engines, if they “like your content and think it’s very relevant to a users search query, then you’ll probably rank on the first page, which is where most of the traffic is. If it’s considered to be the most relevant, then you’ll probably rank at the top, or number one position.

A number one ranking usually means that you can attract roughly 43% of the total searches for a given phrase.

So in our PPC example for the keyword “weight loss diet” that gets around 673,000 searches a month, if you had a number one ranking, you might get about 72,000 visits a week!

Now before all the keyword experts shoot me down, if you check that term globally under exact match, then the search volume drops to 40,500 per months, but that still means you should be able to get well over 4,000 visits a week if you ranked number one for that term.

So it’s pretty obvious that although attracting so called natural SEO traffic can take time, and for a term like that would be fairly hard to get, the rewards can again be extremely good, and with no PPC costs it means a very high level of profit, sometimes virtually 100%, can be achieved.

One thing that’s worth pointing out about using SEO techniques to attract traffic though, is that it doesn’t always take as long as you might think?

If you go after very competitive, high traffic terms then it can take months, maybe even over a year, but if know how to choose the right keywords, with lower search volumes and much less competition, you can still get high rankings and start bringing in visitors in as little as a few days!

You just need to target more of them.

Targeting 20 keywords getting 2,400 searches a month (exact match) would bring you more traffic than the highly competitive keyword in our previous example.

Hopefully you now have a better idea of some of the pros and cons involved with using  SEO and PPC?

If you’d like to learn a lot more about how to effectively implement these methods and how to get tons more traffic to your websites?

Go here to open your account and get access to more of the content and training resources available on this site.

Today I thought we’d take a look at the pros and cons of PPC and SEO, if you’re quite new to internet marketing and haven’t come across those terms yet, then they mean pay per click and search engine optimization.

This isn’t going to be a PPC or SEO tutorial so I won’t be going into a lot of detail about how it’s done, more why you might want to concentrate on one or the other, who knows, you might even do both?

So let’s take a look at PPC first.

Pay per click is a form of advertising where you basically pay each time someone clicks on an advertisement that you’ve set up. You can do this in a number of places but the most common are probably Google Adwords, Yahoo, and even sites such as Facebook now have PPC ads. Usually they will be text ads, although you can also use images and video ads as well.

The main single benefit of pay per click advertising is that you can get instant traffic, and lots of it!

Once you’ve set up your campaign, which might only take a few minutes, even if you’ve never set one up before, you start getting traffic once your ads have been approved. This doesn’t take long so you can literally be getting hundreds of visitors to your website on the first day.

Now if you’re not familiar with PPC this is also where the problem lies, those hundreds of visitors are costing you every time someone clicks on your ad, so let’s say you get 500 clicks during the first day because you where tempted by some high traffic keywords such as “weight loss diet.”

A quick check with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool shows this:

You can see that “weight loss diet” gets 673,000 searches a month so there’s loads of traffic but Google estimates that it would cost you $2.38 per click to be in position 1-3.  So 500 clicks could cost you $1,190!

Now before every one starts jumping up and down, I know the figures can vary in a lot of ways, and you can set daily budgets to control what you spend, but the point is that if you don’t really know what you’re doing, and you just have your “traffic goggles” on, you can burn through your funds very fast!

A lot of new marketers start with pay per click, but after a couple of months of trying, and probably spending a few hundred dollars, they still can’t made any money, or turn a profit. One of the main reasons for this is obviously lack of experience, they probably don’t really understand about relevance, landing pages, campaign structures, conversions, tracking, and a lot more.

How much does it cost before you optimize a campaign and get it to break even, and then turn a profit? Even if you only need to make $600 a week to get by, and you could optimize your campaign to double your money, then you’d still have to be spending $1200 a week on PPC to achieve that. You also have to work out how long it’ll take before you get your commissions paid back to you as well.

It’s important to work out your cash flow projections, and how much you’ll need to have to cover your costs? For example, if you don’t get paid your commissions for four weeks, then you’re going to need at least $4,800 available to run your campaigns, and probably more.

