How to Rank Highly in MSN's Bing

Microsoft’s newest search engine, Bing, was first released in May 2009. With Bing, it seems like they’ve finally hit on something the public can get behind. This is a very pretty piece of tech. So, like the rest of the marketing community, I’ve been digging in and analysing how to rank highly in MSN Bing.

Not shockingly, the rankings for Bing versus Yahoo! or Google are not necessarily very different. The major differences relate mostly to the fact that Bing is new.

Quality Content First

Bing, like so many other search engines has built its entire algorithm around the user experience. That’s not a bad thing though. It actually makes things easier for you and here’s how. Your competitors are all out there searching for ways to “trick” the search engines into higher rankings. They don’t want to put the hard work in for quality content. So, when you do, you automatically jump ahead of them.

The three things I want you to remember here are:

1.       Continue integrating keywords into your text – While quality content is important, the keywords still help. Just don’t focus on the keywords to the detriment of your readers.

2.       Fresh content – Bing is a new search engine which means it is still indexing the web. A lot of spam littered sites that clog up Google and Yahoo! aren’t in there. So, if you use the tried and true trick of writing fresh content every week for your site, you’ll get more pages in Bing, which equals more traffic.

3.       Be original – There’s a temptation to write things that are already out there – co-opting ideas from other blogs and rewriting them. Not only do you need good content, you need original, fresh ideas to draw readers in.

Quality content is the foundation of all search engines (and the only answer you’ll get if you ask Microsoft this very question), so it should be the first thing you focus on when you build your content. Trust me, the rankings will come with it.

Managing Your Backlinks

Of course, part of good content is other sites telling Bing that your content is good. How do they do that? With a boatload of back links. This is another holdover from classic search algorithms by Google and one of the important ways to bump your way through Bing’s listings.

However, there are a few differences here to keep in mind. First, Bing doesn’t provide things like Page Rank to help you determine the internal ranking of the sites you’re getting links from. Second, not all sites – even the good ones – are listed in Bing yet.

To solve these two problems, you’ll need to do searches in Bing to find high ranking sites. Look for content rich sites that are related to your niche and don’t contain too many links already.
Also, sites that have good pagerank in Google, tend to more often than not hold good value as far as backlinks are concerned for Bing.

However, Bing places more emphasis on the title tags of the page that is linking to your page than Google does (ie not just the anchor text on that page). I think that is probably because Bing is not quite as sophisticated as Google is in determining the theme of a website or webpage as a whole, so it uses these title tags to determine the relevancy of the site linking to yours.

Additionally, if you have existing backlinks, make sure those sites are submitted in Bing. If they are not, you can manually submit them for inclusion. Sometimes, just submitting the sites that link to your site can help improve your ranking.

The idea here is always quality over quantity (though quantity doesn’t hurt). Look to add as many links as you can, but ensure they are all high quality.

Tweak Your Titles, Metas, and URLs

Yup, titles, meta tags and URLs are still important factors for search rankings, though not nearly as much as they were in the 1990s. First, make sure every page on your site has a unique, keyword rich title. Then, make sure you include both the META description tag and the META keywords tag on every page, with original content in each of them.

These are simple tasks that a lot of sites neglect. If you are using a Wordpress installation, you can add the All-in-One SEO plugin to provide custom titles and descriptions for every one of your blog posts.

Additionally, make sure the URLs for each of your pages are descriptive and keyword rich. This falls into both the technical and aesthetic sides of search engine optimization. Bing uses keywords to determine content, but they also use language filters to determine if the titles and URLs are useful to the user. So, don’t stuff keywords in there without rhyme or reason. Write them in a way that provides value to your reader while still describing content to the search engine.

There are a few things that make Bing a little different to Google in the way they do their rankings... for instance:

The age of your domain: Bing puts a lot more weight on the age of your website than Google does, the older your site is the more likely Bing is to trust it.

