PPC is much more my niche as you may already know but recently I decided to test the waters of SEO and bum marketing to try and increase my affiliate income. I make the most from PPC campaign management and a small portion from affiliate marketing, but lately I have been wanting to increase the affiliate side of things because as it seems to me, once your on top of the search results, you kind of stay there unless another SEO buff comes in and swipes your spot. Even then your still on the first page of results and still getting traffic and conversions.

So I decided to dive into SEO, learning everything I can from as many sources as possible. Since then I have developed several campaigns trying to tackle the SERP in google. Many without any luck, but I am getting better at it. My recent success is getting to position #3 for my latest campaign.There is not much traffic behind the targeted keyword, but it has resulted in a couple sales reaching just under $100 in commission.

The point of this thread is that SEO is much harder then you think. I though it would be something I can tackle really quickly, but the thing with SEO is that there is lots of waiting… waiting for pages to get indexed, waiting for backlinks to get discovered, waiting for Google to update, waiting for my rankings to climb. All this waiting for things to happen makes it really slow to test ideas and figure out what works and what doesn’t. Unlike PPC I can have test results within hour or a day at max. With SEO it seems I need about a week to see if any changes are going to take effect.

I am still determined to master this, but I have to admit at this point its harder than some people make it out to be. I have put about 3 months or so into it, created about 20 or 30 different campaigns and resulted in 3 current campaigns making money, but not much money, its under $1,000 per month in revenue. Only the recent most campaigns are making any money as well, because I just screwed up the first projects and then just left them for dead.

What makes SEO so hard? Ranking mostly. Every time I put something new up I end up between position 20 and 100, and if you have any experience with search results anything past the first page gets no action what so ever. The hard part is climbing the ranks in the search engines where people can see find you. The biggest problem is there are some many people willing to give advice on how to do SEO and how to get on the top of google, but I dont think those giving advice have any idea what they are talking about. Those who I have found that are on the top of the search results always keep their mouth shut and wont give you an ounce of advice.

Its a secret and a mystery on how to climb the ranks which nobody is willing to share. I guess they have plans on taking over the internet one keyword at a time. I guess thats my plan as well, but first got to figure out how to master climbing the ranks.

With the US economy the way it is and so many people being laid off, fired or going out of business, many people are looking to supplement their income. I have seen a flood of newcomers to Internet marketing, blogging and affiliate marketing lately looking to go from zero to thousands per month. I myself am starting to invest more time into SEO, bum marketing and building up other sources of income as well. I recently published an article about Bum Marketing which is a technique of making affiliate sales without spending a dime. I have only spent a month with that technique but have been able to build over $500 in monthly income. I want to get that well over $1000 by the end of December as I have a feeling that January is going to be a hard to for the USA.

Is It Hard To Make An Affiliate Income?

Affiliate marketers lead you to believe that making affiliate sales are really easy and that anyone can do it in their sleep, but those who make those claims have something to sell. After all they couldn’t convince you to buy their information if they said affiliate marketing is hard, includes long hours and you may never make a single sale, but buy my information anyway just in case your one of the lucky ones… right?

The Cold Truth About Affiliate Incomes

If your not familiar with article writing, web pages, html, hosting, servers, marketing, back links, SEO and many other subjects needed to master affiliate marketing, you may have a few setbacks. I am able to go from 0 to over $500 in my first month simple because I understand all these concepts already and can dive right in. The only thing I was missing was the recipe to get free highly targeted traffic. Now im not an overnight millionaire and $500 may not seem like much, but many of those who will end up trying to make an affiliate income will never see a penny. I even read a story the other day of a guy who has been at it for over 9 months, who finally gave up because after almost a year of research and development, still never made a single sale.

Affiliate Income Resources

If you really want to get started in affiliate marketing I can recommend the following information. There is a really great primer on affiliate marketing provided by a guy named Ryan Moran. He spent over 4 months putting together a video series that is called TAG or The Affiliate God. His online course is 100% free and its a great introductory to affiliate marketing. He breaks it down to 4 weeks of learning but you can jump ahead if your a fast learner.

If you have a little money, then I would recommend signing up at Wealthy Affiliate. Its a great online community of which I am very active in. So is Ryan Moran the creator of TAG, and also Travis Sago who developed the step by step guide to The Bum Marketing Method which is currently putting about $500 a month extra in my pocket with no advertising or hosting expenses.

Lastly there is one more great resource I would like to share with you that can have you making money by the end of the week. This person has helped many people get their first affiliate sale and she is also very active in the wealthy affiliate forums. She has an active blog called Pot Pie Girl and she developed a method called One Week Marketing. I have never seen so many first time affiliates make a first sale before, but using this method I seem to see new posts thanking this method every day.