Then just as you’ve got it optimized and turning a profit, another marketer with “big pockets” can come in and out bid you!

So pay per click marketing can be very challenging to begin with, but if you can get it right, and you have enough funds, the rewards can be vast, and achieved very quickly. It’s big business, and worth remembering that in some cases the advertisers you’re competing against might not even expect to make a profit on their initial campaign. They might intend to make most of their money using up-sells, return purchases, or other methods.

Let’s turn our attention now to search engine optimization, and see how using that as a way of driving traffic compares to pay per click marketing?

Read the next article about the pros and cons of SEO

You can read the first article in this series “how much traffic do you need to make money online” here.

As far as conversions rates are concerned, it doesn’t always mean the prettiest sites will get the best results?

So what else can you look at?

We’ve already decided that it’s important to step back, and have a think about what your site is there for.

Is it’s purpose to generate adsense clicks or affiliate sales. If your main purpose is to get affiliate sales, why would you want visitors leaving your site and generating you maybe just 20-50 cents a click. That $120 adsense could be up to 600 visitors that clicked away from your website, how much might you have made if they’d left through your affiliate links, if you didn’t have adsense on the site?

I’ve seen websites where they have adsense at the top of each page or post, with no obvious “call to action,” maybe even a small “more info” type link at the end of the content, which is actually their affiliate link. The only thing that’s possibly effective there is the adsense placement, sometimes that’s the idea if the site’s “made for adsense,” but it won’t do well for affiliate sales.

Confusing or over elaborate site navigation can also be an issue, if your visitors can’t find what they want, they’ll leave.

I don’t know what it is currently, but they reckon that you’ve only got something like 5 seconds to get a visitors attention, it doesn’t really matter exactly how long it is, next time you’re looking at stats, see how many visits to your site were less than 20 seconds.

Before I give you a few more things you can check, let’s remember we started this series with a website that had massive traffic, but issues with it’s focus, and conversion rates.

Remember 15,000 visitors a month for about $150.

Now take a site that gets just 10 visitors a day, but has a 4 % conversion rate. Average product price is around $300 and pays 20% commission, so that’s $60 per sale.

Just 300 visits a month but it can generate $720 – that’s more like it!

You don’t always need masses of traffic to make some reasonable money, but you would need more websites.

For any sceptics out there, there are plenty of commissions like that to be made, you just need to dig into the right affiliate networks and find them.

One of the affiliate programs that I use pays those sort of commissions, in fact, they can go as high as 20% of just over $2,000.

Yes – that’s a $400 commission for just one sale!

It just gets even better though, because after the customer has purchased, their details are linked to my affiliate account, so I get all the commissions on future purchases they make as well – which is very nice!

If you want to find out about niches like that, just spend a while trying to dig them out.

Or you could always join the Achievers Inner Circle?

Next time you’re struggling with a site, just consider a few basic points like these:

1. What is the main goal for my website?
Adsense, selling own product, affiliate sales, opt-ins, services.

2. Is the website correctly focused on the target market?
Are you targeting businesses, individuals, what demographics etc

3. What type of keywords are fetching traffic?
Informational, buying, reviews.

4. Is the content appropriate and focussed?
Appropriate for visitors, and focussed on the task.

5. Is your content informational or review based?
Should it sell or pre-sell.

6. Is there an obvious “call to action”?
Make sure visitors know what to do next.

7. Is the site navigation clear and easy to follow?
Remember how long visitors might stay on your site.

8. Are you promoting the right products to the right audience?
If they’re not buying, maybe try something different.

I hope you find this article useful and please don’t under estimate the difference a few subtle changes can make to your website?

Now go and have a look at your websites conversion rates,

It’s Time For A Pay Rise!

Or why not Join the Achievers Inner Circle?

You’ll get much more really good  tips, tactics, and training to improve your business, and it only takes one or two more sales to cover your entire monthly membership fee!