Last night I caught part of John Jonas’ live presentation to a packed room at The Webinar Summit. He was giving his usual presentation on outsourcing to the Philippines for $2.50 per hour by hiring full time employees.

I did not catch the entire presentation and I will be going through the replay videos to soak up all of the advice given by John Jonas and many other speakers. That said I wanted to bring up an important point.

At all Internet Marketing conferences, speakers usually pitch their stuff. John pitched ReplaceMyself.com, naturally.

Nobody was pitching products for less than $997. Not a single person. So John came up with a creative way to get his price point up that high. Normally, customers can purchase a membership to Replace Myself for $97 per month, or get permanent access (the “pro outsourcer” upgrade) for $797.

So how can he sell the same thing at $997? Well, he added in a pretty good extra bonus that is technically worth $800. The bonus was a pre-screened and pre-tested employee. You see, because John Jonas owns OnlineJobs.ph he also setup a business by which he tests candidates and places them in a separate pool. Those candidates are more likely to be successful to you in your business, and he guarantees they work out for you or he will replace them free of charge. A tested employee costs $800 (a finder’s fee) plus usual ongoing salary. So John was throwing in a tested employee and adding $200 to the sticker price of the package. That means you’re actually getting a 75% discount on the pre-tested employee.

If you just want to do the hiring on your own, you can still buy his package at the usual $97 per month, or currently $797 if you take the “pro outsourcer” upgrade. BTW, that upgrade is pitched to you AFTER you confirm your payment for the first month. So don’t worry. You pay $97 and then you purchase the upgrade. Then you never ever make another payment in your life. That’s what I did, and I’m very happy to have done it. I don’t like ongoing fees.

Useful Links

Visit Replace Myself.

For people already ready to buy, and want my huge and helpful bonus, visit the checkout page.

To hear John Jonas on his next webinar (these are GOOD), register for his webinar.

Tonight I was browsing the Warrior Forum and came across another oh-so-common thread where the original poster was asking how people make money from the Amazon.com affiliate program.

Here’s my post to explain what I’m doing. Full disclosure, my Amazon activities are by no means a full time income today, but they are decent and growing and because I see how good the potential is, I’ve been doing a lot more of it over the last couple of months.

What is Amazon’s Affiliate Program All About?

Let’s start with the basics – if you have a website where you promote Amazon products you’ll earn a commission ranging from 4% up to about 7% depending on how much stuff you sell every month. You only need to sell about 6 or 7 items to get to the 6% mark, which is incredibly easy. So you should think about it as a 6% commission. Check the terms of the program because some categories, like electronics, only pay 4% no matter what.

There are two main ways to promote Amazon products. You can either write reviews, your you can contextually market products. Let me explain.

Reviews are pretty obvious, and are probably what most readers here will be doing. You either have a website in a niche and you post product reviews, or you create a website with a focus on niche product reviews. This is very common and is exactly what I’m doing. You summarize the product information along with customer feedback and provide a link to where the reader can go buy the product. You get traffic from people who are researching these products, and if you do a good job writing the reviews, you get clicks through to Amazon. Conversion tends to be around 6-7% based on my experience.

Contextual marketing is different. Instead of reviewing a product, you may write a blog post or an email and you may mention a product in the context of a story you’re telling, or information you’re sharing. This strategy is best suited to experienced marketers with a following. Say you had a popular email list in the health and fitness market. Maybe you’re writing about how you started cooking with coconut oil because of its health benefits. When you create anchor text (just like I did there), linking to Amazon, without offering a “review”, that’s contextual marketing.

But most of you are probably interested in doing product reviews. So let’s talk about that for a bit longer. There are some rules you need to abide by when writing reviews.

Here they are:

1) Make sure you review products that will pay you. You need to consider search volume and price. Most people say don’t promote products under $100 because they don’t pay much commission. That’s true, but if you find a $10 product that gets 30x more search volume than a $100 product, you’ll still make 3x as much money. Factor in volume AND price when you consider writing a review.

2) Always do keyword research on the product name or niche keyword, and then make sure you do proper on-page SEO by incorporating keywords in your title, description, headlines, URL, and several times in your body text.

