prelaunchX Invitation

prelaunchX Invitation: You're invited to join prelaunchX

Free Daily SEO Tips

  Many people who get our free tools also sign up to get our free 7-days to SEO success series. This originally started out as a 7-part series, and over the years we have added about a dozen bonus tips covering a wide array of related business topics. We sorta started out as SEOs who learned a boatload about business and human nature in the process.

Day 9 is the one in the series I am most proud of, but we get a lot of feedback from readers who have different ones as their favorites, which helps inspire us to share more. If you ever miss a day, you can use the navigation in the lower right of the daily tips to catch up (or get ahead). And here is the overview page, which lists the entire series. Hopefully sharing that link didn't kill anticipation. ;)

Here is a bonus guide for figuring out the value of a top Google ranking.

Welcome aboard and here is to wishing you the luck and the hard work needed to dominate Google and your market!

Tracking Results

Search engine marketing is an ongoing process. Markets and business models constantly evolve. You should reserve some time each month for reading customer feedback, reading the market, viewing the competition, and creating new ideas to help spread your brand exposure. The web grows with or without you, so if you are stagnant, then you are falling behind.

This section explains why web analytics are so important, using rank checkers to track your progress, why it may take a while to achieve solid results, and what to look for if you are not achieving good results. It also offers tips on how to replicate your success by creating a second page targeting the same keywords.

The Leading Ways to Make Money Online

• 
  Google AdSense & contextual ads - get paid when your users click an ad to go to another website, driven by contextual relevancy. This is the easiest business model of the four, but is also likely a low earner compared to the potential of some of the other business models.
• Ad sales - sell ads directly or as part of an ad network. Many sites will make more from direct ad sales than from AdSense, but it is more work managing ad sales.
• Affiliate programs - get paid a commission when your readers perform an action or buy something from another site. Making a living from affiliate recommendations is hard work because unlike other ad based models you only get paid when one of your visitors actually converts on another site.
• Sell products and/or services - sell services, create indirect revenue streams, or create your own products to sell. This is the hardest business model of the four, but has the greatest potential reward.
• Conditional Advertising - a somewhat advanced module full of tips you can use when thinking about how you scale your website for maximum growth and monetization.

Pushing Yourself Up the Value Chain

As the line between ads and content blur, web users will get better at tuning out ads. For longterm sustainability you are best of putting yourself as high on the value chain as you can.
For most influential publishers that will mean selling ads direct or creating your own product, instead of relying on a third party network.

Profiting From the Organic Parts of the Web

Start From a Good Name & a Good Idea

Many web-based businesses fail because they do not have a functional business model. Before you even choose a name for your site you should have an idea of

• Who your target audience is?
• What do you intend to sell to them?
• What will make your business idea unique?

You can still make significant profits without being sure what you want to sell if you can solve large problems and make life easier for a group of targeted people. At any level, you still have to know your goals and the reasons why you are creating a site. What makes your site different than the millions of sites already published?

Learn from Experience

My first few sites failed because they had no functional business models. They added little value to the web. That is not to say that I didn’t learn from them, because I did, but they led me to creating this one.

If you are uncertain of yourself, don’t be afraid to create multiple channels just to try them out.

If you know you want to do something for the long run, you may want to spend a bit of time watching the marketplace before pouring too much effort into making a huge site that is hard to update.

Create Value and Then Extract Profits

Many sites fail because they fill their site with ads on before they get a loyal following. By creating value without placing much emphasis on early profits, you can later make a larger sum of money when the site has a large, valuable user base.

Links have value. You need to gain link authority for search engines to trust you.

You will never build a large, profitable audience via SEO unless you create content other people will want to link at, and market it aggressively enough to build your brand and build mindshare.

Non-Commercial Profits

Even if you are only trying to sell your opinion, you can still earn money from it through hard work, creativity, or simple outspokenness. If you are selling advertising space, you first need to win great distribution.

You do not win that distribution by throwing too many ads up too early! Offer something worthwhile, then try to extract value (in that order).

I made a personal blog about losing weight that was accepted into DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directoryhttp://seobook.com/aff/affiliates/signup.php?a_aid=moneymaker for free within its first month of existence.

Flipping the Switch

After the site aged and gained authority, I placed ads on it. I gave the site to my mom and she has added weight loss calculators and other features to the site to make it more useful. As she keeps adding valuable features to it eventually the site will hit a tipping point where the income increases logarithmically.

It is easier to get links for a non-commercial site than for a commercial site. After the links are in place, you can use that link popularity and authority to do whatever you want to do with it.

Some people may consider it bait-and-switch, but as long as your site does not deviate too far from its original purpose, most of the links will likely stay. As proof of this point, after I moved a site most people would not link to the new location. They were unresponsive, and those links were stuck like concrete.

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Our Free Keyword Research Tool :

• Offers rough suggested daily search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.*
• Links the search volumes to the related global search results.
• Provides links to price estimate tools from Google AdWords. That Google AdWords tool shows the necessary bid to rank #1 for 85% of queries, and roughly how much traffic you could expect AdWords to send you based on that bid price and ad position.
• Links to Google Trends, Google Suggest, Google Synonyms, Yahoo! Suggest, and Keyword Discovery keyword research results.
• Links to various vertical databases like Topix.net, Google Blogsearch, and Del.icio.us to let you know if people are talking about your topic and what types of resources they are referencing.
• Is driven off the Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool. If you sign up for a Wordtracker account they offer many additional keyword research features and tools that are lacking in our basic keyword tool.

Want more free PPC or keyword research tips? Need more Keyword Research Data?

• If you use pay per click marketing you are probably best off using Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter over the smaller PPC engines due to typically higher click quality and faster feedback loops.
• Our competitive research tool allows you to find top keywords competing sites rank for.
• Geordie Carswell offers a free 10-day Google AdWords course.
• Wordtracker offers a valuable subscription based keyword research service and has a free keyword research guide [PDF]. Wordtracker also sells lists of top search terms at various price points and depth.
• Dan Thies's SEO Research Labs offers professional keyword research services and this free 75 minute keyword research video.

Tool Limitations:

• Tools can only provide helpful information and estimates. Don't let tools make your mind up for you!
  • Don't expect precise quantitative analysis from keyword tools.
  • Use tools for qualitative and relative analysis.
  • People tend to typically use language in similar patterns. If there are 14,000,000 search results for ["car hire"] and only 2,000,000 pages for ["hire car"] then odds are car hire is a more common search term.
• Since we estimate Google, Yahoo!, and MSN traffic based on Wordtracker's keyword data, any sampling error is amplified due to the difference in traffic.

* Please note our tool currently assumes Google having ~ 70% of the market, Yahoo! having ~ 20% of the market, and MSN search having ~8% of the market, and is based on rough math that is less precise than Wordtracker's computational techniques.

Depending on your topic / vertical and your geographic location the search engines may have vastly different search volumes. The tool can only possibly offer approximations. Exact search volumes are hard to find due to vanity searches, click bots, rank checkers, and other forms of automated traffic. Exceptionally valuable search terms may show far greater volume than they actually have due to various competitive commercial forces inflating search volumes due to automated search traffic.