By far the easiest method I’ve used to get quick rankings is buying aged domains, however this doesn’t quite work if you really want to brand an affiliate site or create a brandable network of sites with a similar url theme.

Before Google will start ranking your site for popular or mainstream terms you’ll more than likely see traffic trickle through on “long tail terms,” eventually your site will start to appear for more generic terms.

Now, the time period that this starts to happen can depend on a number of factors:

1. The rate at which you acquire links
2. The number of links you acquire
3. The trust of the website that’s linking to you
4. The varation of the anchor text in the links

Many people have nicknamed this aging period the “Sandbox” however I personally think that these are filters applied depending on various scenarios & combinations of events.

I’ve found number 4 to be the single most significant factor at tripping Google’s Filters & really dragging out the initial aging phase. The filters that are applied seem to vary, I’ve seen filters applied on a keyword basis only & also on a sitewide basis.

Once you’ve been hit by the filters I’ve seen it take up to 14 months to recover fully.

9 Rules to obide by when launching a new website

1. Send a Press Release via PRweb when you launch, from what I’ve seen it seems to pass some initial authority to your site.
2. Don’t overdo it, build your links slowly. 5 in the first week, then 10 & so on.
3. Avoid Sitewide links initially, the lack of variation in the anchor text will trip the filters.
4. Don’t go after high PR links, get links from all sources. PR isn’t important, rankings are.
5. If you’re buying links try to get links initially on individual pages. This will often be cheaper & more effective when your site is starting out.
6. Try to balance relevant links with non relevant links (i.e. directories & blog comments).
7. Don’t submit your site to 500 directories with the same anchor text. Keep the anchor text unique.
8. Avoid reciprocal linking until you start to see your site rank. Try to keep these links on topic.
9. Don’t just try to build links to your homepage, promote inner pages. This will help your inner pages rely less on the link popularity of your homepage & rank better.

If you want proof that this works, have a look at the following screenshot from Google Analytics. I launched this site for a client of ours on the 12th August (this is search traffic from Google only).

Here’s a graph from another site that’s been around much longer (about 18 months).

In this second graph you can clearly see a period of filtering just before the huge spike. This period lasted around 3 months. However, since then as the generic rankings have improved so has search traffic.

Slow & Steady: This is how you should be approaching new sites. Naturally as Affiliate Marketers we want rankings RIGHT NOW. I’m sorry but if you take this approach it can actually take you much much longer to get those rankings.

Start slow, experiment with PPC to see how people interact with your site & use that knowledge to help build your keyword focus. If you find yourself getting impatient then do what I do, finish one project, do some initial promotion then move onto the next project. When you start to see traffic increase you know that you can start pushing your promotion a little harder.

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A typical Press Release at PRWeb will set you back about $169 if you leave out all the fancy SEO features. Which are really a member of the PRWeb team picking your categories & tags for you, except the SEO Anchor text links which I’ll go into later on. I always go for the more expensive $249 option for that option alone.

Here’s my top 11 tips for a successful Press Release on PRWeb:

Choose the Right Time

Submitting your Press Release at 5pm on a Friday night isn’t going to get you as much exposure as submitting it on Monday Morning. Think about Timezones too, who is your target market. For example if I’m sending a Press Release for the Australian & US Market I’ll typically send it on Tuesday so the US Market gets it on Monday Morning.

Optimise the Headline

Having a boring headline will do nothing for your exposure & clickthroughs. This is where good copywriting comes into play. If you run an Adwords Campaign you’ll have a good idea of what kind of headlines work well in your industry. If not then I recommend Glyphius, this is a piece of software that algorithmically scores ad copy based on past trends then spits out a score. The higher the score, the more appealing your Headline is. I’ve had great success with this.

Don’t claim to “be the best” if you can’t back it up

At lot of Copywriters will try to make statements like “We’re the leading company” or “We’re the best.” Don’t make statements like this unless you can reason Why you’re the best, use the opporunity to really sell the website or company here.

