What the hell am I talking about?  Yahoo teamed with McAfee and formed a formidible roadblock to earch engine marketers that they are calling Site Advisor, otherwise known as The Masters of the Universe Club.  And no, you aren’t invited.  It seems the two giants decided to go collaborative and make life for us marketers, even tougher.  I waited a bit to post on this one, because it seems they are still testing it.  Sometimes these results appear, and sometimes they don’t.  Here’s what I’m talking about.

Instead of moving spammers further down the search engine results food chain, as we’re used to, they now get to keep their placement, only with a “spammer” tag.  Smart?  I don’t think so.

Now, it seems like a good idea at first glance.  We all HATE spam, but is this really the answer?  Absolutely freakin not.  The way it works is that users can tag links sent through email newsletters, or that they just signed up for as spam-prone.  After submitting this form to Yahoo, it seems that the “spammer” gets painted with Yahoo’s version of the Scarlet Letter.  What’s this mean exactly?  Well, the idea is to reduce newsletter spam, or spam of any sort for that matter.  What’s really going to happen?  Everyone is going to start reporting everyone as spammers. Eventually these tags will mean absolutely nothing, except for the fact that more people hate you than the person directly over you in the search results.

What good is this?  None.  Spammers are going to be the first one’s to tag their oppositon as spammers to try and gain an edge in the niche they’ve chosen.  In a competitive niche?  Well, it looks like you’ll just have more people to worry about tagging you as a spammer.

Why am I so up in arms that something like this is coming out?  I send random newsletters to my readers of this blog, and a few others.  The problem?  If you have an Aweber account and you’ve ever sent a newsletter you’ll recognize it immediately.  There are always the people that report you as spam for sending a newsletter that THEY requested.  I always use a double opt-in method meaning not only do they have to sign up, they have to confirm the subscription via email.  And I still get people reporting my newsletters as spam.  Are they spammy?  Not at all.  It’ll be just like a blog post, and I’ll generally have a one sentence pitch at the bottom.  It’ll look something like this…

“Tired of blogging, see what Blog Product X has in store for you!”

One little link, and they can easily skip over it.  So if I get problems sending out newsletters every two weeks (or monthly) with one link, imagine the damage that’s going to be done to the people that are actually trying to pitch a product.  Marketers tend to send out a pre-sales letter to their list before any product launch.  Tell me that’s not going to be flagged as spam.

Sound off.  What are your opinions on this?

It’s now Week 3, and we need to start generating some organic traffic.  Most of you have probaly seen a bit of organic traffic already, so you are off to a good start.  For those of you that haven’t, let’s figure out how we can get more organic traffic.

Here’s the deal.  We don’t have the time it takes to rank for highly competitive keywords, so we’ll be targeting long-tails here.  A long-tail keyword is simply any keyword with added text, making it longer than your original keyword.  For example, if my keyword was “Blog Flipping” - I could expand this into a long-tail by using “Learn Blog Flipping Methods” or “Flip Your Blog For Profit”.  Both of these tie into my original word, and they will be much easier to rank for.  When targeting long tails, I tend to shoot for anything with between 200-500k results in Google.  With some keyword optimized text, proper use of title tags, and a few links, I can generally obtain these rankings in less than a week.

You’ve got just over two weeks left before it’s time to sell this puppy, so besides your normal link building, and marketing, I want you all to do a bit of long-tail chasing and see if you can’t get yourself ranked on this weeks articles.  If you don’t have a premium Wordtracker account (which I recommend highly), you can use the free version here.

Let’s break this down into steps for you guys and girls.

1. Type in your keyword in Wordtracker
2. Find “lateral” keywords that people are searching for
3. Do a search on these lateral keywords
4. Use your data, and start posting.

I don’t know who came up with the idea that you can only target one keyphrase per post, but if the terms are not highly competitive (millions of results), then you can actually kill two, even three birds with one stone if you choose your keywords properly.  Write an article using your new keywords, and make sure to use one in the title.  After that, use Bookmarking Demon or you can post on Do Follow blogs with your anchor text. Here’s the key… instead of linking to your homepage when commenting on Do Follow blogs, link to the post with your optimized keywords.  If you can pick up 20 or so links, you should be on page one for non competitive keywords pretty quickly.  Just use that anchor text wisely!

Also, I’d like to thank Forest for finding this nifty little tool which allows you to find do follow blogs.  I’ve been using it quite often, and I’m sure the results will be great.  Thanks Forest!  Give it a try!

Today we’re going to knock one of those problems out.  We’re going to learn how to use a method that all of you already know to build a sizeable amount of backlinks.  Let’s get started!