The amount of words per page: Bing puts a higher weighting on pages that have more content than pages that have less content. So as a rule of thumb, with Bing, you'll find it a little harder to rank highly with pages that are less than 300 words long, whereas with Google, while content is king, the length isn't quite so heavily weighed on.

Bing likes sites that link out: If you link out to lots of good quality sites, Bing trusts your site more and you end up getting higher rankings. When you link out Bing seems to like it if the title tags of the pages that you link to include the keyword that your page is trying to rank for.

Backlinks: While they are important with Bing, they are nowhere near as important as they are with Google. Some people on Bing-optimization related messageboards complain about their rankings when they have thousands of backlinks and high Google rankings, but they haven't got other areas going well on their sites that Bing places more weight on than Google does.

Overall though, it all starts and ends with good, quality content. Bing, just like Google, wants happy readers. Make your readers happy and half the work is already done.

I hope you enjoyed this blog post, I'm interested in your comments!

10 Excellent Reason To Affiliate

1)You get to be your own boss.
You create your own opportunities. You choose how much you wish to earn and work accordingly. You choose to do things that interest you. You choose to take holidays when you need them. You choose to spend more time with your family. Regardless of where you are now, you can go as far as you like with affiliate marketing if you're willing to work. With this freedom comes responsibility, but for most affiliates the benefits far outweigh the negatives.

2)No risk: It costs very little to get started as an affiliate.
In all seriousness you can become an affiliate and start earning commissions, without spending a dime. Most affiliates, however, will make an initial investment for some web hosting and a domain name for their first website. Hosting will set you back between $3 and $10 per month, and a domain name costs about $10 per year. Joining affiliate programs is free. There are lots of free ways to promote your website - for example being listed in the natural search listings of the search engines.

Generally you will end up spending money when you want to save time; you'll keep your spending to a minimum if you're the patient type and you're happy to do the tedious tasks yourself (this can even be a good thing to do with your first website, so that you learn how it works!).

3)Anyone can become an affiliate.
Affiliate marketing is extremely democratic. You will find affiliates of all ages, from all different countries, with all sorts of backgrounds. All you need to get started affiliate marketing is Internet access, and you can operate from any country. (although some countries are restricted from certain networks and payment providers, but there are usually ways around this). You don't need to be an expert web designer, writer or marketing guru: these things will give you a slight head start, but for the most part affiliates all start at the same level and just learn by doing.

4)You have a lot of choiceThere are many different affiliate programs you can promote, hundreds of different markets you can promote to and lots of different methods for promoting products. In fact one of the biggest problems striking new affiliates istoo much choice

5)You don't need to invest in building your own product.
This falls under the "no risk" category as well. Someone creating a product needs to be very thorough with their market research beforehand to be sure that they're creating something that actually sells. If they get it wrong it can mean tens of thousands of dollars in product development wasted! Affiliates don't have as much risk since they are only promoting products, and they can change products at any time.

6)You don't need to focus solely on one topic.
In fact affiliates who are earning large amounts typically have a number of separate websites promoting different products across a variety of markets at any given time; they don't have all their eggs in one basket.

7)You're not tied to any particular product
If a product isn't performing, or if you see a different product you'd like to promote, it's can be as easy as changing the links on your site. You can try lots of different products and see which ones work for you.

8)You don't need to be concerned with delivery or payments.
That's all dealt with by the merchant or the merchant's payment processor.

9)There's a lot of money to be made.
As mentioned earlier, affiliate marketing is a huge business and it doesn't look like it'll be going away anytime soon.

10)Affiliate marketing can be a relatively passive income, freeing you to spend more time doing the things you like.
Yes it takes time to get started, but once you're earning enough you'll be able to do what any decent business manager does: delegate. There is a huge wealth of freelance talent on the Internet these days, and you can easily outsource all but the most vital tasks.

