How many domain names do you own? One? Five? Over one hundred? You would probably be surprised about how many domain names I own and how many I have developed. Some are currently parked using a domain parking service. Yet some of the domain names I own redirect to currently developed web sites. And I acquired them just for that purpose: to redirect to an existing web site. Enough about me, though. Let’s think about your existing domain names, what you’re doing with all of them right now, and domain names that you could acquire in the future.

Domain names you’re not using
If you own more than one domain name, then what are you doing with the other ones? Did you register them and they’re just sitting there…making someone else money? Seriously. Like many people, they have bought domain names and they never did anything with them. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. If you typed them in the browser right now they would come up with a “Godaddy web page” or other landing page by the domain registrar…advertising that Registrar’s service and (you might now know this) it is making that registrar money when people click on the PPC ads on that domain name. Did you know that if you simply went to a domain parking service like Sedo.com to park your domain names. All you have to do is sign up, change the nameservers on your domains, and tell the parking company what your domain name is about: give them a keyword phrase. That’s it. If you’re just sitting on some domain names that you’re not using, then you should consider parking them, selling them, or developing them.

Redirecting Domain Names
There is a unique group of people out there that use the 301 Permanent Redirect to their advantage: they acquire domain names that have links and traffic: and they redirect them to their current web sites. That is an option that you have if you own a domain name that has links and traffic. But I would only redirect it to a “live” web site if you are certain that the former topic of that domain name is in line with the domain name you are redirecting it to. So, if you own a former automotive site that has 100 backlinks that are good automotive links then it might make sense to redirect it to your existing automotive web site. There are other factors, and I plan on discussing those factors–and buying domain names for links–at a future date.

How do you know when do develop a domain?
Developing a domain name, whether you install WordPress on the domain name and make it a blog or a site or you hire a development team, a web designer, and a writer should depend on several factors. Developing a domain name, whether you do it yourself or not, means time and money. Let’s take a a look at an example of how you could determine, from an Search Engine Optimization perspective, whether or not you should develop the domain name you own or not.

Ultimately, “Should I develop this domain name or not?” is a question only you can answer. But, I would like to give you my unique perspective on this and how I go about logically determining (from my SEO perspective) whether or not to develop a domain or not.

There a few things that you can do that will might help you decide if you want to develop the domain or not. Here’s what I do. I will use “nailerkit.com” as an example, as it is a lot easier to use a real domain as an example. I currently own that domain name and plan on developing it at some later date.

I would also like to point out that this technique is good for “generic” domain names, ones that contain keywords or keyword phrases (keyword-rich), and do not contain a trademark.

1. First, go to Google and search for the domain name’s primary keyword phrase. In this case, I am using “nailer kit“. Are there Google AdWords ads for that phrase? In this case, there are. Companies believe that it’s a good enough keyword phrase for them to actually pay for ads for that keyword phrase.

2. Go to the Google Keyword Tool and search for the the phrase or keyword. I searched for “nailer kit” without quotes and I see that Google says that there are about 40,500 searches for that phrase, and 25 related phrases. That means that there IS traffic for the phrase, there are people who search for it, and there’s 25 potential pages for the site (one page per related keyword). So, I could fairly easily create a 26 page site.

3. Back to the search results for “nailer kit“. I look at the search results’ top 10 to see if someone else is using a domain with keywords in the URL and they’re ranking in the top 10. In this case there is not.

I look at the top 5 search results to see if any of those sites that are ranking are actually targeting that phrase as their main keyword (and they’re not for ‘nailer kit’).

I look at the top 5 search results and check the backlinks to those pages that are ranking. I take the actual page that’s ranking and check it’s links in Yahoo!. In this case, there are 34 links to that page. But, what is important to note is that there are 34 links from the same domain name, Lowes.com, and not from other domain names. If a web site has on-topic links from several different domain names there is a better chance that it will “beat out” a page that only has internal links from one domain name pointing to it. There are a lot of other factors involved in a search engine ranking, but since I should be able to get lots of on-topic links to a whole entire site about “nailer kits” then I stand a good chance of ranking well for “nailer kit” and “nailer kits”.

4. Some other considerations will include questions like:

- How easily can I create the content? How much will it cost to hire someone to write 26 pages of material about nailer kits? I could write it myself (probably about 1 day of time to write the content) or I could get someone else to write it (I have a writer who will write unique content for me at $7 an article or page).