Normally I despise the idea of link exchanges.  In the long run, they offer very little help to your site, and they can often be downright worthless if you aren’t linking (and getting linked) to from the right types of sites.  You need to target relevant sites when doing this as a long-term linkbuilding strategy.  However, we can’t be so selective when building links for flips.

Here is an example of my link building strategy for a 30 day flip, and bear in mind you need to start building now or else the links aren’t going to be indexed by the time you sell it!  First of all, I go to two major sites… Sitepoint, and Digitalpoint.  Both of these allow you to request link exchanges for free, so take advantage.  What you want to do is target the niche that you cater to in the first round of linking…  an example ad would be -

Need Link Exchange For Celebrity Gossip Blog

I’d like to stay site relevant, but I’ll consider just about any site that doesn’t include adult, racist, or otherwise offensive content.  I’m no so concerned about the PageRank of your site as I am the number of pages… the more pages, the better!  Send me a PM, and we’ll see if we can work out a deal!

My blog is dedicated to celebrity gossip, and the latest Britney Spears meltdowns.  I post daily, so the amount of pages will increase rapidly, and therefore, so will the number of your links.

SITEWIDE links only please!

It’s that easy.  I always do this twice on each site.  The first time I’m looking for relevant sites, or at least something that follows my niche laterally.  The second time, I’ll take just about anything.

You’ll notice that I asked for a sitewide link.  This is very important because otherwise you may just get a couple of links from the site that you are exchanging links with.  If you add someone to your blogroll, you appear on EVERY page within the site (minus the about, contact, etc. usually).  So it’s important that you add them to your sidebar in a blogroll, and that you get the same in return.

The next step is approving the link exchange.  After you find someone to exchange with, you want to post their link, and then check in 24 hours or so to make sure that they posted yours.  You are also going to want to make sure that they didn’t attach “nofollow” to your link.  If they did, you need to promptly email them and ask them to remove nofollow, or you’ll be taking their link down.  Nofollow links don’t pass juice, so these are practically worthless, although they do show up in your link totals if you do a backlink search (usually).

If you don’t know how to check to see if a link is nofollow, here is a quick tutorial.

My comments are Nofollow, which keeps me from getting spammed like crazy.  But if I link to you on the sidebar, or within a post, it’s a followable link.  Here’s how to find the difference if you use Firefox.  And if you don’t, why the hell don’t you?

1. Highlight the link and the text around it
2. Right click
3. “View selection source”

A link within my blog posts would look like this …

<a href=”http://thepissbiscuit.com“>Piss Biscuit</a>

Wherease a link in my comments, which has the nofollow attribute added, will look like this…

<a href=”http://thepissbiscuit.com” rel=”external nofollow”>Piss Biscuit</a>

or - <a href=”http://thepissbiscuit.com” rel=”nofollow”>Piss Biscuit</a>

Now that you know how (if you didn’t before), don’t forget to check your link exchanges to make sure that your links are being followed.  It’s worthless if they aren’t.

Remember, I’m not a huge fan of link exchanges, but they produce results fast when it comes to blog flipping.  It shouldn’t be your only link building method, but it should be in the arsenal!

Don’t forget, you should also be commenting on dofollow blogs, and doing a bit of forum posting.  Add these methods to your social bookmarking and you’ll be building links pretty quickly.

There are two ways to generate a high pagerank, and organic traffic. You can go the quality, or quantity route. If you go for quantity you’ll generally need a lot more links to see any pagerank or organic traffic increases. However, I’ve bought sites with a pagerank 4, that had just 8 or 10 incoming links… because they were quality links! The best method is to just get out there and build links… high pagerank, low pagerank, no pagerank… you want them all. But here is a bit of a secret for you - some links are even more trusted than a site with a high pagerank.

The links I’m talking about come from sites ending in .edu - these sites are generally reserved for educational institutions, but it’s not impossible to get them to link to you. You’ll get a lot more “no’s” than “yes’s”, but it’s worth a try.

Here’s what you do. You want to go to Google, and type in this search string. It’d probably be better if you just copy/pasted it actually. The minus signs signify that Google shouldn’t show sites that have these variables, in this case we don’t want blogs with closed comment fields, or blogs that say you must be logged in. Other than that… we want them all.

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” “your topic”

site:.edu [finds edu domains]
inurl:blog [ find blogs]
“post a comment” [makes sure we can post to this blogs]
-”comments closed” [does not show these closed blogs]
-”you must be logged in” [does not show blogs where u need to log in]

Another method is to BUY .edu backlinks. I see them for sale on digitalpoint from time to time, and they are generally pretty expensive. But, it’s worth it for high ranking sites!

