Life in the Cloud

The iPad and the recently introduced Chromebook will change the nature of computing, and by extension, the nature of affiliate marketing.

Why is the Chromebook so important?

1. faster, simpler, and more secure computer
2. inexpensive laptop
3. runs on a thin Linux platform
4. Chromebooks boot in 8 seconds, and resume instantly
5. first consumer operating system designed from the ground up to defend against the ongoing threat of malware and viruses
6. you get the latest version of the operating system automatically
7. updates when you turn it on
8. less vulnerable to hacking
9. multiple layers of protection, including sandboxing, data encryption, and verified boot
10. work totally in the cloud
11. about an 8 hour battery life
12. e prerendering technology to load websites faster
13. multiple logins and Guest Mode allow secure sharing
14. built-in Wi-Fi and 3G – easy to get connected anytime and anywhere
15. truly mobile – even without a place to stop and plug in
16. thousands of web apps

The Content Manifesto

My oh my. I have determined to use the rest of my life, or at least the next 1,000+ days, to create a personal lifestyle I want to live, not the ones I have allowed others to foist on me. I have debts to pay, and a daughter to launch, and a desire to retire somewhere else, possibly Denmark. But that’s another story.

Affiliate Marketing

As strange as it seems, affiliate marketing is the current key to individual financial freedom. You can begin in minutes with absolutely NO money – true bum marketing. Our society now has enough free public access to the Internet including computers at public libraries to eliminate the need for owning hardware or software. Using Google docs, you can create everything you need online.

Of course, having the right tools – whether free online or paid – makes your job easier. But even this is changing. The new Chromebook will revolutionize the hardware needed to do this job.

Definition: A way for a company to sell its products by signing up individuals or companies (“affiliates”) who market the company’s products for a commission. ~ http://www.entrepreneur.com/encyclopedia/term/82092.html

Jeff Bezos created Amazon and the affiliate program as we know it. Definitions are evolving, but what individuals need to concentrate on are areas in which they have strength over huge corporations.

In the past, when the Internet was new and the number of websites small, list building gurus made early fortunes. Using some great keyword search tools and a large advertising budget, they would use Google Adwords to promote affiliate products without a website. Then they would document their methods in an ebook, give it away for free to subscribers to a newsletter, build a list, and promote other products to that list.

Does it still work? Sure. For now.

But to attempt to build a big list and compete with the entrenched gurus is an exercise in futility. Google has changed. Sites will not get indexed – especially yours – without content silos Google considers valuable. Google is now looking at the whole site, not just a hundred landing pages to funnel searchers to an affiliate program.

This will all make more sense as we move along. The topic is really so vast that there are hundreds of systems for affiliate marketing different from mine. Is mine the best? Yes. For me.

Why?

• includes the one activity/advantage you have over every other affiliate marketer in the world
• includes only activities I am willing to do
• shows you some other techniques and strategies you can try if you don’t believe me or like my system
• once you have my system down pat manually, shows your how to outsource everything if you choose
• system can make you the king or queen of local search marketing

As we go along, we will concentrate on 3 services, and branch out from there:

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. Twitter

All the rest are secondary players. Among these, Twitter may be the weak sister but could profit from the battles between Google and Facebook for eyeballs.

Your Real Job

Writer.

Not copywriter. No ad writer. Not creative writer. Not research. Not grant writing.

Here’s where I differ with the usual method of digging up low competition keywords and writing reviews of products in those niches. If you are a pure marketing machine, by all means go ahead. With the Panda update to the Google search algorithm plus the rise of social media as a search platform, landing pages will cease to work well as new marketers turn up the heat with the new rules.

It’s a little like when America shifted from an agricultural to industrial society. It doesn’t mean that agriculture disappears, just that fewer people can make a living at it – agribusiness instead of family farms.

Your personal family farm will be creating authority sites and writing the valuable content Google is thirsty for.

Authority Blog

Google and other search engines struggle to deliver the best user search experience possible. On the SERPs, content from relevant, authority sites is served up on the first page (the only page most surfers look at). As the search engine bots index all pages on your website, it will determine how relevant your entire site is to the search parameters.

If your targeted keywords are scattered about your site, the relevancy can be dilluted quickly. Hence, the concept of silos.
(This is not new. It goes back to Ken Evoy and the earliest affiliate marketing system. And it still works today.)

Using a WordPress blog or other CMS software, you will use categories and tags and let the software create the silos for you. As we get into details, this will all make a lot of sense.

But I get ahead of myself. What I recommend is this:

Create valuable content that interests you.
Become the authority in your area of expertise (niche).
Monetize later.

I know you want to make money from day one. You can, but you will kill your new site. A bunch of ads with slim content will drive visitors away faster than a swine flu epidemic. And chances are, you can’t get it indexed and on the first page of Google anyway.

Here’s how I go about creating raw content:

1. Wake up early (3:30 am ~ 6:30) – the earlier the better – to have undisturbed writing time.
2. I write at least 1,000 of new, unique, relevant content daily before looking at anything else online. No email. No surfing.
3. Write about something that interests you. One good way is to take a topic you have searched, in my case say prostate health, and write a bulleted post with relevant information, save and post to one of your blogs. If you are interested in the topic, someone else is too.
4. Content is posted to the relevant blog. This content only appears on one of my sites and is never spun.
5. Whenever life conspires to steal my time (doctor’s waiting room, DMV, etc.), I have a notebook to scribble down posts.
6. Edit and post all handwritten material the same day.
7. If you desire, you can use speedwriting to knock out 1,000 words in less than an hour. Write first. Edit and research later. (NOTE: Research is your biggest time waster. Write fast. Fact check before posting. – This way, you never research anything that is not in the article or post.)
8. If you have a new site, have at least 5 posts/5,000 words of related content in one area before adding affiliate links

We will go into detail at each step, but this is what I believe the hardest part of affiliate marketing is:

Writing Discipline

Without unique, relevant content on your blog or website, you will never succeed in affiliate marketing. The rest can be learned and added to your posts – SEO, article directories, traffic building, and more.

Monetization with Affiliate Programs

No matter what topic you have chosen for your authority blog, you will find relevant affiliate programs. Tons of them. What you will want to do is drill down and get some low competition keyword phrases. Add these as categories and tags, and put them in the keywords section of any SEO plugins like All-in-One-SEO. If your post centers on a single word keyword, the longer keyword phrases create a silo when used as categories.