I could also see a very good “link bait” type of articles on the site, one about “how to use a nailer” and “how to use framing nailers” and “how to pick the right nailer”. This is the type of content that other sites like to link to. And they tend to do well in the social media, which will help.

- Can I easily monetize the site? In this case, I can use a combination of Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network ads as well as affiliate product ads (using affiliate programs, potentially through popshops.com). I can find a lot of “nailer kits” and nailers to sell on the site.

- Would someone want to purchase the domain at a later date if it has traffic, is developed, has a revenue stream, and is a good generic domain? Yes, I think so.

- What is the link strategy? How are you going to get on-topic links to the site? In this case, once the site has enough content (I have already found 26 different pages for the site), submitting it to dmoz.org, botw.org, business.com, yahoo directory, and various home improvement sites will help. Spending about $500 on links and on directory listings will help. Using the content and the link bait articles on the site to promote the site in the social media will potentially help get links to it.

At this point, I have decided that it IS worth it to take the time to develop nailerkit.com. There’s enough potential traffic for the topic and I could develop it. Actually developing it will increase that domain name’s value in the long run and it will appeal the the “sellability” of the domain in the future. By searching for the site’s main keyword phrase, by doing some basic keyword research, and by looking at the overall potential for the domain name’s advertisers or your “potential profitability”, you should be able to determine whether or not you should develop the domain name or not.

Do you have questions? Do you have a domain name that you’re thinking of developing and want me to take a look at its overall marketability? Let me know.

This is an idea I’ve touched on in the past, and in this post I really want to hit on how to build momentum and why it’s SOOO important.

I want you to think of your affiliate marketing business as a big boulder. Now your goal is to become a super affiliate.

How do you hit that goal?

You have to push the boulder over a hill and super affiliate success and riches are waiting for you at the bottom of the other side of the hill.

Now it’s going to take A LOT of energy and effort in the beginning when you’re trying to get that boulder up to the top of the that hill.

But once you get the boulder to the top of the hill the rest is easy, because now all you have to do is push your boulder DOWNHILL. As you push it downhill it will gain more and more speed until you don’t have to push it at all!

At which point you’re a super affiliate with a massive income on virtual autopilot.

Unfortunately most affiliates do not apply enough energy to even move the boulder, let alone get it to the top of the mountain. The affiliates that do successfully move the boulder often times decide to call it quits just before they reach the top of the hill!

If only they had applied just a little bit more energy in pushing the boulder!

Here’s how you apply enough energy to your boulder so that it hits the top of the hill:

1. Launch at least 5-8 campaigns a month consistently and LEARN from the ones that fail as well as the ones that succeed. This is SO critical when you’re in the momentum building phase. The more campaigns you launch a month the more energy you’re applying to the boulder. If you’re only launch one campaign a month and spend all your time time try to make it work, then you’re NOT applying enough energy to even move the boulder.
2. Stay consistent, don’t launch 8 campaigns one month and zero the next. If you do this your boulder will start moving backwards!

Now once you get your boulder to the top of the mountain the rest is just a matter of adding fuel to the fire by scaling & building up the profitable campaigns you’ve found. This is the FUN part!

Are You applying enough energy to the boulder so that it’s moving up the mountain, or are you just scratching your heads trying to figure out why the boulder isn’t moving?

Ask.com has re-launched their search engine for kids at www.AskKids.com. School is now back in session (at least it is for the kids here in Texas), so now is great time for kids to start using this new search engine.

What’s important for me, as a parent of an 8 year old in third grade and a two year old is that the search engine they use is a safe one. But it needs to be a search engine that kids want to use. Ask Kids gives kids a great search experience. After using it a few times this morning, I can see that it has more relevant, kid-friendly search results than any other search engine. And the search results are presented is an interesting, pleasing, graphically-vivid display–better than any other search engine. In fact, it makes Google look sort of “bland”.

What’s great about this new kids search engine is that it’s more “click friendly” than “type friendly”. If you have kids and you’ve ever watched them use a search engine to find something, you’ll know that kids are not very good at typing. In fact, they’re terrible at typing. But, even my 2 year old can use a mouse. According to Ask.com, the Ask Kids search engine was built with this in mind: you don’t have to type that much in order to get good search results. Let’s take a look at the search results.