Got a friend in college? You in college? Well, sometimes the school allows you a free webpage on their server, or some even have social applications within their school (think a local facebook)… use them!

The answer? Get links!!!

It sounds easy, and most of you are probably doing this in some form already… but probably doing it the wrong way. I read a statistic that scared the living bejesus out of me… 90% of bloggers don’t know what “anchor text” means. How the hell are you going to build a blog that is ever going to generate any traffic… if you don’t know the cardinal rule of generating organic traffic?

Ok, before I go off on a rant, let’s take a step back and I’ll explain this to the 90% of you that supposedly exist, and don’t know what anchor text means. Anchor text is simply the text that a link displays. For example, if someone were linking to Site Flip U… they could use -

https://siteflipu.com - siteflipu.com - siteflipu.com - https://siteflipu.com

All of these suck! If you are going to link to me… please don’t use the domain name. These links work much better when it comes to generating more organic traffic.

Blog Flipping - Website Flipping - Site Flipping

If I’ve lost any of you… smack yourself on the forehead, and follow the principal back to the blogging 101 class. So the idea is, if you are using the easy link option of Wordpress, you’d click on the little chain link icon… type out the URL, and then in the “Title” section, that would be your anchor text. Got it? Good… moving on!

Generally the anchor text issue can’t be avoided. You can try contacting every blog that links to you, and asking them to change the anchor text… but then you just look ungrateful. A link is a link… take it where you can get it. So how do you help to control your organic traffic destiny? Comment on forums, blogs, and in social sites using your anchor text as the name. However, you want to seek out “do-follow” blogs, due to their ability to pass juice.

Now this is where it gets tricky. A lot of blog owners hate when you comment on their blog with your anchor text as your name. It’s a bit spammy, I agree… but if you ever comment here using your anchor text, I won’t remove it unless it’s questionable content (porn, gambling, etc.), or if your comment sucks royally, and you just spammed my site for a free link… which you won’t get, because I’m not do-follow, and this is the reason why… SPAMMERS SUCK! I realize that I don’t own the world… yet! So I would think that if your comment added nicely to the conversation, and you didn’t just dump a link and run… other bloggers might not mind as much. Some don’t care either way, they just like a full comment field, even if it’s pushing Viagra and Thai knockoff cell phones. Keep commenting… if they get deleted… so be it!

If building highly targeted back links using my anchor text is the fastest way to get more organic traffic, can anyone guess what comes next? Anyone?

Actually there are quite a few, but the one that stands out, is your title tags. These are the tags that appear on top of your browser window, and mine say -

Blog Flipping | Website Flipping | Make Money On The Internet

Why did I choose these? Well, they are relevant to my site! The blog is brand new, hasn’t even officially launched yet, and I’m already ranked on page one or two for a lot of terms that have to do with blog flipping, website flipping, and making money on the internet. I’ll take it… a little more work, and I’m destined for page one, barring any Bi-Polar type behavior from Google.

So how do you change the title tags? Well, if you are using a Wordpress blog, just download the All-In-One-Seo Pack, and change them under the “settings” window. The one you MUST change is in the “tagline” section. These are your title tags.

Let’s not forget about post tags either. All-In-One-Seo also allows you to add tags to your posts. Use them! These tags are search engine friendly, and they are usually the source of high quality backlinks from Technorati as well. Anything else to generate links? Yeah… tons… social bookmarking - uh huh, article submission - yep, directory submission - sure, bookmarking demon - Abso-freakin-lutely!

Guys, if you are serious about flipping websites, open up the wallet and spend the $97 on this piece of software. It’s the one tool that you simply MUST HAVE. Generating links sucks. It’s boring, time consuming, and it doesn’t make you any cooler. So if you can find software to automate it, it’s a definite buy. The more time you can save building links, the more money you’ll make by devoting your time to something a little more profitable.

I’m gonna cut this one off right here before I lose my audience that suffers from ADD. But, when I pick up, I’ll show you a couple of tricks to get HIGH quality links. Links are nice, good links are even nicer.

That’s the beauty of organic traffic. But how do we capture this ever-elusive organic traffic? Well, that could be a book in and of itself… and there are actually several books on the subject. I could go on for days about how to do it, but let’s start with something everyone knows… SEO IS ALL ABOUT BUILDING LINKS.