Don’t use Conatives like We, You, I or They

Using Cognatives not only makes the release sound less professional but it takes away Keyword ranking potential. For example:

Giving away a Free Pen that they can use

should turn into

Giving away a Free Pen that professional writers can use

Give an overview of why your site is unique

A Press Release is the perfect opportunity for you to sell your website, if your site offers something unique that others don’t then play on this in the Press Release. This will give journalists & bloggers something to write about & potentially attract much more attention than normal.

Use Quotations

PRWeb has a nice Quotation feature that will take a paragraph from your Press Release & Emphasise it. Use your most compelling message in this space & really make it work for you.

Add a Picture or Media Files

You’re allowed up to 3MB of Pictures & other media files. Pictures will also display beside your Press Release in the natural listings. Again, use this opportunity to add some media & get your money’s worth.

Include Anchor Text links in the Press Release to Deep Pages

A Press Release is one of the best ways to get a brand new website indexed in the search engines & also give it some authority. Since Google trusts new websites less, sending out a press release will instantly give you site some Credibility (and some links). For example I recently just sent out a Press Release for one of our new Bike Trading websites & used these three keywords:

1. Bikes for Sale
2. Bike Accessories
3. Cheap Bikes

Surely enough we’re already starting to rank for these terms within a week of Soft Launching the website. So use those Anchor test links to your advantage. I see too many press releases that just include the url of the website (i.e. www.earnersblog.com). This will achieve nothing. This option is only available in the $249 option on PRWeb.

Select all your Categories & Tags

You have the ability to select a certain number of Categories & Tags. Choose the Maximum possible. If you run out of ones within your industry then choose the most popular Categories. Choose tags that appear on the main page, these get the most amount of exposure.

Include the right Contact Details

If you have an inhouse SEO or even a Media Company sending your Press Releases quite often the sign up users details will get added to the Press Release. This obviously isn’t good when you’ve got potential clients contacting you. Make sure you have the right details in that space.

Socially Bookmark the Press Release

Once the Press Releases is live, start bookmarking it & sharing it. If it’s of value then more people will see it, that means more people will see your company or website. Don’t just let the Press Release do its thing, give it a nice push in the right direction.

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That’s 3 months of link building, writing articles, linkbait & working. That’s a lot of time.

If you’re starting out in Affiliate Marketing should you really be waiting around for your sites to come through Google’s filters? OR would your time be better spent hunting down some domains that could rank for you in as little as 2 weeks?

Bingo

Despite what many people say I feel there’s really no such thing as the Google Sandbox. It’s just that newer sites are subject to more filters than older ones. The more trust your website gains the less it becomes filtered & the easier you’ll find it to rank.

There are 2 basic ways to beat these filters & rank your sites quicker.

1. Build natural strong links from relevant sites (not too quickly)
2. Buy an aged domain with authority already

If you are planning on making Affiliate Websites then can you really afford to wait up to 3 months for a domain to start ranking? How much in potential revenue is that? Even more, say you’re creating a website to promote a particular product, what happens if you get filtered & by the time you end up ranking the competition is too fierce?

Don’t get me wrong, it IS possible to rank new sites quickly & it can be done (depending on the keywords) but what if you could buy an aged domain & rank right away & make money right away.

So what do you look for when buying an aged domain?

Age: This for me is the most important factor, the older the better. Pre 2000 is always a winner.

Banned: Check the domain hasn’t been banned.

Backlinks: Check Yahoo Site Explorer to see how many backlinks the domain has.

.Edu Backlinks: Does the domain have any authority backlinks?

Indexed: Has the domain been indexed before? search engines calculate a domain’s age from when it was first indexed. If a domain has a good Search History then you’re onto a winner. To check this out fire the url into Way Back Machine.

Price: What price are they asking for? You can pick up a good domain for around $10-100 if you look in the right places, a small price to pay for not having to wait to rank.

Pagerank: Generally Pagerank isn’t an issue for me although many sellers will try to sell the domain based on Pagerank. I’m more concerned about age & IBL’s. Although if pagerank is an issue please check to see it’s not fake.

