Since the last 2 of my posts were entirely about Internet Marketers and what I don’t like about some of them, I feel I owe my readers some SEO advice. Because this is an important aspect of seoreef.com, to give good SEO advice to people who need it.

On today’s special, I am going to talk about how to get a top 10 ranking in 48 or even 24 hours using Digg. Don’t get me wrong, I am not talking about difficult keywords. But that doesn’t mean that some of the long tailed keywords can’t bring you traffic. As a matter of fact, if you have a lot of long tailed keywords into top 10, you will have a steady source of traffic each day. It is advisable that you apply this strategy each day or it least once every other day, especially for your important websites.

STEP 1: CHOOSE THE KEYWORD(S) YOU ARE GOING TO TARGET
No matter what your niche is, you are bound to find some keywords that are easy to dominate and will provide you with some traffic. For the sake of argument, I am going to give an example in the Dish Network niche. The keyword we are looking for is ideally 3, 4 or 5 words long – yes, this does work for some of the non-competitive 3 words long keywords.

We go to Keyword Discovery, which is my favorite keyword research tool, and type in “Dish Network”. If you are not a Keyword Discovery subscriber, you can use the free version here, although it doesn’t have as many features. Just for this strategy, you can use the free version, because this will not be a very extensive keyword research. If you are planning on building a website, it is better if you have the full version though.

Ok, let’s move on. Ideally, you want to target a keyword with less than 1,000 allintitle competition. You will soon understand what I mean by that. Now let’s take a look at the first four keywords and their search volume.

dish network 190530
dish network receiver 4472
dish network satellite 3800
dish network internet 3711

Of course, we can’t dream of touching the “dish network” keyword, this must be done with a preferably aged domain with a lot of authority. Let’s look at the following keywords though and establish the competition. In Google, type “allintitle:dish network receiver” in the query box. We get 11,500 results. Way too much. Let’s go on. Allintitle for “dish network satellite” is 261,000. Haha, no way. Let’s try “dish network internet”. We get 2,310 results. We may be on to something, so let’s dig deeper into this keyword. After typing this keyword into Keyword Discovery, we get as the most important results the following:

dish network internet 3711
dish network high speed internet 878
dish network satellite internet 870
dish network internet service 776
dish network satellite internet pole installation 488
dish network satellite internet service 219

Now let’s check the allintitle competition for “dish network high speed internet”. It is just 311! We have just found our golden nugget. Reasonably high searched for term, little competition. What is even better is that we can probably rank in top 10 for some of the other keywords also.

Results 1 - 10 of about 497 for allintitle:dish network satellite internet – very good;
Results 1 - 10 of about 302 for allintitle:dish network internet service – very good;
Your search - allintitle:dish network satellite internet pole installation - did not match any documents – not that good and I’ll tell you why in a second;
Results 1 - 10 of about 46 for allintitle:dish network satellite internet service – very good.

Now, keyword research is not over. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, it is better if you don’t rely on a single keyword research tool. The probability that a keyword is indeed searched for is way higher if the respective keyword can be found in more than a keyword research tool’s database. So we go to Wordtracker. The story with the paid version vs. the free version is the same as with Keyword Discovery’s, so I will not insist on that.

Let’s type “dish network internet” into Wordtracker. We get the following as the most important results:

200 dish network internet
23 dish network satellite internet
22 dish network high speed internet
15 dish network internet service
7 dish network internet access
7 satellite internet dish network

It seems that the results from the 2 keyword research tools are reciprocal – well, almost – and that’s very good. We have 3 certain winners here:

dish network high speed internet
dish network satellite internet
dish network internet service

However, we can rule out “dish network satellite internet pole installation”. Since Wordtracker doesn’t record it, it must have been just a temporary search trend. It could have been a webmaster searching for his rankings or a number of other different things. The fact that the keyword is not really important is also shown by the fact that we got 0 competition for the allintitle query. This concludes keyword research, so let’s move on to step 2.

STEP 2: CREATE THE ARTICLE AND UPLOAD IT ON YOUR WEBSITE
You are now going to create the article, which must have the following characteristics:
- it should be high quality, because you want your visitors to like and to digg it;
- it should incorporate the keyword(s) you are looking for in the body.

However, there’s one more very important thing to do before submitting the article. You should come up with a proper title tag, because the title tag together with the high authority backlink from Digg is what is going to make your page rank high. Ideally, the title tag for this page should be something like:

“Find out everything about the Dish Network satellite high speed Internet service”.

With this title tag, you incorporate all the 3 keywords we decided to rank for.

STEP 3: SUBMIT YOUR ARTICLE TO DIGG
All that is left for you to do is to submit your article to Digg. However, there is one final catch. Your Digg profile must be a relatively strong one. You need to have 100-150 friends, or somewhere along those lines. Of course, it might work even if you have fewer or more friends than that, but bottom line is that you need to get involved. Digg other people’s stuff, and they will digg yours in return. Be a part of the community and don’t spam. You want to get at least 10 diggs, because this way your backlink will have more authority. So, take the time to create a powerful Digg profile.