Sadly, building links is one of the most tedious and boring jobs that a web publisher or a blog flipper will ever have to accomplish. But it’s a necessary evil, and it’ll pay off in the long run. It doesn’t matter whether your blog or website is a quick flip, or something you plan on keeping a little longer term… it needs links. People won’t buy the site without SOME organic traffic, and in order to do that, you’ll need a few links here and there. Don’t get me wrong… I’ve had sites that started generating organic traffic and didn’t have ANY links… but that’s purely by accident. If you want to build organic traffic, you’ll need to get those links. On the subject of blog flipping, look at it this way… one of the factors of valuation when buying a blog is incoming links. So the more you can generate incoming links, the better you can cash out for!

Google & Link Weight

One simple fact can’t be disputed. The biggest part of the complicated Google Search Engine Algorithm is linkage data. Google views the site with the most trusted links as the most important. That’s not a secret. There are many other considerations, but generally if you build enough links, you’ll rank higher than the guy in front of you.

But wait… did you know that the number of links a site has, has very little to do with search engine results? That’s because one of the things that most people forget about when building a link is that every link is not created equal. Google likes sites with “trusted” links, and these types of links carry more importance than a blogroll link from Aunt Maple’s Knitting Blog.

So what else does Google look for when deciding how high to place your site in their search engine results?

• Trust Factor of Incoming Links - Like I said above, one link from a “trusted” site can be worth more than dozens of links from smaller sites. For example, one link on Problogger.Net, can be worth 10x as much as a link on JohnChow.Com, even though they see similar traffic numbers. Problogger has a Google PageRank of 6, and John Chow is lucky that Google still allows him to run a blog. He’s been kicked around by Google so many times it’s not even funny. But long story short, the higher the PageRank of a site that’s linking to you, the more “trusted” the link is from Google. Get those high PageRank links!
• Number of Outbound Links - Even if a site has a high PageRank, if the site is linking to EVERYBODY, it’s not as important as a site that selectively uses outbound linking. For example, a link in a directory (except for trusted directories like DMOZ), is worth very little, no matter what the PageRank of the site is. Directories are great for building massive quantities of links, but they don’t carry much weight individually.
• Anchor Text - This might just be the most important thing when it comes to ranking highly on a keyword. However, generally you don’t have any control over this. Make it quite clear what words you are trying to rank for, and most people will link to you with that anchor text. For example, if I wanted to rank for the terms, Blog Flipping, and Website Flipping, I’d need to build links using those two phrases as anchor text. So if you wanna link to me… *nudge*. When manually building links (commenting on Do-Follow blogs, etc.), you can use whatever anchor text you want, so make sure to take advantage of this.

When building links, I don’t recommend that you worry about anything but getting links, and using the correct anchor text. The above examples were just shown so that you know some of the factors that Google uses to decide what site goes where. And just for clarification, these aren’t SEO tips per se, but just an overall guideline of how Google decides which links are important. When it comes to SEO, I’ve got a ton of tips, but I just wanted to share with you how Google decides which links are important, and which ones are junk. Stick around and we’ll discuss some on-page, and off-page SEO tips in future articles. But for now, get out there and start building links. Whether you know what you are doing or not… links can only HELP your blog.

We’ll have more great SEO tips for you coming soon. Make sure to check back often!

1. Paid Traffic
2. Organic/Seo Traffic
3. Referral Traffic

These three methods all have their pro’s and con’s… so the best way to build traffic would be to utilize all three. However, I realize that this may not be practical in all situations. So, we’ll discuss the three in further detail.

Paid Traffic

Paid traffic can be anything from PPC (pay-per-click), to banner advertisements. This is just what it sounds like… traffic that you are paying for. The most effective way to generate low-cost traffic BY FAR is Google Adwords. I can get clicks for non-competitive keywords at around $.05 each. Since these are non-competitive keywords, it takes hundreds of them to do any damage usually, but at 5 cents a click, it’s an affordable method.

I like to call paid traffic, “band-aid traffic”. I think that any good web publisher should be using this to build a small following, while using the other two methods for free. Of course, building Organic or Referral traffic takes much more time, so it’s great as a temporary solution. The reason I call it band-aid traffic is because it’s not something that you should have to do forever. If you are working on the SEO aspects of your turnkey site, or blog, you shouldn’t have to do this for long. SEO is such an easy concept that you’ll start to see results by accident sooner, rather than later. However, you should be working on the non-accidental keywords that you’d like to rank for as well. We’ll jump into SEO in a bit more detail at a later date… but as I said in the opening… organic traffic sells sites! So, get out there and work on it.