The Biggest Secret to Online Success

The more time I spend around the web, the more I see people talking about their own secret to online success, and usually, what they are telling people is so full of rubbish that it makes my head spin.
You see, the reason most people fail is not because they used the wrong system, or didnt buy the right tools. That's all hype that people spew to make you feel bad and buy their latest new product. The fact is that the reason people fail is because they focus on the wrong things.

In order to understand the real secret to online success, I have to strip away the lies that people have used to deceive you. Before you can understand what is really going on, you have to STRIP AWAY all the bad information that people have told you so that you rip out your wallet and spend some cash.

The biggest secret to online success has nothing to do with how you market your site but it is about what you spend your time doing. In order to illustrate my point, I am going to break some of the biggest marketing myths online. I am going to touch a lot of nerves here, but please, keep on reading and you will see what I am talking about by the end.

The Money IS NOT in the List
Email marketing is really popular, and if you have been online for more than a day or two, you have probably heard this said before. In fact, I have said it myself.

However, the fact is, I know people with lists 100 times the size of mine that make less from that list than I do. So, obviously the money is not in the list, or else those people would never have to work again.

Highly Searched Keywords Are NOT The Secret

Keywords are important, but you need a new understanding of keywords in order to really succeed. You see, when most people look at keywords they are looking at what was popular LAST MONTH, not what will be popular in the future. Although some topics tend to be popular over time, you can actually make a lot of money by creating a keyword.

This is especially true when creating a domain.

I see people every day saying you have to buy a domain based around popular keywords. But, if you look at the most popular names online, they are NOT keyword optimized (at least they wern't until the buzz around them became so HUGE everyone was talking about them!)

Now, I have been called a liar on this count, but let's take a look at some of the most popular names online, and see how people have created keywords.

One example relates to search. 10 Years ago, if you were trying to learn about how people search online, who would think to look for a name like GOOGLE? It's not even a word, and says nothing about online search. But, today, it is synonymous with online search, and you wouldn't even think about search without the name coming up.

Two more quick examples come to mind when it comes to social networking as well. One is Facebook, which I do not believe was a highly searched term more than 5 years ago, and the other is Twitter. These two names are now big daddy's of social networking, but they were NOT highly thought out keyword domains.

The reason they are popular has nothing to do with their keywords, it was because of what they did that impacted people.

Owning Your Website is NOT a secret!

Many people will tell you (and I often agree) that for long term success online, you need your own website. But, at the same time, I personally know about a dozen people that are making a full time living online, and see no reason to go out and build their own site. Now, personally, I would rather have that asset, and I think everyone should have a site of their own, because it is really helpful in leveraging the real secret to online success. But, you can find success online without spending a dime.

Search engines are NOT the best source of free traffic!

Now this one will spark off a round of debate that will never be resolved. But, the fact is that although search engines are a great source of traffic, and you should try to get at least some of your traffic there, if you are willing to spend some time on your business, you can find a lot of traffic without relying on the search engines. In order to do that, you have to understand the real secret.

Now, What is the Real Secret to Online Success?

Now that I have everyone up in arms, I want to talk about what you really need. You see, everything that I mentioned above will HELP you to succeed, but they really are not the true secret behind online success. These are simply methods that we use to achieve success in our efforts.

The real secret to online success (or ANY business really), which all the gurus know is really simple. It is the one thing they have that you don't if you aren't making any money. This one tip is going to take a whole new way to look at your business. SO, here it is...

Build RELATIONSHIPS!!!

Did I say that loud enough?
That's all it takes to make it in this business. One reason I succeed where others fail is because I see the relationships that I am building. What I see most people doing online does more to destroy relationships than to build them.

Everything that you do should center around the relationships. I know people who own their own sites getting loads of traffic and yet not making any money. Yet I know people without a website of their own making loads of cash every month.

I know people with hundreds of thousands of people on an email list, yet they are barely able to make a few hundred dollars a month. Because they don't have a good relationship with their list. It doesn't take much to get a subscriber, but it takes a lot more to keep them and get them to trust you over time.