Once you submit your article, you should be able to see results in 48 hours or even less. You will notice that the Digg submission itself will rank maybe even higher than your website at first, but that’s only going to last for a few days. After that, your ranking will stick, while the Digg submission will probably disappear way lower.

I hope you enjoyed this little secret of mine, now get to work!

You probably know that the question in the title is more of a rhetorical one than anything else. And the answer is different for each individual. For some of you, the answer may be 0. For other persons, it may be thousands of dollars or even more. Let’s get something straight: we are talking about money spend, not time or anything else, and yes, I know that time costs money.

So why do I insist on only taking money into this equation? Well, to be frank, because this is how Internet Marketers who supposedly sell recipes of success put it. And you might argue that I have something against them, which is simply not true. I couldn’t care less for the majority of them.

But why do they insist, in their sales letters, to say things like:
“This product will bring you tens of thousands of dollars each month, what is this worth to you?”

If you have seen some of the sales letters, I know you will recognize the speech. The overwhelming majority of their hyped up sales pitches have this line in order to justify their often absurd prices. In order for you to understand how stupid this type of line is, let’s think about an example that could easily be – and probably has been for many people – a real life example.

John buys a van, and starts transporting people between two different towns. He starts a small business, and due to the fact that he had a somewhat lower price compared to other companies and started developing a good reputation, business was good to him. He bought another van and so on and so forth. John now has an incredibly developed business, with many coaches and lots of routes, between many towns. Let’s say that the first van he bought cost $15,000. His current business has an annual money flow of 3 million dollars. So, was the first van he bought worth $3,000,000?

Of course it wasn’t. The time, dedication and commitment he put into development of his business is worth that much. However, many ebook and other digital products gurus try to lead you into believing their products are worth the metaphorical $3,000,000. But their products are not. It’s your own commitment and work that is worth the output you manage to get out of your business. You shouldn’t judge a product based on how much money it can theoretically bring to a person, because in theory you can make millions starting with a pencil. Now I wouldn’t mind the gurus saying: “Hey, this kind of advice is scarce and there are not too many experts on the matter, so that’s why it’s priced at $197”. In other words, to base their prices on the supply and demand balance of the market. But wait, now I remembered: they’re not real Marketers, they’re just salesmen.

Of course, in the end, this is just another one of their strategies that try to play with one’s mind and induce them the buying attitude. For me, it is just not fair. It doesn’t seem fair that an ebook from a quasi expert who barely knows how to write costs $97, while a real Marketing book, from a real expert, Philip Kotler, can be found on Amazon for as low as $68.

“Forgive me but the day I start trusting him is the day I would have sold my soul”. This quote is from Sayid, a very cool character from an even better show called “Lost”. A show which is definitely my all time favorite. What does that have to do with Internet Marketing? Well, the quote tells exactly how I feel about the majority of gurus - I will not call them Marketers, because I don’t consider them to be.

Being a “guru” is very fashionable in today’s online environment. They project an image of success and everyone who tries his/her luck online wants to be exactly like the gurus and fit into the guru mentality. I am telling you to think again. Let’s talk about some of the reasons why you should not listen or follow these self-proclaimed gurus.

1. THE GURUS FEED FROM YOUR LACK OF SUCCESS
It sounds pretty cruel, but it’s still the blatant truth. As I was saying before, many people who get disappointed by the lack of their online success tend to buy more and more of the gurus’ ebooks. When they don’t really find the answer in a product that sounded too good to be true, they move on and buy another. The conclusion is simple: the gurus only sell their products because you don’t achieve online success. Because if you would, you would not be needing their products, would you?

2. MOST OF THE PRODUCTS ARE OF POOR QUALITY
Not ALL of the products are of poor quality, but most of them are. For one thing, they never tell you the whole story. They tell you some basic things, without touching the essence. And they don’t really want you to succeed online. If you are successful online, it means that:
- they have more competition to worry about;
- they lose one of their potential buyers (you).

Then, not every person can be a writer. Many of these ebooks have basic Grammar errors that would make a 12-year old feel embarrassed. Amateurish and sloppy writing is the best way to define these products. In order to overcome this and capture the reader’s attention, they resort to extreme measures like offensive language, constant bragging, etc.

3. YOU DON’T NEED THE GURUS
That’s exactly right, you don’t need them; it is exactly the other way around. They need you and other people like you who dream of online success in order to sell their products. I am not saying that you shouldn’t buy any of their products at all. As I stated before, there are some good products. But you certainly don’t need to buy each and every new product that comes out. As a matter of fact, you can believe me when I tell you that it only takes the best product from each field and you’ve read them all.