I did a search for the word Texas at Ask Kids to see what would find. Right there, front and center, you get the stats for Texas:

Governor: Rick Perry (R)
Capital: Austin; Population: 22,490,022
Statehood: December 29, 1845 - 28th state admitted
Nickname: Lone Star State; Motto: Friendship
State Bird: Mockingbird; Flower: Bluebonnet; Tree: Pecan
State Song: Texas, Our Texas

What’s also good is that there are many places to click: you don’t have to actually type again to find what you’re looking for. You can click on over to the official State of Texas website, you can look at images on the right, and you can even narrow or expand your search with related phrases. And, best of all, you can find out the time in Texas as well as the temperature in Austin, Texas.

What’s also interesting to me, though, is that Ask Kids has sponsored search results right in the middle of the screen, right below the stats for Texas:

I know Ask.com needs to monetize their search engine, but to put up sponsored results right there in the front and center like this? Do you really think that kids have the ability to support those sponsors? It just seems kind of odd to me that contextual ads (they appear to be from Google AdWords?) would be so prominent in the search results. I would expect banner ads to be there, not contextual ads.

Just as a test, I went ahead and searched for some keyword phrases that might bring up some “controversial” search results, just to see really if this all-new Ask Kids search engine is more “kid friendly” like they say it is. I searched for viagra. Do it yourself and tell me that this search result is “kid friendly”:

Should AskKids.com, supposedly the best “kid friendly” search engine show sponsored ads for Viagra? I realize that many kids will probably not be searching for Viagra at AskKids.com. But what about their actual search results. Are their organic, natural search results even on-topic for the keyword phrase that I searched for, Viagra? The number one search result for this search phrase is Nature.com. How ironic!

The summer is winding down,  the Olympics are over and NFL football season is ready to begin. But that’s not all that’s going on around the b5media Sports Channel . Check out what our bloggers are writing about this week, including top 10 lists and the latest sports news.

• Jodie at Gossip on Sports talks about how it was a good Olympics for some and not for others.
• Cherie at Dejuiced discusses the top 10 games to watch this college football season.
• Tony at Inside the Ballpark lists the greatest moments in the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry.
• Lyndsey at Girls Dig Sports talks about the top 10 greatest women athletes.
• Sandy at Green Posse discusses the FedexCup leaders after Week One. She also talks about the top U.S. paralympians at Light the Torch.
• James at Squib Kick lists the top 10 single season passing touchdown leaders.
• Stephen talks about the best teams in baseball at Knuckle Curve and the best basketball players in the Olympics at Hoops Fantasy.
• Kori lists the fantasy wide receiver rankings for the 2008 season at The Fantasy Kickoff.

Photo credit: istockphoto

Red Herring Canada is hosting their first annual Top 50 Awards at their September event in Mont-Tremblanc, Quebec. We’re delighted and honoured that after recieving hundreds of company submissions, Red Herring has included b5media as one of the 100 finalists in the competition.

The top 50 companies will be announced during the Red Herring Canada event, which runs from September 15-17th.

Well done, team and congrats to the rest of the finalists!

I hear a lot of affiliates who have been in this business for sometime tell me all reasons, I mean the bs excuses, why they’re not a super affiliate yet:

1. I don’t have a PhD like you Amit!
2. I don’t have the money.
3. I just don’t have any time to work on my business.
4. I have kids!
5. You got in early, it’s too saturated now.
6. I don’t know the right people like you do.
7. Blah, blah, blah!

Yon can come up with a million reasons why you’re not a super affiliate yet, even though you been “doing” affiliate marketing for the last 3 years with little to show for it.

Let’s be honest, deep down you know all your excuses are complete bullshit!