3) Pick products that your writer is interested in writing about! This is REALLY important. If you are the writer, then you need to be interested. If you are hiring a full time writer from OnlineJobs.ph then you should ask your writer what gets him or her excited. Perhaps you can find good niches that your writer is personally interested in. This will help you add value in your reviews. This leads us to …

4) Make sure your reviews HELP PEOPLE. If they are crap, nobody will click them. If you can’t write, do not write reviews. Hire someone who can. Even hiring an American writer for $0.02 through TextBroker.com will be better than doing it yourself if you are not a good writer.

5) I personally find that text links work best. I link to the actual product page on Amazon, and I link to customer reviews. Amazon makes it easy to get an affiliate link to these variations of pages.

Outsourcing Amazon Review Sites

These days I outsource all of the review writing and most of the niche research. I hire people through OnlineJobs.ph to write for me full time and in their first (probation) month I will assign them a complete website to build. Obviously it takes less than a month to build a site, but I’ll hold their hand through the process without doing any of the work for them. I’ll just show them how to do things. I get them to pick products, pick domain names, install WordPress, write reviews and write articles to promote the site.

Other than “English writing”, everything else is easy to teach, so I focus on hiring people with some writing talent.

I do not have a full time graphics person. I simply outsource some small jobs to a freelancer that I like. A website header for my Amazon sites will cost me $2 (yes, I’m serious).

I spend my time managing projects, doing some niche research, and proof-reading some of the reviews to make sure quality is in check. I send my guys lots of emails or training videos to suggest ways to do things better. I work “on” my business rather than “in” my business. This is the only way to grow, in my view.

Getting Started with Amazon Review Sites

I recommend two products that happen to be sold at Clickbank.com to get started. Both of these should be handed over to your outsourcing team so that THEY can implement these for you, so long as you known enough to guide them. Remember guys – Clickbank forces vendors to offer a 60 day guarantee so I wouldn’t recommend this stuff (using my affiliate link) if I thought it was crap. These are both systems I purchased with my own money.

The first is Dan Brock’s Super Deadbeat Affiliate Program. I previously wrote about it here, and if you use my affiliate link to buy it I’ll send you my notes on how to make the program even better.

The second is Gary Gregory’s MOBS system. He doesn’t advertise this as an “Amazon” system, but it is PERFECT for building sites that promote physical products and it is a very complete system. You really can’t go wrong if you follow Gary’s instructions. He even shows you his own demo site that acts as a perfect model to follow. You need nothing more. If you buy this using my affiliate link I’ll send you a report I’ve been working on (for my team) that explains how to make Gary’s strategy even MORE powerful. Email me at info (at) replace-myself-bonus (dot) com to claim the bonus.

The Most Important Part: You won’t make money sitting on your ass thinking. You won’t make money analyzing stuff. You will only make money by taking action and making LOTS of mistakes. Trust me on this. You NEED to make a ton of mistakes to become profitable and luckily these are low-cost mistakes. But the faster you start, the faster you’ll make money. Once you make money you’ll understand exactly why you’re making money and you’ll be self sufficient. It really is that simple.

Today what I’ve got for you is a simple suggestion for making sales pages in WordPress. It’s a pretty common topic, so I hope this is helpful to you. If you don’t ever create sales pages, or if you have a HTML / CSS guru on your team, you can ignore this.

This is for the rest of us

I use a theme called FlexSqueeze to make sales pages. It seems that so many people ask about how to make beautiful sales pages in WordPress, yet so few are aware of this theme. The guy that created it has supported it with awesome service, and the theme just keeps getting better.

I used FlexSqueeze to create this site, and two other sites, including my main product sold on Clickbank. I did this when I didn’t have any outsourcers. I didn’t know much about CSS, so FlexSqueeze solved my challenges. I didn’t have to learn any fancy code. I just did cust & paste on example code and wrote my own copy.

Here’s a demo page I slapped up by cutting and pasting the demo code. You can see exactly can be done, literally, in a few minutes.

Oh, and here’s the pre-sell page I made for Replace Myself, which is the home page of this domain. All I did was write copy. I did no graphics work at all.

It comes with all sorts of styled lists, testimonial boxes, guarantee certificates, feature boxes, big arrows, buy buttons, opt-in forms, etc. It’s very professional.

If you need to have one of your guys in the Philippines create nice looking sales pages, this theme gives you everything you need to do it. Maybe you write the copy, maybe you hire a copywriter and hand off the copy to your outsourcer – it doesn’t matter.

