Backlinks!!!

This is a topic that almost all bloggers would have written about and you might have read about. But none of the techniques that these bloggers and Internet Marketing Gurus give actually works. Blame it on the “NoFollow” tags everywhere.

Nobody is willing to give you a backlink and you are tired of trying to build some.

A very easy way of getting backlinks, about 3-4 years back was to comment on blogs. Good blogs, with good PR provided an excellent way of getting a few extremely targetted and valuable backlinks. But, spammers couldn’t just stand this. They spammed almost all blogs that they could find, consequently forcing the bloggers to put a “NoFollow” on their comments. Thus stopped the goodness of commenting.

The biggest obstacle to building backlinks by commenting is to find blogs that do not have a “NoFollow” on  their comments.

How will your find “DoFollow” blogs?

I had once discussed this in one of my blogs earlier. There is a service called Commenthunt which searches for blogs that have a “DoFollow” in them and returns the results for you.

But, off late I have noticed that their search results, though they were powered by Google, produced irrelevant results. They would return details of blogs which had zero PR or, that have not been updated for a long, long time.

So, in case you are interested in finding out good PR blogs that have a “DoFollow” in them, then I recommend you do it with Google’s blogsearch tool.

You can find it here.

This is a service from Google, that provides you an option of searching for “DoFollow” blogs.

Now you can easily search for informative blogs that have a good PR and that are in your own niche and add some valuable comments to them to get a backlink.

Please refrain from spamming these blogs.

Do not forget to let me know about your way of getting backlinks in the comment section.

P.S. My blog also has a “DoFollow” in its comment section.

Photograph courtesy Ali Akbar

What is that one thing that stands in between you and your goals?

It’s not a difficult question to answer, right?

Procrastination, it is! It is probably the simplest things to get rid off, yet we are unable to. Even today, there are days when I do this. At the end of the day when I sit down to review my entire days activity, I find that there was nothing worthwhile that I did except procrastinating. This is where I thought I would guest post on this topic at a very good blog.

I received a few very good comments on the post, but there were certain others where people felt that the topic was not that important and I was surprised at it.

Nevertheless, I thought I would write a follow-up post here for the ones who felt that this topic was worth discussing.

When I first started my Internet Marketing business, it took me about 2 months to build my first mini site. I had the knowledge and the skill, still I couldn’t do it. I kept postponing it for some or, the other things. I would spend most of my time surfing the internet for unnecessary things, or, clicking on the links that were there in the mails that I received from countless other marketers whose optin pages I subscribed to.

At the end of the day, when I reviewed my activities for the day, I found that there was nothing worthy that I did the entire day.

Have your experienced this?

This is procrastination. Procrastination induces you to put off somethings for a later time, for something else. You do this primarily because of faulty prioritization.

Faulty Prioritization:-

What is more important for your in your life? Determining this could be very difficult. There could be 25 different things that you want to achieve in your life. But which one to achieve the first?

Your success depends on how well you prioritize things. But how will you prioritize things?

Start by mapping each of your priorities to what your dream or, goal in life is. What is more important of the following two – Spending an evening with your family in a restaurant of your choice, where you could order food without looking at the right hand side of the menu-card first or, watching the Ashes live on television this week.

Can you afford to postpone the dream of that evening by another month? Or is it convenient to decide that you will watch the Ashes the next time round and instead spend that time on working on something that can lead you to the fulfillment of your dream?

It is often difficult to convince ourselves of postponing certain things – mostly that are immediate fulfillment of a desire. It is so, because you are not able to visualize the actual result of that dream that you have. The visualization that you have is incomplete and is not as beautiful as your actual dream. You are probably unable to convince yourselves that it would one day be a reality.

This is why getting rid of procrastination requires only two things to be done -

1. Put up a picture of your dream in front of your eyes always. Keep it up on everything that you frequently interact with.
2. Stop visualizing in your minds. Set your priorities right based on your goal and not your visualizations.

Get rid of procrastination…today, if you want to build a successful future for yourselves.