4. SOME OF THEIR PRODUCTS ARE RIDICULOUSLY OVERPRICED
$800/month for a membership site?! $1000 - $1500 for a single product?! Some of these gurus’ greed is indeed endless. However, you must remember that not the people who demand such outrageous sums of money are being foolish; it is the people that give the money. Never pay such large amounts on Internet Marketing products; you would be disappointed of what you get in return.

5. LACK OF REAL QUALITY CONTROL
However, there’s one area in which these gurus excel indeed: vanity. OK, that too. But I’m referring to something else: copywriting. Yes, they are indeed very good at writing hyped up sales letters that touch a sensitive string in people. The fact that they don’t deliver is not that important (to them, anyway). Some of these sales copies are so good though, they should be made illegal.

Usually, the longer a sales page is for a product, the worse the product is. There’s no wonder that there’s a rumor that says that Google is going to filter these pages out of the search results. However, the lack of REAL quality control is an issue. For instance, what would you say if you saw a driving school’s advertisement that said: “Come to our school, and you will be able to compete in Formula 1”. Unfortunately, this is not a far fetched comparison, not by a longshot. While you would know that the driving school’s advertisement is fake, you would not really be able to tell that you can’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars overnight by reading a certain ebook. This is exactly why I said that the gurus feed on people’s hopes and dreams, and take advantage of them.

Now, as a final note, you might argue that one has to sell his/her products. I am not against that. What I am against is throwing out poor products with no sense of ethics whatsoever. In one of my future posts I will make a comparison between your average guru and his / her inherent way of thinking and real Internet Marketers who know what they are talking about and actually bring something useful to the community.

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past few years, you probably know the great popularity that the blog platform enjoys nowadays. The term “blog” actually comes from the term web log, and the conceptual backbone is similar to that of a diary, except for the fact that it’s exposed for everyone to see and it is online.

People share their expertise and experiences through blogs and it didn’t take too long for people to realize blogs are a great way to make money online also. So what are the most important advantages of a blog? Quick installation and the ability to receive instant feedback and to communicate with the visitors are some of the most important ones, but there are many more. However, this is not the subject of this post.

What I am going to talk about is the title tags of your blog posts. The great majority of people owning blogs use the WordPress platform, with its 5 minutes quick installation and its versatility. However, what the WordPress CMS fails to provide is good title tags for the blog posts. However, there is a solution and it’s called the SEO Title Tag plugin and you can find it here.

With this handy little plugin, you have the possibility to create a custom title tag for each of your blog posts. As you might have noticed, Wordpress title tag usually defaults to the headline of your post, which is not a very good thing. I’ve had a few websites filtered out of the search results for doing this mistake back in the times when I was a rookie.

The installation is simple. You simply upload the plugin onto your server, in the wp-content folder, and in the sub folder called plugins. After that, you log into your administrator area of your blog, go to plugins main menu and plugins sub-menu. You will get a list of your available plugins, where you will see the one called Seo Title Tag. Hit activate. Now, before you actually start customizing your title tags, there is one more thing you need to do. You need to replace the title tag php command line in your header file. If you don’t know absolutely anything about programming, don’t fret. This is far easier than it sounds. You just need to delete a line and copy-paste another one. Here is how you do it.

In your blog admin area, you go to Presentation main menu and Theme Editor sub-menu. At the right of the page, you will have a list of editable files. Click on the one called “Header”. Look for your title tag, it is to the top of the page. It is the statement between the beginning title tag (<title>) and the ending title tag (</title>). All you need to do is replace that line with:

<title><?php if (function_exists(’seo_title_tag’)) { seo_title_tag(); } else { bloginfo(’name’); wp_title();} ?></title>

Hit update file, and start customizing your blog posts’ title tags. This is a must do, so make sure you don’t skip this. Have fun.

No, this post is not about how gurus make their often enough immense amounts of money by selling false dreams to naïve people. Nope, this is about something else entirely. This post is about me and my performance.

And boy, do I have a lot of things to feel frustrated about. First of all, I feel very uncomfortable for setting up this blog and utterly and completely forgetting about it. If you have any experience whatsoever in the field of Internet Marketing, you will know how I feel and what I am talking about.

It is very easy to get carried away, make big and bold plans, and then not carrying on with them. Especially in Internet Marketing. The mirage of hitting it big time is often a curse also. We can say that not every person is prepared to embrace success. Internet Marketing is like flirting with a beautiful woman. You can either become the happiest man in the world or heart broken.

But before throwing other metaphors at you, I will also tell you exactly what I mean. It is easy to get carried away at the allure of a free life, with you being your own boss. It is very easy to think about waking up each morning, taking a shower and going at the corner café for a delicious breakfast taken while checking your overnight income. What most people often forget – your truly, guilty as charged sometimes - is the fact that you need to work really hard if you want those dreams to become reality. As much as working on a normal full time job? Nope, not as much, way more!

So as of today I am going to make a promise to myself. Although I can’t say that I’m a lazy person, I can safely say that I can do more. This blog is a proof of that. So what would you like to mend in your Internet Marketing method of working?