FlexSqueeze makes sales pages (and squeeze pages) dead easy.

The theme costs $127 last time I checked, which is about average for premium themes.

Here’s my affiliate link:
FlexSqueeze Theme

There’s no rush to go buy it or anything. I just wanted you to be be aware of its existence because at some point, if you haven’t already created your own product, you’ll want to. And given the popularity of WordPress, it only makes sense to use it for creating your sales pages.

Like I said earlier – FlexSqueeze is the theme that I use on this website. I chose it because I wanted to crank out a quick Replace Myself Review + Bonus offer and it did the job beautifully.

There are tons of videos over at the FlexSqueeze Theme website showing you exactly how all of this fancy stuff is done with very little effort.

Happy outsourcing,
Chris Thompson

Internet marketers buy a lot of domains. BUT I’m pretty new to the idea of buying domains from other people. In the past I’ve always just picked domain names based on availability of new names, and I’ve never considered buying pre-registered domains.

…Not until my guy in the Philippines suggested it.

I’m not talking premium domain names here either. I’m just talking about domains that some other Joe Marketer registered. I’m talking about making an offer and simply buying it privately.

We’re building a lot of niche sites right now and I have one main guy doing all my keyword research and domain research. Last week he came back to me with a top-3 list of potential names for a new site.

But in addition to the top 3 list, he did something I never asked him to do. I love it when guys go beyond what they were asked to do. How cool is that?

Here is what he wrote to me:

“If you look at ExactMatchKeyword.org it is an abandoned site. Maybe he [the owner] will sell it? It ranks very well in Google”.

He was right. The site had 2 or 3 pages of content, but a perfect exact match on our keyword with a popular .org domain. The site ranks #2 for the keyword. It’s a SUPER thin site that we can make a lot better.

I visited NetworkSolutions.com and did a “whois” search. The owner had not used private registration so I was able to email him and offer him $150 for the domain. He asked me for $200 and we settled on $175. It’s a bargain for me because I know I’ll be able to sell a lot of physical product via Amazon using this site – especially once my Filipino writers create real content for the site.

Anyway, that’s your quick tip for today. When you have your guys look for domain ideas, always tell them to look at the .net, com and org extensions of the exact match keyword. You’ll be surprised how often the domain has been registered, but is not really being used. You might as well throw out an offer to see if you can buy it rather than start from scratch with a lesser-known extension (such as .biz, .info, etc).

Best regards,
Chris Thompson

P.S. I highly recommend you use Market Samurai for keyword research because it speeds up the process about 5x compared to using Google’s free keyword tool. Time is money. Here’s where you can get a free trial of Market Samurai.

I wanted to show you a new feature at OnlineJobs.ph because after reviewing it, I think this is really cool John Jonas has added videos to OnlineJobs.ph so that job seekers can “pitch” themselves using video.

When you watch a video of someone, you get to hear how they speak. This makes it really to tell how good their English is, and how well they communicate. This is super important!

I think this is going to become my favorite way to screen people before I contact them. I also wanted to show you this one specific example (see video) because it clearly shows someone (a 35 year old woman named Anne) who has absolutely perfect English just as you’d expect from an American. She’s clearly pitching herself as a freelancer, so not someone you can hire full time, but I show you this just so you can see how good the English can be with a Filipino.

Free Access to OnlineJobs.ph

When you join Replace Myself, you get free access to OnlineJobs.ph, which means you can look up these candidates, get their contact info, and hire them.

I already emailed Anne to tell her how impressed I was with her video. I need someone to do freelance logo design anyway, so it fits one of my current needs.

There seem to be a LOT of people asking about OnlineJobs.ph and whether it is any good as a place for online marketers to hire employees. I thought I’d take some time to write a quick post with my thoughts.

The Good Parts about OnlineJobs.ph

• John Jonas owns the site, and he is an Internet marketer, so he will keep improving the site to suit the needs of people just like him. I like that.
• There are TONS of resumes available on the site. It has become popular, so there are lots of job candidates to choose from.
• You can post a job and have people find you. I like doing this and in my bonus package I reveal a strategy to get more qualified candidates to contact you.
• You can bookmark favorite candidates.
• You can mark your employees as “hired” when you hire them so other people won’t bug them.
• If your worker marks himself as “not hired” you will get an email notice. Hey, sometimes people working for you full-time will try to get another job. It happens sometimes.