Where to look?

• Digitalpoint Domain Forum
• Domain Name Forums
• Domain Forums
• Name Pros
• Sitepoint Domain Marketplace

I don’t think I really need to say any more on this subject. Buy smart, rank quicker, make more money

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1. The Quality of Affiliate Websites
2. Increased PPC Competition & Prices

Nowadays setting up disposable affiliate websites is not as easy as it once was. Not only that, Affiliate Marketers are now faced with a new challenge:

How the hell do you drive natural links to a website that’s clearly just promoting affiliate products?

I’m going to address some of the techiques I use & some of the techniques I’ve seen on other blogs to overcome this issue. This should hopefully help you dominate your niche & take your affiliate websites to the next level. Leaving your competitiors to sit back & cry.

1. Creating a Blog on the Affiliate Site

The nature of blogs & the information they provide make them very linkable. Writing indepth posts about a particular topic or subject can attract natural links to your blog, which you can then filter into your Affiliate Product pages. Blogs are also received much better on Social Networking sites.

Pros: Effective | Allows you to direct targeted internal links | Keeps content fresh

Cons: Time Consuming | Lack of knowledge in the area to write fresh articles

2. Creating the Affiliate Site as a Blog

Many affiliates have been cutting out the middleman & using blog platforms such as WordPress right from the getgo. This allows them to integrate articles in with affiliate reviews to make the whole site look much more natural. I’ve found this particular technique to be quite successful. This will attract links to particular posts which can allow you to deep link with relevant anchor text into product reviews.

Pros: Allows more flexibility with content | Affiliate links can be hidden seductively within posts | Easier to do well on social networks since your site doesn’t look like spam

Cons: Time consuming | Easy to lose interest if you’re not converting | If you build up a readership you feel like you need to blog often

3. Squidoo

Squidoo is a great way to support affiliate product reviews. Simply create a new account & write an overview for each product review in its own lens. Tag the lens as much as possible & also join as many groups as possible. Next interlink all the lenses together using a links plexo & choose the anchor text you want to rank for. Now also link back to your affiliate website with the anchor text you want to rank for from each lens. Bookmark the lens using Onlywire. Wash rinse & repeat.

Pros: Squidoo links pass a good amount of authority | Squidoo lenses rank very well naturally so this can provide extra exposure & inbound links to the lens

Cons: No cons other than time

4. Dominate the SERPS

Are you wanting to rank for a particular term? Then dominate that term by flooding it with as many of your own targeted pages as you can. All linking back to your original Affiliate Site.

I.e.

http://www.myspace.com/earnersblog/ & http://www.squidoo.com/earnersblog/

Register a page on:

1. Squidoo
2. Googlepages
3. Blogspot
4. Myspace
5. WordPress
6. Typepad
7. Spaces.Live.com
8. Feedburner

Register User Profiles on:

1. Digg
2. Mybloglog
3. Bumpzee
4. SEO Moz
5. Stumbleupon
6. Last.fm

Use all these relevant pages to link back to your own site, which will help increase your serps ranking for that targeted keyword. If these pages rank well & dominate the serps it will also increase your overall market share & push out competitors, which is always a good thing

Pros: Ability to dominate for a particular keyword | Can leverage off other sites link popularity

Cons: Time consuming | May take time to get all the profile pages indexed

5. Forums

Register on related (& unrelated if you wish) forums. Set your signature with the anchor text you want to rank for. Go back to some of the older posts with pagerank & authority (I like to use the Strongest Subpages Tool to find authoritative pages).

If you’re feeling particularly inventive, make a load of posts then come back in 3-4 weeks, edit the post & insert your links. This will avoid detection by the mods & admins.

Also search for forums that have VBSEO enabled. You can find heaps by using this query. VBSEO rewrites user profiles thus helping that page rank better for the chosen keyword.