Here are the REAL reasons you’re not a super affiliate yet:

1. You keep focusing on all reason why you can’t do this business. Make your bs excuses the reason WHY you need to succeed at this business. If you don’t have time or money, make that the reason why you NEED to become a super affiliate, and NOT the reason you can’t become one.
2. You’re thinking TOO small. You get an affiliate offer to $50/day profit and move on to something else, when the top affiliates may be making $1500/day profit with the same offer. STOP being happy with table scrapes and start working towards building your affiliate campaigns to 4-figure a day in sales. Your affiliate income will NEVER outgrow the level of your thinking. Kick it up a notch!
3. You’re scared shit of losing money. Get over it. Your investing in your future, NOT “losing money.” How much money did you “lose” going to college? How’s the ROI on that investment working for you?
4. You’re lazy. I had to work my ass off in the beginning to build my momentum and get my business off the ground. If you’re only testing one affiliate offer a month, you’re dead in the water, there’s no way you’re going to build momentum. I’ll talk more about this in the next post…
5. You’re not consistent. If you do this business for 4 months and then take a month or 2 off and then try to get back into it again, you’re again killing your momentum.
6. You don’t want it bad enough. Honestly this is the BIGGEST reason you’re not a super affiliate yet. You need to have a burning desire to succeed to become a super affiliate. You need to have a CRYSTAL CLEAR vision of what you want. Your attitude has to be like Micheal Phelps : eat, sleep, & launch affiliate campaigns. If you’re NOT having trouble sleeping at night because you’re so excited, then you don’t want it bad enough.

So if you’re sick and tired of just poking a stick at affiliate marketing then SUCK IT UP and take an honest look at why you’re not a super affiliate yet.

Google just recently announced that it’s getting rid of minimum bids on keywords!

No joke.

Of course there’s a catch, they’re going to replace minimum keyword bids with what they call “First Page Bids”, that is, the minimum amount you have to bid on a keyword to show up on the first page.

Now does that mean your ad will show up on page 2+ if your bid below the “First Page Bid”?!?

Honestly, we won’t know until they roll it out.

If that’s not enough, Google has also decide to calculate the quality score on the fly, every time a user searches for a keyword you’re bidding on.

WOW!

The quality score will also be dynamic, meaning that depending on where your ad is showing, which country, which search partner, which website, it will have a DIFFERENT Quality score.

Read it from right from horse’s mouth.

Implications for PPC Affiliates…

It’s hard to say anything at this point.

If the on fly Quality Score calculations also apply to landing page quality score, the results could be disastrous for affiliate who survive by changing their domain name and reuploading their campaign every time they get slapped.

On the other hand, a dynamic quality score could potentially deliver more traffic and reduce the impact of Google slaps.

Cross your fingers, we won’t know the true effect of this Quality Score “Improvement” until we’re hit with it.

I recently did an interview with my good friend and fellow blogger Andrew Wee, for his Friday podcast on WhoisAndrewWee.com.

Click Here to Liston to the Interview.

Enjoy the call, I get into some really great content in regards to the mindset you need to win at PPC.

It seems as though everyone wants something done quickly, or nearly instantly. We want success quickly. We want to be successful online and we want to get links to our web sites quickly. We want traffic to our web sites quickly.

There are many reasons why you would want to get an “influx” of links to one particular article on your web site. Perhaps it’s a blog post. Perhaps it’s just a new web site and a brand new domain name and you “want to do something” to jumpstart it somehow. I’ve put together a list of six things you can do right now to get nearly “instant links” to your web site. In many cases these six “techniques” of getting links are nearly automated, so your link will show up almost as fast as you can go check to see if it’s really there. Some other techniques I’ve listed below are faster; and some require that you actually create some content (like writing a few blog entries).

I am not making any sort of “guarantees” at all whether or not these work or whether or not they’re completely “white hat”, meaning that if Matt Cutts from Google picks up on it he won’t have problem with it. And I haven’t tested each and every one of these to see if the “links count” at all the search engines. In any case, though, there are legitimate reasons as to why you would want to get a link quickly. One reason I can think of right now is that you need to get a URL crawled quickly; especially when you’re going to syndicate the content on other web sites. Duplicate content can be a real issue nowadays, and it’s important to make sure that the content our site gets crawled first.

Here are fix ways to get nearly instant links to your web site:

1. Submit site to get-listed-quickly directories.

OneMission.com
Sign up as an editor, then add links in appropriate categories. Top level categories are better, make sure that the page is located not too many clicks from their home page: http://onemission.com/

Easy Link Directory
A bid for placement web directory, submit a link to your site and bid to for placement; lowest bid is only $1. Easy Link Directory

2. Add your own blog at a few web sites:

Start a Wordpress blog. Make sure the blog has good unique content, make sure you link out to trusted sites when you post; add tags to posts
http://wordpress.com/

Start a Squidoo Lens on your topic.
http://www.squidoo.com

Start a weather blog at Wunderground.com
Start a blog (choose free option) and
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/

Other places to add your own content:
hubpages.com
zimbio.com

3. Add the link to your social media accounts.

Add a link to your social media accounts that you’ve already set up.
StumbleUpon
Del.icio.us/delicious.com
google.com/bookmarks
wirefan.com’
simpy.com
folkd.com
blogmarks.net
corank.com
megite.com/discover
dropjack.com
a1-webmarks.com
jumpup.intuit.com
spicypages.com

If you have the option available to you, consider adding “link bait” type articles, content to the web site and use the social media sites to help promote that content.