I signed up with an online marketing group called wealthy affiliate almost a year ago. I signed up because I was getting a flood of PPC questions over on digital point about PPC and wanted to try and solve the problem at the source. This post however is not about PPC, its actually about something called bum marketing.

What Is Bum Marketing

Simply put its marketing anything, a product, service or affiliate program, using methods that do not cost the marketer a Penny. I am mostly a PPC guy. I have used PPC for over 8 years, but with the recent slump in the economy makes it harder to pick up clients, and more clients want to spend less, or they are having a hard time closing sales. So I decided to to look into SEO.

I found out that i have a major resource of information that i have been paying for anyway. The information is from wealthy affiliate. This site is not dedicated to bum marketing, but more affiliate marketing as a whole, but as you can imagine many beginner Internet marketers do not have the funds to dump into PPC, or even web hosting for SEO reasons. So they came up with bum marketing.

Why Bum Marketing?

I have become slightly fascinated with this method of marketing lately. To learn and test the methods being thought I implemented some of my own bum marketing sites, and guess what… It really works. Not only for my PPC teaching, but I have also been making a small side income using these methods from CPA affiliate programs.

I am no SEO or bum marketing guru, but i have been learning a lot, and since I love to teach and educate others I think I will start adding bum marketing information onto this site. Not only that but I will start applying what i have been learning to this blog as well.

This blog will always be dedicated to my thoughts, education and things I enjoy sharing, I just hope to put in more posts to this blog and hopefully even increase its traffic…

What a nightmare! I have spent the past couple of days trying to figure out how to get rid of all my link problems on this site and others. The main problem is that other external sites and even my own internal linking is not universal and many times ends up with many different variations for the same page. Google does not like this and neither do web visitors.

Image you write an article and the sub directory is http://www.mydomain.com/category/article/

Well, you and other website might try linking to it in the following ways

http://mydomain.com/category/article/

http://www.mydomain.com/category/article/index.html

http://www.mydomain.com/category/article

http://mydomain.com/category/article

I recently discovered, due to googles webmaster tools, that all these different variations are actually very unique paths and many times can cause your visitors to end up on 404 error pages. I figured this out because I decided to check up on the reports in webmaster tools and I saw a little section that showed me all the pages that were resolving on 404 error pages.

After a quick glance of the 404 pages I realized, all these articles and pages did exist and that external websites were just linking to my pages incorrectly. I did some research and found out how to not only universalize my url system but a way to also fix other webmasters mistakes without having to knock on doors and asking them all to fix their links.

The answer is all in the htaccess file which uses methods like mod_rewrite and the rewriterule and rewritecondition statements. This is by far no tutoral on htaccess or mod_rewrite but just my finds of near little tricks of code that helped me universalize my urls internally and externally so visitors are never sent to 404 error pages

First up make sure you have the following turned on otherwise these neat little tricks will not work

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

Fixing Links with a missing www

Now lets say for example you want to ensure that www is always used in your url string, whether or not you or other webmasters remember to use it while linking to an article or page. Add the following lines to ensure your www naming convention always remains the same.

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^mydomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Now I have noticed some other people use this same code but with HTTP_HOST instead of THE_REQUEST. Like I said I am no expert on this subject. but I have learned that if you use the HTTP_HOST version the url will only fix itself when linking to the home page and not sub pages. If you want your subpages to fix themselves as well then use the THE_REQUEST version

now if anyone types in

yourdomain.com
yourdomain.com/article1

they domain will always end up at

www.yourdomain.com
www.yourdomain.com/article1

Remove Trailing File Names

Lets say for example you use a CMS such as wordpress or drupal and you use the permalink option. If you write an article and permalinks makes the destination url www.mydomain.com/article1/ and you want to prevent accidental linling of trialing file names such as

www.mydomain.com/article1/index.html
www.mydomain.com/article1/index.php

Then try adding this code

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \/index.php\ HTTP [NC]
RewriteRule (.*)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \/index.html\ HTTP [NC]
RewriteRule (.*)index.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]

This will remove the trailing file name on the url and redirect the visitor back to the original naming convention

Ensure Trialing Slashes on your url

How about if someone linked to that same article again, but this time forgot the last / sending their traffic to

www.mydomain.com/article1

instead of

www.mydomain.com/article1/

Try adding this code to put the forward slash back onto the end of the url string

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

A special note about this code is that its going to make sure the directory /article doesnt really exist and if it does it will not put the trailing slash on the end of the url. Also, if someone does try to access a directory that does exist it will give them a forbidden access page. This will protect all the sub files in any directories that do exist and are accidentally linked to.