Read my guest post at Sitesketch and don’t forget to tell me your ideas of getting rid of procrastination.

Are you an affiliate marketer?

How difficult do you find selecting a product at an affiliate network?

I agree to the fact that it is often very difficult to find the best product available to promote. The end result is that you choose a product that is not worthy enough and you end up loosing quite a bit of money on it.

In this post we will deal with some simple and easy to use tips to follow in order to pick the best product to promote at one of the best affiliate marketing networks – Clickbank.

If you do not have a Clickbank account, then you can get one here.

For people who are not familiar with Clickbank, let me tell you what Clickbank is -

Clickbank is an affiliate product network that acts as a medium between the actual product seller and affiliates (middlemen who sell the product to earn commissions) and they mostly deal with electronic products like ebooks and downloadable softwares.

You can create an account with Clickbank and login to get a hang of how the interface appears.

For the purpose of this post – we will have to look at how the “marketplace” looks like at Clickbank. The below screenshot gives you a glimpse of the marketplace at Clickbank.

When you search for a product at the Clickbank market place, you should have a fair idea of what the vendor code for the product is. (“bryxen4” is the vendor code in this example). Else you should know the exact keyword that the vendor is using to market his product. If you do not know any of these, your searches will show “no results”.

Clickbank also provides you an option of sorting your results in various ways. For the purpose of this post sort the results by “gravity”.

Let us assume that you search Clickbank marketplace for the term, “fat loss” and you got a few results. Now let us understand the terminology that Clickbank uses in these results page. We will only discuss things that are really relevant to us -

Gravity – This is the key metric for us in selecting the products to promote. It is a Clickbank specific term, which is a measure of the success, popularity in terms of customers’  liking of the product and the affiliates liking in promoting the product and refunds on the product. So, the more the gravity of a product, the more popular that product.

Earnings per Sale – This is the commission that you can earn by promoting this particular product.

% Earnings per sale – This is the % commission that you can earn by promoting this product. Normally all Clickbank products offer around 67% commissions on an average.

% of Referrals – This is another important metric for us. This refers to the % measurement of referrals that the product has received over a period of time. A higher referral % would mean that more people are buying this product from the affiliate links.

Future earnings – This is a very relevant and important metric if you are looking forward to a stable and recurring income. This amount shows the recurring commissions that you will earn from the sales, if that particular product has a recurring commission model.

What is the thumb-rule to select a product at Clickbank?

Do you really think there is a thumb-rule to selecting a product at Clickbank marketplace. Well, then I will have to disappoint you. There really is no thumb-rule. Every affiliate marketer will have a way of picking a product which will solely be based on his business goals, budgets etc. At the same time, I should also say that not all decisions to pick a particular product at Clickbank is a success.

Then, how can you ensure that you don’t fail when you pickup a product to promote at Clickbank marketplace?

Over the past 2 years, I burnt my fingers with quite a few products, I had no clear knowledge of which products to promote, hence I would select a product by trial and error, only to ultimately find that the product was not converting well. It is after many such experience that I arrived at this simple method of selecting a product.

A higher gravity means that the product is very popular and at the same time there are thousands and thousands of affiliate marketers who are promoting that particular product. This means huge competition and as a matter of fact the competitors will be monster gurus. The chances of survival for you with a small budget in such a situation is very bleak.

Hence what I do is pick the products that are in the range of 100-120 in gravity, at Clickbank marketplace. These products have a good demand in the market, but are not being promoted by too many affiliate marketers, probably because of a lower commission or, because these products have been there for some time. In selecting such products you have a few advantages -

1. The competition will be much lesser than the high gravity products.
2. Since the products have been in the market for some time, they are tried and tested. This would in turn mean that you can get enough information for these products in order to build your landing pages.

In addition to doing this, you can also research a bit on such products. The best place to gather the required information to research is cbtrends. This is a place where you can research on a lot of aspects for any product that your want to select at Clickbank Marketplace.

You can follow this simple method to select your affiliate products for promotion.

So, what is your way of selecting products at Clickbank?

Photograph courtesy svilen mushkatov