4. Add your site to new social media profiles.
If you plan on using the new social media profile in the future, then it might make sense to set up social media profiles for the site. There’s a good list of social media sites at www.socialposter.com.

5. Check for broken links at Web Directories

Check for broken links. Use a dead link checker to check for sites that are listed in the category where you want to be listed. Sometimes you can find a domain name that is listed (or one that you can buy) and redirect to your site with a 301 Permanent Redirect.
dir.yahoo.com
business.com
dmoz.org

Besides the Yahoo! Directory, Business.com, and DMOZ.org, there are most likely other authoritative sites or in your niche that list sites in your niche. Run a dead link checker script on those pages to find domain names, sites of formerly competitive sites on your topic. Watch out for domain names that have trademarks, don’t register those. Whether or not you actually get credit for those directory links is questionable, though. Once a domain name drops (goes pending delete) and is available, I tend to see them removed from the Google index. If you’re after a directory listing, though, this may be an option if you don’t want to wait or pay for the directory listing fee (some are as much as $299).

Here are a few broken link checker scripts:
Xenu - http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
404 Checker - http://www.404checker.com/link-checker
Dead Links - http://www.dead-links.com/

6. Make useful comments on some dofollow blogs.
There are lists of dofollow blogs (blogs that have removed the “nofollow” tag on their blog comments. Keep in mind that you really DO need to make a useful comment (especially on my blog) because most of these (if not all of them) are moderated. If you want a link from my blog, make a useful comment on a *recent* post, not one from 6 months or a year ago.

Comment Hunt - www.commenthunt.com
Do Follow Blogs - http://www.dofollowblogs.com/
Courtney Tuttle DoFollow blogs - http://courtneytuttle.com/blogs-that-follow/
Link Building Bible - http://linkbuildingbible.com/dofollowdiver/

Like I mentioned before, there are many reasons why you would want to links to a site quickly; and you easily force a search engine crawl of your site by doing any of these things. I tend to prefer to do as many as I can, especially when it comes to a brand new domain name or when I need a link to an article or press release on a site that I know is going to get “syndicated” somewhere. Hopefully this list is helpful. If you know of any other ways to get a link that I haven’t mentioned, feel free to comment about it.

Let’s face it, bidding on trademark terms-especially on major brand trademarks is BIG money for PPC affiliates. This includes trademarks for the offer you’re promoting and competitor trademark terms as well.

Trademark bidding may be highly profitable but it’s also equivalent to playing Russian roulette with your affiliate income, especially if a large majority of your sales are coming from trademarks!

Why?

Let me illustrate with 2 stories…

At Affiliate Summit Boston, I had dinner with Jeremy Palmer, John Hasson, and Ajay (all PPC super affiliates).

Anyway, Jeremy was telling me about an affiliate who made $2 million last year (no joke) all from bidding on ONE trademark term (plus misspelling and variations of course).

Well, the merchant suddenly decided to no longer allow trademark bidding for affiliates!

Now the guy who make $2 million last year is now LOOKING FOR A JOB!?! Apparently all of his income was coming from that one trademark term.

Scary, isn’t it?

There’s always competitor trademarks, right?

Wrong!

A friend of mine who was running a very profitable offer ($1k/day net profit) was forced to pause his campaign after the merchant threatened to freeze his account if he didn’t stop bidding on COMPETITOR trademarks.

Now, I’m not saying don’t bid on trademarks, I bid on trademarks all the time.

What I’m saying is don’t DEPEND on trademark bidding as your sole source, or majority of, your affiliate income.

Ask yourself : “How stable are my affiliate campaigns? Can they be wiped out by one policy change from the merchant?”

If the answer is YES, you’d better get busy!