Have you been keeping up with the Lori Drew MySpace “online bullying” case?  Because if you use blackhat SEO to promote your sites, then this verdict could have far reaching implications that may affect you.

First of all, if you don’t know about the case, here is the rundown: Lori Drew’s daughter, Sara, was being badmouthed (allegedly) by a former friend named Megan.  Lori made a fake MySpace account with a boy’s name to retaliate against Megan.  Lori took the harrassment too far and Megan (who was depressed) hung herself.  Now Lori Drew just got convicted of “Unauthorized Access,” made illegal under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Now if you are using blackhat SEO techniques (like forum, or comment spamming), here are the implications of this verdict: (Read more…)

Are you trying every possible method of making money online and failing at all of them?  Well, the problem may be that you are not focused enough.

I was talking to a person over on the warrior forums that said he had been trying to make money for 6 months in affiliate marketing and had not yet seen a single check.  His conclusion was that affiliate marketing was overhyped and it was nearly impossible to make money at it.

So I asked him what method he was using, specifically.  He told me he had tried everything.  Here is the list he sent:

• Adwords with affilate landing page
• Adwords with list-building squeeze page
• Article marketing
• Buying and reselling PLR products
• Squidoo pages
• Started multiple blogs
• SEO on both affiliate pages and blogs
• Forum marketing
• Newsletter advertisements

WHOA!  All that in 6 months?  His problem is that he isn’t focused enough.  You can’t try to learn everything there is to know in affiliate marketing in 6 months.  I recently read Chris Monty compare it to learning sports. If you try to learn to throw a football, shoot a basketball, putt a golf ball, etc. all at the same time then it will take a very long time to get good at anything.  If you just focus on shooting hoops instead, you will get good at that one thing much more quickly.

I had an advantage over many of you when I started in affiliate marketing: I didn’t know anything about it.  I found the original Bum Marketing Method ebook and I started writing articles with affiliate ads.  By about my 10th article I foundly found paydirt, an article optimized for a longtail keyword that was getting me about 2 sales a week with commisions of $25.00 each.  (By the way that article still makes me 1 or 2 sales per month 3 years later.) I wrote another 100 articles before I ever tried any other marketing method.

And, of course, success drives success.  So my advice to you if you are still looking for your first real payday in affiliate marketing is: pick one method or one ebook and FOCUS on it. Commit to doing no other affiliate marketing until you are making money from that one method.  If after 6 months of focusing on that one method you still are coming up empty, then you can try something else.

There is a single word that increases sales letter conversions like crazy.  It is so important, that without this word (or perhaps a synonym of it) all marketing you try will result in failure! It is a word that you probably barely notice, that you see all the time and never realize the power of.

Do you know what the word is?

The word is “because.”

“Because” is so powerful because people need a reason to do anything in life.  If you want someone to purchase your product, you had better tell them why.  Don’t worry, the reason doesn’t have to be a great one, but you must give a reason!

There is a well-known experiment be behavioral scientist Ellen Langer that demonstrated the power of “because.” In the experiment, a researcher approached a person in line to ask if he could cut to the front. They ran three trials to test the results. (Read more…)

Search Engine Optimization pro Hamlet Batista has released a *FREE* video recording of his new web seminar about getting started in SEO.

I watched the video, it has quite a bit of good info in it, especially if you are pretty new to SEO.  It is partially a promotional piece for his Ranksence SEO software / service, but it still is worth watching.

The video is 26 minutes long and covers topics such as:

• Solutions to Common SEO Problems
• Creating successful content
• How to attract successful traffic
• How to use the “Brand Hijacker” technique to attract visitors
• A look at the concept of link opportunity
• Viral Link Building
• How to scale your SEO efforts
• Hamlet’s SEO mind map

If pretty good content and its free (you don’t even have to fill out a signup form).  Definitely worth checking out.

Free Hamlet Batista SEO Webinar Recording

Have you checked out the new Google Searchwiki yet?  Its a new change to Google Search that allows users to personalize their results page and comment on search results.  The comments are visible to other users that perform the same searches.

At release, Searchwiki only allows you to change the order of the results that you see (it doesn’t affect the actual rankings.) However, it looks to me like Google is making a big step in the direction of Web 2.0 and social bookmarking.
I would be very surprised if Google didn’t eventually start using this data to try and improve search results.  In any case, the comments on links ARE VISIBLE TO OTHERS.  It might be a good idea to make sure that the comments on your links are good, and if not, at least add some good ones.