Things you Need to Know

• Candidates rank THEMSELVES on their chosen skills. Keep this in mind because people tend to over-rate themselves.
• You should think about the single most important skill you need in a person (besides English), and hire to fit that skill. Teach the rest later.
• The site costs $47/month unless you are a member of “Replace Myself” (see bonus link above). If you are a “pro” member of Replace Myself then you’ll never have a monthly fee in your life. You get permanent membership. That’s what I did. The pro membership is offered as a one-time offer after you subscribe to John’s monthly package. This means you subscribe to the regular package and then you’ll see the up-sell offer. If you plan to outsource, this is HIGHLY worth the money.
• You will need to come back to this site again and again. An employee may not work out, or might quit, and you will probably expand your business. You will hire from this site more than one time. That’s for sure.

The Conclusion

Simply put, I love OnlineJobs.ph and have found nearly all of my employees through this site. Some of them have not worked out, but that is not a reflection on the site. It’s a reflection of my novice hiring skills at the time, or my lack of defining what I wanted ahead of time. There are very good people out there to be found, you just have to go out and find them. You can’t expect a job site to solve your problems. It is more like a toolbox. You still need to know how to use the tools to craft something beautiful.

Today I want to talk a bit about outsourcing as it pertains to article writing and the economics of doing this. I see countless posts over at WarriorForum.com, or other places, asking about how to get started outsourcing article marketing.

Obviously, article marketing can be a powerful way to promote your business. You get backlinks from your articles, and you get potential traffic from people who read your articles.

So let’s talk about your options when it comes to outsourcing article writing:

1) You can go to a freelancing site such as Elance or oDesk. Here you can probably hire someone to write articles for you either by the hour, or more likely, on a per-article basis. You generally spoon feed the person the exact keywords and other article requirements. They work for you but they also work for many other employers. They get paid by the article and they crank out whatever they crank out. You might get lucky and find a great person through this method, but it’s not easy. They have no real incentive to learn about YOUR business, and do anything to help you succeed beyond writing articles. They are not truly working for you.

2) You can hire your own writers to work for you full time. This is far more effective, in my own experience, because you are able to set expectations for how much output a person creates in an average week or month, while paying them a salary. This means they aren’t looking to crank out garbage. You can also teach them exactly what you need accomplished. You can show them how to do keyword research so that they know exactly what to write about without you needing to explain it on every single assignment. You can earn each other’s trust and you can give them your login details for article marketing accounts, so that they submit the articles for you. You can get them to track your rankings for keywords. There is FAR more value in having a dedicated employee than hiring a freelancer.

The Economics:

I use Unique Article Wizard, so whenever I have a writer do articles for me, I get 3 versions of the article along with a resource box file that we submit to the UAW service.

Imagine that on a typical day my writer takes plenty of breaks (you go nuts writing all day), and outputs a total of 3 article “sets” each day. That’s actually 9 articles, but only 3 topics because each “set” for UAW has 3 versions like I said above.

There are an average of 22 work days in a month. That’s 66 article sets per month. Say the salary is $400 per month. You can hire people for less, but I’m using numbers that are very achievable for you.

This works out to a cost of $6.06 per article set. Oh, and since my writers also submit to the Unique Article Wizard Service for me, this means that I’m getting a lot more than “just” an article. I’m completely outsourcing article marketing so that my time is free to figure out what the next growth path will be for my business.

Do you need a full time article writer?

If you are not sure, then you probably don’t have ambitious enough goals. With one writer on your staff, full time, you should be able to pick 3 niche markets, setup blogs within each niche market and find products that you can promote using a feature box in your blog (or the “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin).

Then, you train your writer to follow the news on each niche market. You have your writer write one article per day for each of the blogs, and post to the blog. The writer then creates the 2nd version of each article and submits to EzineArticles.com (and perhaps other directories). Then, the writer creates the 3rd version of each article and submits the entire set (all 3 versions) to Unique Article Wizard.

If you pick niche markets that actually have buyers, and you promote products that actually sell, then you should have no problem making a solid profit with this strategy. And there are many variations of it.