Organic/Seo Traffic

95% of SEO revolves around your ability to build links. You can make this as hard as you want, or try to repeat every SEO tip you’ve ever received from so-called “experts” in the field, but it all comes down to links. This is one of the few things that Google is fairly straightforward about, and unless your a moron, you can’t really dispute it. Linkage data is what it’s all about.

Organic traffic is the best way to generate large amounts of income on a semi-passive method. This traffic obviously is looking for what you are talking about. If not, they wouldn’t have found your site in the search engines, and they wouldn’t have clicked your link after seeing the brief description. Leverage this traffic at all costs, and make sure to do all you can to generate more organic hits.

Referral Traffic

I’m a firm believer in social bookmarking. Before you start booing me off of my self-generated stage, let me explain. The non-believers criticize this as a traffic method because generally the traffic converts very poorly. I can’t dispute that fact, it’s 100% correct. Social bookmarking traffic is NOT converting traffic. They generally don’t buy, and rarely do they do more than give your site a quick peek before taking off for the next shiny object in their browser window. However, it’s not WORTHLESS traffic. It does have some benefits.

One of the benefits of social bookmarking traffic is the fact that it’s virtually idiot-proof and anyone should be able to bring this form of traffic to their site. To start generating traffic to a new site, it’s as easy as clicking the “I like it” button on StumbleUpon. I recommend working Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit as well, but StumbleUpon is an easy start. The reason I like StumbleUpon as a starting point is because all it takes is a few clicks to send hundreds, if not thousands of new viewers to your site. Granted, most of them won’t stay long, and won’t buy anything… but if you can get them there, you are still taking steps in the right direction. This is especially true when selling websites. It’s much easier to sell a website with 500 hits a day, even if it’s 90% social bookmarking traffic, than it is to sell that same site with 50 hits a day, of organic traffic. Why? Not sure… but people seem to like sites with more traffic… no matter where it comes from.

Remember, the reason you are in the web publishing (site flipping, blogging, etc) industry is to make money. And one of the only tips that make money online experts aren’t arguing over, is the need to increase your RSS subscribers. Now, we know that social bookmarking traffic is poor converting traffic, but what if you could get 2% of new visitors that you see from social sites, to subscribe to your RSS feed? They haven’t bought anything, but they just became a subscriber… which could mean more when you go to sell the site.

One more BIG reason I’m a firm believer in social bookmarking traffic is simple. Submitting stories to these sites means more backlinks for your site. And the best part? These are generally very trusted sites, so the link obviously becomes worth more than a blogroll link on your cousin Joe’s blog about BBQ.

I could go on for days about these three traffic methods, but I’ll finish up by saying this… if you aren’t working these three traffic methods, you are definitely behind the curve. Whether you want to make money with your websites, or just sell them off… you can’t get the full value out of them without building traffic, backlinks, and rss subscribers.

The goal is to register a domain, or to buy a pre-existing website that is undervalued. Undervalued is the word of the day, so say it with me… U N D E R V A L U E D! Good, now we can move on. Blogs sell for a ballpark figure of 10-15x monthly income, although there are often exceptions to the rule. Such as John Cow, who is asking the ridiculously high price of 50k, and he might just get it. I don’t blame the Cow, as you can’t get a Buy-It-Now (BIN) price of 50k, without asking for it… so kudos to my favorite bovine.

So part one of the equation is to buy an undervalued blog. And it doesn’t get much more undervalued than a new domain, which has it’s benefits, and it’s drawbacks, which we’ll discuss in a later post. So essentially, you can buy a $10 domain name, slap it onto a $4 hosting account, and cash out for thousands in 30-90 days. But it’s the steps in between that are going to lose some people. Anybody can handle the beginning (finding a domain, or site) and the end (selling it), but the ones that master the middle of this process are going to be those that make the most money.

The middle steps in this process are the ones that are going to make or break your sale. These steps revolve around creating a visually appealing blog that a buyer will deem worthy of spending their money on. When I say visually appealing, I know most of you instantly thought of fancy themes, and great header graphics, but I was actually referring to statistics. Statistics sell blogs… it’s that simple. If you can’t increase the statistics of an undervalued blog, then you are going to end up selling it for zero profit, or even worse… a loss.

I’m going to be teaching you several ways to make money flipping websites over the next few months, and here are just a few of the methods that you’ll be making money with in no time flat!

• Buying Domains and/or Pre-existing Websites
• Building traffic and increasing statistics
• Increasing revenue numbers
• Writing killer sales copy that will sell your site fast
• Closing the deal

Those 5 simple things are all it’s gonna take for you to start making money flipping blogs and websites. Now, let’s roll up our sleeves, and start mastering these methods to make money flipping websites.