When it comes to search engines, you can get all the rankings you want, but if you don't build trust with people when they land on your site, you have wasted your time and theirs. Also, you can get loads of traffic without any rankings in the search engines at all (and without spending hours and hours, or thousands of dollars, spinning articles and slaving away over boring SEO tactics meant to trick the search engines into believing people like the pile of junk you call a website).

In fact, this attitude that 'it's all about the sale' and not about the relationship, is a huge factor in the HIGH failure rate. I have seen people come out and make thousands of dollars, and then disappear forever because they got caught scamming, promoting garbage, and nobody would trust them.
The money isn't in your email list, it's in the relationship you have with your email list. If you provide a lot of value and quality, you build trust. If you always make sure that you promote products that deliver what they promise, and don't over hype themselves (which is, unfortunately, getting harder and harder to find) then you build that relationship. If you promote junk just because it has a high commission, or promote something based solely on the name of the product, without knowing what is inside, you can destroy your relationships, and those people won't buy from you again.

Also, you can get all the high search engine rankings you want. I see this one all the time. I have watched people spend months to get a ranking for a really big keyword, and one HIGHLY targeted to buyers, yet fail to make a dime from all their efforts.

These are the people who you will see daily in the forums claiming that IM is all a scam, and you can't make money doing all this. The reason why is because they can't take responsibility for the fact that THEY failed to build trust and respect with people along the way.

Another important point is to remember that relationship building is not JUST with potential customers. You need to build relationships with other website owners as well, especially ones in the same or similar niches.

Most people see another website, and all they think about is competition, and someone they have to beat. This makes the industry a cutthroat world, where it is every man for themselves. If you have this attitude, you are dooming yourself. You may make millions of dollars, but you will still be a failure in my book. It's not about how much money you make, but how fulfilled your life is at the end of the day. The real secret to online success is in how you build relationships and get people going.

How to avoid losing traffic from a poorly chosen domain name

How much thought do you put into choosing a domain name? 

Surely it's the easy part of setting up a website, right?

You could be missing out on well-deserved traffic and not even know it if you haven't been savvy about choosing your domain name.

So what can you do to make sure you're not sending your hard-earned traffic to someone else's website?

You need to put yourself in your customers' shoes. Say your fancied domain name out loud and see how many interpretations you can get out of it (you don't want more than one!).

If I said "Hey, check out my website called See Too", this could lead to numerous interpretations. Following are just a few examples:

• Seattwo.com
• See2.com
• C2.com
• Ctoo.com

And my actual address might be see-too.net.

Of course it's not always possible to get a domain name that has only one interpretation (and even less likely you will get one ending in .com). In this case you need to take extra care to market your website as close to your domain name as you can. You might also buy the domain names for the other interpretations and set up redirects to your site.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• While it's not as important as it once was, using a keyword or phrase that you are trying to rank highly for in your domain name can be helpful. This goes hand in hand with the necessity of choosing a domain name that is related to the topic of your website, seeing as you will use this as the name of your website.

• Make sure the phrasing of your domain name makes sense, for example ‘dogbarkinghelp.com' is a lot better than ‘advisedogsbarking.com'. You want your domain name to be memorable, so keeping it short is also a good idea.

• Check if the term you want to use is trademarked. No-one wants the sting of receiving a cease and desist notice after they've put in the hard yards building backlinks for the domain and got it working as a good money earner. Contact your local Government Intellectual Property or Trademarks Office to check this out first.

• You will also want to check a domain name for penalties (for example penalties given to the previous domain owner for aggressive link building campaigns and so forth). You can do this by pointing a link to the domain from a trusted site, and waiting to see if Google will index it.

• .com's are the best. It's the default suffix for type-in traffic, and search engines will tend to return results for the .com equivalents first. However, if you're after local traffic then a local suffix, such as .co.nz, will actually work in your favor for search results.