For example you could have your writer do product reviews and write articles to point backlinks at your reviews. Go to some of the affiliate networks where physical products are promoted. CJ, ShareASale, LinkShare, etc. Find products that look like they sell very well (check for real user reviews online).

When you find a great product that you think you can promote, check the top 10 organic listings when you query the product name in Google. Look at the number of search results using phrase match (product name in quotes). Look at the average page rank of the top 10 listings using broad match (no quotes, the way people actually search). If you think you can get ranked for the product name, publish a review. Then start sending articles to the review using Unique Article Wizard. You’ll be surprised how many awesome products there are to sell out there once you move away from Clickbank. Even Amazon has a TON of stuff out there, but you need to focus on expensive products given the 6-6.5% commission cap.

The point is this: Hiring an article writer in the Philippines is very low cost. If you have ANY aspirations for making money online you better learn how to manage a few employees and you better learn how to do article marketing.

The side point is this: If you are willing to step up to the plate and hire a dedicated employee for a few hundred bucks per month, then using a service such as Unique Article Wizard is a no-brainer. It’s like buying a car for $30k and not paying an extra $5k to be able to drive faster than everyone else.

Where to hire writers

My top recommendation is to use John Jonas’ training over at ReplaceMyself.com (make sure you claim your bonus through me)

Today I want to give you another simple case study about article marketing + blogging. This is a story about how I got a first-page Google ranking for a profitable keyword within one month. It will generate me auto-pilot income for (likely) years to come. It took some up-front investment in time, but it is easily outsourceable and repeatable.

Got your interest? Good. Let’s move right along.

Important side note: When I say “article marketing” I’m specifically talking about Unique Article Wizard, which is by far the easiest way to accomplish these results. It is not free, but as you’ll eventually learn throughout your marketing career, you need to pay for good quality stuff if you want to succeed. If you subscribe to this service using my link I will give you the same bonus package that I offer to people who join Replace Myself. See this page for info on the bonus package, and then just come back here and use my link to join UAW.

About the Product I Promote:

I chose an information product that has a recurring monthly fee and pays a decent commission. It’s something I feel very good about promoting because I’ve seen the content. Pick stuff you feel good about. Be ethical. Enough said.

The Keyword:

My goal was to rank very highly for the product name, and for variations such as “product name review”, etc. When people are searching on a product name it means they are interested in buying, but they need more information. It’s a great area to start with your marketing efforts.

Just so you know, the product name I want to rank for is two words. It’s harder to rank for two-word phrases compared to something like “Captain MonkeyUncle’s Large Brown Underwear”. Duh.

Assessing the Competition:

I don’t believe in huge keyword research. Keep it simple. Type the keyword into Google within quotes to reveal the number of pages with a phrase match for your keyword. Reminder, if the keyword is “Stinky Shoes”, you want to know exactly how many pages say those words in that order. You don’t want to skip the quotes or you’ll get a total number of pages that says “stinky” and “shoes” anywhere on the page.

In this case, my competition is about 90,000 pages. Certainly not child’s play, but definitely not rocket science to beat.

Now we look at Page Rank. Type the keyword into Google again, but without quotes this time. This is how your prospects type stuff, so copy them. Look at the top 10 results and get the page rank for each page. I use the FireFox plugin “SEO4Firefox” to do this. Average it out. If it is under 2 you should be in good shape. Above 2 and it will be harder to compete.

In my case, the average worked out to 1.1 (a few zeros, and a few pages with PR 1, 2, 3, and even a 4).

The Work Involved:

First, I setup a WordPress site. As usual I made the static home page the sales page. I then created a “blog” page and set that up so that’s where the blog posts go. Pretty ordinary so far. I have a guy who sets up sites like this for me and it takes him about 45 minutes to install WP, add the plugins, setup the pages, install the theme, etc. From there anyone can do the posting (myself or an employee).

I started publishing some decent articles as blog posts. Nothing huge, just stuff that I could whip off easily. I’m up to about a dozen posts on that blog over the course of a month.

Next Comes the Promotion via Article Marketing

I wrote a whopping total of 2 articles with educational information about the niche. I didn’t even mention the product in the articles. I just wrote for the reader, and I provided links back to my site in the resource box. It took me about 45 minutes to do each article, including the “re-writes” needed for the Unique Article Wizard system. Making the resource boxes took 10 minutes.