Well Lets give all these are try now

This articles url is

http://www.robdogg.com/wordpress/2008/10/16/my-3-htaccess-mod-rewrite-rewriterule-rewritecondition-tricks-and-tips/

Lets mess with it a bit

Lets forget the www
http://robdogg.com/wordpress/2008/10/16/my-3-htaccess-…ricks-and-tipsmy-3-htaccess-mod-rewrite-rewriterule-rewritecondition-tricks-and-tips/

How about droping the trailing slash and forgetting the www
http://robdogg.com/wordpress/2008/10/16/my-3-htaccess-mod-rewrite-rewriterule-rewritecondition-tricks-and-tips

How about forgetting the www and adding index.html to the end of the url
http://robdogg.com/wordpress/2008/10/16/my-3-htaccess-mod-rewrite-rewriterule-rewritecondition-tricks-and-tips/index.html

all these variations should all end up on my new universal naming convention

http://www.robdogg.com/wordpress/2008/10/16/my-3-htaccess-mod-rewrite-rewriterule-rewritecondition-tricks-and-tips/

Well I hope if any of you are having any of my issues that this helps resolve some of them

I am by far no relationship expert, so if you’re looking to solve your relationship or marriage issue, this may not be the answers you are looking for. This is simply my ideas and thoughts about this subject of relationship matter. I am like anyone else living day to day with friends and relationships and I wanted to share a though I had when it comes to expectations and assumptions within a relationship

I was out with a friend of mine the other day and we were having a conversation about relationships and marriages. We have both been married and have realized that marriages are highly over rated. It seems that marriages these days are just societal pressures of conformity. Why does a piece of paper that says you’re recognized as married under the state of whatever mean so much? To save on auto insurance and get a little discount on taxes? If two people enjoy each other’s company as friends and as sexual partners then why get married and ruin a good thing? If you do get married why does everything change all of a sudden? I came up with the idea that there are certain expectations and assumptions that go along with friendship, relationships and marriage.

Expectations

Expectations are things we expect to happen and when they don’t we get upset or angry. To me expectations are more like agreements because I cannot expect something to happen without first planning what I expect to happen with the other person. If I do not plan what I want to happen then it becomes an assumption on my part. If I expect to meet my girlfriend at 8pm for dinner, it’s because we both agreed to meet somewhere and eat, but if my girlfriend never shows up, I will probably become upset, worried and angry, especially if there is no warning.

Assumptions

Assumptions are things I hope will happen without me having to ask for it or plan for it. Assumptions are not like agreements because they are not verbally acknowledged by the other person you are making assumptions about. Assuming leads to disappointment, confusion, and frustration because people cannot read each other’s minds and assuming something out of someone will always end bad. I think this is where many relationships, friendships and especially marriages go wrong. If I am married and I assume she will do all the cleaning then it will only lead to disappointment when I come home and the house is a mess. This is when the argument comes and usually sounds something like..

MAN: “why is the house such a mess”?
WOMAN: “Because I was out with my friends today and just got back home”
MAN: “Well I expected the house to be clean when I came home, its game night! And with whom and why were you out with your friends all day?”

Then the fight starts, people yell and things are said that probably shouldn’t have been said. But the issue was that the man confused an expectation with an assumption. Now had he said before he went to work…

MAN: “Hun… Its game night and I’ll be home around 6pm, can you make sure the house is clean so we don’t look like slobs?”
WOMAN: “Sure hun… I’ll do it before I go out with the girls”

Now the man has an agreement and can correctly expect the house to be clean when he gets home and avoid a nasty argument. I am sure in many situations this scenario can still go wrong, but that is probably due to many months or years of expectations and assumptions. If we all started making more agreements instead of assumptions and expectations then many of us will probably have much better friendships, relationships and marriages.

Marriages

Marriages are tricky because many unspoken expectations and assumptions are presented from both the man and the woman. There is a long laundry list of them which I probably do not need to mention, but the fact that you probably expect and assume things from your partner at this very moment, which has never been mutually agreed upon, probably does exist. I make mistakes in relationships all the time and I am learning something new each and every day, but as for the other day, this is my lesson learned.

If you have no expectation and assumptions then you cannot become disappointed, upset or angry. Only when you want something out of someone is the only time you can get hurt. I think it is vitally important to make agreements, such as loyalty, duties and roles within a relationship or marriage. Never assume someone is just going to do something, just because or due to societal expectations of your relationship.

Social Pressure

Social relationship pressures come from everywhere such as friends, family, and religion. The problem is trying to live up to their expectations and assumptions. Why do we do that to ourselves? It is a mystery in itself, but in this day and age a valuable lesson is being learned and that is to be yourself and allow others to be themselves. When you are in a marriage or relationship, take it for what’s it is worth and don’t assume or expect anything out of your partner, make agreements and understand one another. Don’t ruin a friendship with a relationship and don’t ruin a relationship with a marriage.

I am not saying to never get married, but I am saying not to marry someone for what they might become one day or for how they might change now that they are locked into a marriage. This will only lead to disappointment, confusion, and anger.