• Don't use product names (unless it's your product). This isn't allowed, and would make it difficult for you to promote other products on your site.

• Use hyphens, numerals and words that are difficult to spell with caution.

• Don't place words that end and start with the same characters together (for example, worddrool.com). It's confusing and can be prone to typos.

• Be careful with words that are spelt one way in US English, and another in UK English (for example, ‘favour'). Try to use real words too (and avoid text language).*

• And finally, check your spelling before clicking buy! It's not just our website visitors that can make typing errors and I'm sure you don't want to end up with a misspelled domain name.

Are there any other tips you have that would be useful for those at the stage of choosing a domain name? Share your thoughts below.

How To Find Affiliate Programs

One of the best places to start when building your affiliate website is investigating what affiliate programs are out there. We'll give you a closer look at ClickBank, one of the largest affiliate networks on the Internet and home to some pretty high commission products, and we'll show you some other networks to check out as well.

But first things first, what is an affiliate network?

Introduction to Affiliate Networks

Affiliate networks are the coordinators of the affiliate world. They coordinate between the merchant and the affiliate, are responsible for processing payments from the customer, keeping track of affiliate commissions and paying affiliates.

They're a very good place to start when you're looking for affiliate products to promote, since many will maintain a directory that you can browse by subject.

Let's take a look at one such network: ClickBank.com.

ClickBank is one of the best affiliate networks for digital products, like software and eBooks. The good thing about software and eBooks is that they tend to have a lot higher commissions than physical products. (You can probably figure out the reason for that yourself - software and eBooks have no manufacturing costs per item, so merchants don't have to worry about affiliate commissions cutting into their margins.) Commissions of between 50% and 75% are reasonably common for digital products.

If you click on "Marketplace" you'll be taken to ClickBank's directory of affiliate products - here you can browse affiliate programs by subject:

ClickBank provides some statistics on affiliate programs in their listings.

Initial $/sale = How much you earn for each sale

Avg %/sale = What percentage of the sale price makes up your cut.

 

Avg Rebill Total = If the product has recurring billing (for example, monthly memberships) then this is the amount of money you might you expect beyond the initial sale. If the product doesn't have recurring billing this figure will be blank.

Avg %/Rebill = This number is only shown if the vendor offers products with recurring billing, and shows the average commission rate earned on that part of the income.

Grav = Gravity Gives an indication of how hot a product is at the moment. Products with high gravity have a lot of affiliates making money selling this product, while those with low gravity have comparatively less affiliates selling the product. Take this figure with a grain of salt, since it is open to manipulation, but in general you'll probably want to look at products that have a decent amount of affiliate activity, since that obviously means that people are making money from them.

Signing up to become a ClickBank affiliate is a fairly straightforward process: click the "Sign up" link at the top of the page, fill in the details as required, click "Submit" and follow instructions from there.

Once you have your ClickBank ID you're able to promote any product on the ClickBank network. When you're browsing products you'll see a link to "Promote".

 

 Click this, enter your ClickBank ID and the site will generate your HopLink (affiliate link).

  
 

 You must use your HopLink any time you link to the merchant site. If you just link directly to the merchant site using the website's usual address you won't receive credit for any visitors who click that link and then purchase, as they won't have been tracked!

Logging in to your ClickBank Account

When you belong to an affiliate network you're able to check how much you've earned by logging in to your account and reviewing the statistics. ClickBank pools the commissions from your whole account into a daily amount, which is shown on the first page when you log in.

You can also delve further into your statistics and break it down by product in the reports section.

So that was a basic introduction to ClickBank. However there are many other affiliate networks out there that you may wish to join as well.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based system where you (as an affiliate) get paid for referring sales or customers to another business.