I submitted the articles separately (about 2 weeks apart) using Unique Article Wizard. I made sure to use a variety of titles and a variety of anchor text and resource boxes.

Ok Let’s Get to the Good Stuff … The Results!

At first I was nowhere to be seen on the first 3 pages of Google. I wasn’t even cracking the top 30! That is typical. I had no backlinks yet, and my site was pretty new. Remember, the articles had not yet been submitted at this stage!

About 2 weeks after I submitted my first article I was on the 2nd page of Google if you typed “product name review” (no quotes). But still nowhere to be seen for the product name alone. Mind you, my first article was still in the process of being drip-fed out to the directories.

That’s when I submitted the 2nd article. Again, I waited another two weeks. Every day the Unique Article Wizard would submit my articles to blogs and directories. I could see the pingbacks coming to my site each day, so I knew I was getting about 10 new backlinks per day (I set the articles to drip out to only 20 sites per day). BTW, I don’t keep the pingbacks. I delete them. But I like to see them come in since it tells me that backlinks are being formed.

After a total duration of four weeks, my rankings had significantly improved. And I mean SIGNIFICANTLY. I’m now showing on the first page for the main keyword. I’m ranked #8 as of this writing. If you add “review” after the keyword then I’m ranking #6.

Do you think I plan to stop there? Of course not! I’ll just submit another fresh article into the wizard every couple of weeks (or maybe every week if I’m aggressive) and I’m very confident I can get to the #2 or #3 spot (the top spot will probably always be owned by the product vendor’s site).

Very Important SEO Point: Results do NOT come instantly. Quit thinking that you can post something today and rank for it tomorrow. That’s definitely true for non-competitive phrases, but if there is even only mild competition it will take some time. Just be cool with that concept and plan to build a business around it.

The Money:

The site I’m referring to has brought in a few hundred bucks so far. Nothing huge, but remember that it’s still new and my rankings are still being built up in Google. I expect that making $1000 per month is very doable from this site. That’s just ONE site. Keep that in perspective when you think about the $67 cost for Unique Article Wizard.

Also remember that the time investment is only modest up-front, and then very light going forward. All I need to do is keep submitting a new article every month to ensure that competition doesn’t creep up behind me and push me out of the way.

Outsourcing These Projects

In this particular example I wrote the website content and articles myself. That’s because I know the market better than anyone who works for me. Plus I actually enjoy writing (as you may have noticed), so I pick topics that I want to write about and I outsource other topics. There are plenty of projects where I do none of the writing. I just manage the process. I have someone else setup WordPress. Someone else writes reviews. That same writer will do the articles and submit them to UAW for me (I literally don’t touch them).

Then my VA keeps track of analytics to see what’s getting traffic and what’s not. We’ve done this on tons of products and sometimes you get “easy rankings” with only a few backlinks.

If you know the rankings are coming quickly and the product converts, you can then go back and improve your review, add more content, add a bonus offer, or whatever. That’s the power of outsourcing. You can test a LOT of stuff very cheaply with someone else’s labor, and then you can go back and re-invest in the stuff that is working.

This way your efforts are concentrated on only worthwhile projects.

UAW Bonus Offer

I think you can tell that I’m pretty passionate about the power of Unique Article Wizard. If you buy it through my link I’ll give you the bonus package that I created for Replace Myself members (outsourcing stuff). The bonus covers a lot of important concepts involving UAW, outsourcing, and hiring English writers, so it will definitely be useful to you.

Often people will ask “what kinds of tasks do you outsource”. Here’s a list of stuff that I’ve been outsourcing lately, and what I think works.

1) Keyword research.: If we start a new project we need to decide what keywords we are going to go after. I own a copy of Market Samurai, which I like to use to automate a lot of the information gathering on keywords. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on keyword research so I’ll ask an employee to come up with the “big giant list” of keywords, then I’ll delete anything that is obviously not useful, and run the list through market samurai. I export a CSV file and send it back to him. He can then go through it to check for the best opportunities according to some screens that I learned. One of my favorite screens is to look for keywords that get reasonable traffic, have phrase match competition (search in quotes) of under 20,000 results, and where the average PR of the top 10 results (search without quotes) is under 2.