Pros: Thousands upon thousands of forums to utilise

Cons: Profile may get banned for spamming if you’re not making relevant posts | Forums may require a certain number of posts to use signatures

6. RSS Feeds

Using RSS & XML feeds are great ways to get inbound links quickly, check out these posts:

1. Using RSS Feeds for Backlinks
2. Automated XML Backlinks

Check out the RSS top 55 for more places to grab RSS Links from.

Pros: Can accumulate a lot of backlinks in a short period of time

Cons: Scraper backlinks are spammy & may provide no overall value

7. Blog Commenting

Finding blogs that don’t have the nofollow enabled is a great way to spend a day. Set up an excel spreadsheet, hell even write a script to do it for you. There’s a dofollow plugin now that will remove the nofollow tag on WordPress. Start your research there, you’ll soon find lots of blogs that are Dofollowing (i.e. Easy Pickings).

Pros: Quick easy links

Cons: May get deleted if your anchor text is too spammy | Quite a bit of research involved

8. Sponsoring themes & templates

I mentioned this before in my sponsoring wordpress themes post. There hundreds of different templates you can sponsor, it doesn’t have to be just wordpress.

Think Joomla, Movable Type, Vbulletin, Invision Power Board, PHPBB etc.

Pros: Cost Effective | Can gain lots of links very quickly

Cons: Can’t control who is linking to you | Many sitewide links could trip spam filters

9. Link Bait & 301 Redirect

This is perhaps one of my favourite techniques at the moment. Create a blog purely for linkbait purposes & write articles for Digg, Netscape, Reddit & Stumbleupon. Once you’ve gathered around 1,500 links 301 redirect the pages & blog to your existing Affiliate Marketing websites to boost their authority.

Pros: Good way to fight supplemental results | Possible to amass a large amount of links organically & very quickly

Cons: Links may not be relevant to your niche & may not help your affiliate pages rank any better (think a bit about this one ) | Writing a popular story can take time & a lot of perseveration.

10. Link Feeder Sites

This again is something that Eli touched on a while ago in his post about Link Laundering. Basically you’re using existing sites that requires registration to build targeted backlinks to your Affiliate Sites. These can be software download sites or even reciprocal directories. If you set up a nice network you can instantly get about 200-300 links per day to sites or pages that you specify with the anchor text that you specify. Check Eli’s post out for more detailed information.

Pros: Can build targeted links very quickly | Can choose the anchor text

Cons: No control over the quality of sites the links go on | Too many links with the same anchor text could trip the spam filters, so rotation is necessary.

So there you have it, a breakdown of some of the top methods you can use to really boost your affiliate websites up in the serps & start capatilising on the traffic you’re missing out on.

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I spent a lot of time analysing what works on Digg & what doesn’t. However what a lot of people fail to notice is that 99% of the stories that are submitted rarely make it beyond 1 digg (from the user themselves).

The reason for this is the mentality of the submitter. They think that creating an account then submitting their stories is enough for the story to hit the front page. However, it’s just not that simple.

Here’s an account of how exactly I created a profile & became a power user that had 4 stories front paged with no help from any IM friends, within 48 hours of creating the Digg Account:

1. Create a Digg Account
2. Choose a memorable name & a good picture (picture is vitally important, notice how the top user supernova17 has a bright image ). Make the name memorable. Bear in mind you’re not trying to deceive here but merely some extra persuasion which will help with initial diggs.
3. Start by digging stories from users in the “upcoming section” make sure & leave a nice comment on each.
4. Add friends & digg their stories regularly. Adding friends is key to making this work.
5. Check for people that have added you as a friend using the “See who befriended you” tab.
6. Start submitting stories from places like reddit & stumbleupon to get an idea of how many initial diggs you are going to get. If you’re getting less that 10 diggs from friends then you need to do more digging & building.
7. Try to comment first on stories you think will hit the front page, this increases your exposure & increases your chances of acquiring friends.
8. You’ll instantly get a feel for what’s working & what’s not working. Now it’s time to tweak things.
9. Don’t submit into the general category. Things scroll off too quickly & don’t linger enough to get that initial “boost.”
10. I added anyone that dugg my stories as a friend. If they check their “befriended” tab they’ll probably add me too. This works well with newer users who have less friends. Make them feel wanted :p
11. Create a huge list of resources to scour for stories. 50-100 is good, tech blogs, apple news all that sort of stuff you want right in your feed reader.
12. I Created google alerts so that I’m getting info on hot topics right to your email inbox.
13. Don’t post your own stories until you’re sure you can get that initial 10-20 diggs to get your story noticed. If you’re posting your own stories you need to make sure they’re professional, not spammy otherwise you’ll get buried & the blog will get banned.
14. I now have a Digg account that will automatically get 15-30 Digg’s from my friends as soon as I submit a story, depending on what the story is about. For example they’ll probably not digg SEO or Affiliate Marketing related stories.
15. Have fun digging, remember it’s a game. It’s not difficult. You just need to network & build relationships then you’ll be rewarded