2) Writing landing pages and product review If we have a specific product that we want to promote we might either create a series of landing pages, where one page is targeted at one keyword, or we will create a product review where we are going after keywords such as “product name review”. Either way, this is something that is easy to outsource. Make sure you outsource this to a good writer. The content needs to be high quality here.

3) Article writing. We write articles mainly for backlinks. I have never found that articles have been a good source of traffic on their own, but they do propel us in terms of off-page SEO, so we get more direct traffic for our keywords. I use a method of article marketing that John Jonas teaches inside of Replace Myself.

4) Article submission. We use EzineArticles, along with other free directories. But, the KEY to our SEO success is using Unique Article Wizard. This service does cost money but it comes back in spades. I wrote this case study in using unique article wizard, and the same thing keeps happening over and over again when we write specific product reviews and aim links at them through UAW. I don’t do any of the submission myself. It’s incredibly easy to outsource.

5) Mini-net creation. We setup a series of blogs that link to each other and to our “money sites”. We link using a mixture of anchor text. These are easy to setup and require a new blog post ever few weeks to keep them active. This is an ongoing product that I outsource. I have not ever touched it. It certainly helps us with SEO. The guy that takes care of this project also does a monthly rank-checking spreadsheet and we can see that we DO move up. One trick: Make sure to log out of your Google account before checking your rankings.

6) Blog setup and maintenance.. We run a lot of WordPress sites. The setup is now templated. We do the same thing, pretty much, for all sites. One of my guys just sets them up and he does a weekly check for comments, spam, etc. We may shift to every two weeks on this because all comments go into a moderation queue anyway.

7) Split Testing. We use Google Website Optimizer to perform A/B tests on landing pages, or on offers, etc. I simply had one of my guys learn how to install the split tests using a WordPress plugin and he runs the tests. I usually get involved only to come up with a good idea … something I think is worth testing. He does the legwork to make it happen.

Google Analytics. If you run websites you should be using analytics. I like to use analytics for content ideas. I can see how people are finding our sites. Say that we setup a new site and we have a product review for XYZ. Say we have VERY few links pointing to the review, and somehow we’re getting traffic for it anyway. I taught my guy to dig into this. So he can now look for sources of traffic, and then go to Google to see where we rank on these keywords. Sometimes we rank within the top 20 but not on the first page. So we write some articles to throw backlinks at these reviews using the keyword as anchor text. Within a few weeks we’re ranking better and we get MORE traffic.

It ain’t rocket science folks … but you need to be organized and execution-driven.

Important Point about Tools:

I notice a lot of people are hesitant to try out a tool that costs money. They go to forums and ask people how well they work, or they read reviews. That is DEFINITELY smart, but please do not fall into the trap of standing still because you are not sure if it works. Guess what! Pretty much every monthly-fee tool out there has a free trial period, or at the very least, allows you to cancel anytime.

Look at Unique Article Wizard as one example. It’s $67 per month. I hesitated in the beginning because I didn’t know better. I thought, “Is it really that useful”. Then I re-read something John Jonas wrote over at his blog. He said something like, “This is the way article marketing was meant to be done”. So what’s the worst case scenario? I login to the system, absolutely hate it, and ask for a refund? I know I’ll get refunded if I ask. You know it too.

So if there is a tool out there that you think might help you, GO FIND OUT. Test it.

From a marketing perspective, I often like to see what people are putting on YouTube. Sometimes it gives me good ideas. Anyway, I found this video review of ReplaceMyself.com on YouTube. It’s short, and seems fairly well balanced (not just all good stuff).

My thoughts: He says that the training provided inside of ReplaceMyself is “weak”. I disagree with this. I think the training is actually very solid. Maybe he thinks it is weak because it is broken down into many steps. For example, on the training in sales copywriting, John basically provides about a dozen or more things that he wants your workers to go through. They could be PDF documents, audio lessons, or videos. Keep in mind this fits into the 80 / 20 rule. He is not creating novels or DVD courses to train your workers. He is giving them the knowledge that will allow them to get 80% of the job done, and enough knowledge to go out and LEARN the rest.

The free audio: Obviously the free audio mentioned in the video is the one that John offers when you opt-in to his mailing list. It’s a great audio, and worth getting.

The training is a big time saver, in my opinion. I only wish he gave people more of the advanced hiring techniques that I’ve come to learn. But that’s why I created a bonus package as an affiliate