Welcome to everyone that’s come here from Digg! I’m surprised that you’ve not nuked my server….yet. Please feel free to have a look around, here’s a few other posts that I recommend:

• Diggproof You WordPress Blog
• Quick tips to Increase Feed Subscribers to your Own Blog
• The Ultimate Guide to getting Links to your Website

Also, don’t be afraid to drop me a line using the contact tab or leave a comment if you have any questions (or suggestions) about this article

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Get those people to bookmark your RSS Feed into their reader

Once they’ve bookmarked your site you at least have their attention. This is your chance to shine! If you write good posts chances are you’ll stay there for quite some time. Maybe even get mentioned on many of the blog lists going around.

I think I’m up over 150 Subscribers now, not a HUGE feat but then I don’t think of myself as a mainstream blog. I don’t generally write about all the trends & copy the things I see on other blogs. Perhaps that’s the reason, however I am also happy that I’m building up a niche readership that hopefully enjoy what I’m doing.

With that in mind I’m going to look at some quick & easy tips to make sure you can get as many new subscribers as possible.

1. Have a dedicated subscribe page. This is a single page on your site with details about all the different ways to subscribe to your feeds & sites. Include things like Technorati’s Favourite Blog Adder, Your Rss Feed & Email Updates. You can visit my subscribe page here.
2. Ask people to subscribe, be blunt. Ask them whenever you can, I do it at the bottom of every post & it works quite well. You can see I ask a question “Like this Article? Then Subscribe….”
3. Sign up to Feedburner & redirect your feed through their system. This allows you to track exactly how many subscribers you have at any given moment in time & also track their movements / trends.
4. Redirect all your WordPress Feed traffic automatically through Feedburner with this awesome little plugin.
5. Make sure your feed icon is visible on your blog by using the appropriate icons in the sidebar. The bigger the better usually! Feel free to nab the massive RSS Feed Icon in this post.
6. Offer original content that is worthy of people bookmarking your feed in their reader. If they find you interesting as a person also they’ll bookmark the site. Many blogs may not post “interesting” posts everyday but I still bookmark some because I find the blogger “intriguing.” This is another good reason to include an “About Page” it’ll help strike a common note with many readers.
7. Offer unique content or downloads for feed subscribers. Textlinkads offer a Feedvertising Plugin for WordPress that allows you to run ads or even run your own “extra content” in the feed.
8. Include your RSS Feed in your Signature links in forums. Some forums like Digitalpoint allow you to add your RSS feed to your profile & have it displayed in every thread you write or participate in.
9. Include your RSS Feed in any articles you submit to other Web Sites. Let say for example you submit a Guest Blog Post on Eli’s Blue Hat SEO, ask him to include your RSS Feed at the bottom of the Guest Post.
10. Get on Technorati, this is a great place for people to find your blog & what you’re blogging about. If you blog about anything then try blogging about things in the “Top Searched List” this’ll bring in a slight increase in traffic & hopefully more subscribers everyday.

Best of luck increasing your Feed Subscribers, I know I’m trying to keep my content as original as possible! Let me know how you get on.

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