There are many different ways you can earn money from being an affiliate marketer, including commission-based affiliate programs and AdSense. Here are some fictional examples of these:

Commission Based Affiliate Programs

Geoff has a website full of dog-training advice; on the side of his pages he has placed an ad for a dog-training eBook. If any of his visitors click on his ad and buy the eBook from the merchant's website, Geoff receives 75% of the price of the book as commission for sending the visitor to the merchant.

 

Marnie runs a very popular newsletter for people who want to learn yoga. She regularly sends out lessons and tips to her list members, and occasionally she promotes products that offer affiliate commissions. Whenever somebody from her newsletter list clicks on a link in her emails and buys one of the various products she's promoted she earns a percentage of the product price.

  

AdSense 

Tara has a health supplements website containing lots of useful information about various health supplements. By pasting a small segment of code into her website she gets ads relevant to her content automatically showing up on her page. She earns money every time a visitor to her site clicks on one of these ads, even if they don't end up buying from the merchant.

 

Affiliate marketing can be a very lucrative business. There are a huge number of affiliates earning full-time incomes from affiliate marketing, and a lot of affiliates doing considerably more than that! Take a look at these figures...

This is real money, and real people just like you are earning it. So let's take a look at what affiliate marketing is...

Affiliate Marketing Is....

…Pay-for-performance. You only earn money as an affiliate if you're producing results for the merchant of a product or network such as Google, whether it's from sales, clicks or registrations.

…Big business! Affiliates worldwide collectively earn billions of dollars each year. One report estimated that affiliates in the UK alone earned over 2 billion dollars in 2006. Of course within that there are affiliates turning over millions of dollars a year, affiliates who scrape by earning $20/week and everything in between.

…A long established business model. Affiliate marketing has been around since people realized the Internet could be used for commerce. One of the earliest big affiliate programs was started by Amazon.com in 1996 (although, just quietly, their commissions aren't anything to write home about!)

…Internet-based. You can promote yourself or your website using offline methods, but when it comes to earning commissions, all the tracking and processing is done through the Internet. There's no door-to-door selling here!

…Open to anyone. You don't need any special credentials to be an affiliate. Since affiliate marketing is pay-for-performance, most affiliate programs are open to anyone, regardless of whether you're experienced or a complete novice. You also don't need to be a computer genius to be a successful affiliate - everyone goes through the same learning process.; it really only comes down to whether you can fight your way through to the other side!

Now that we've seen what affiliate marketing IS, here's what affiliate marketing is NOT:

Affiliate Marketing is Not...

…Creating and selling your own product. Creating your own product is a different business that requires a lot more risk than affiliate marketing. When you create a product you invest money in creating the product, marketing the product, handling payments and delivery, providing customer support and ongoing development. An affiliate is simply responsible for sending prospects to a merchant - a much less daunting task!

That said, product owners can learn a lot by being affiliates first, and a lot of affiliates go on to build their own products later in their careers.

...Earning $14,000 overnight just by uploading this one website and script (which you can buy here for $49.95 $29.95 for the next ten minutes only!) There are a lot of websites out there that will tell you that THEY have the secret formula.,THEY can tell you secrets that the experts don't want you to know, THEY can give you all the information you need to start your lifestyle of cars, boats, houses and giant wads of cash stacked on the table and THEY can back it up with screens and screens of testimonials from very satisfied and very rich customers. THEY will deliver you the world, at an absolute bargain price.

Here's the real scoop, the information that the "experts" REALLY don't want you to know, and I'll give it to you for free: there are no magic overnight success formulas. Certainly, there are people doing very well out of affiliate marketing: they've been working hard for a long time, they've made some good decisions and they deserve every success. Sure, there are campaigns that might turn over huge amounts of money in one day: they will have been planned for months in advance by very clever people with a lot of experience in making a lot of money.

The reality of affiliate marketing is that you need to spend time learning the ropes and, after that,  spend time implementing what you've learned. You need to make a lot of mistakes and spend a lot of time anguishing over why you're making no sales. Then you WILL start making a few sales, and it will grow from there.

There are people and websites who can help you along the way (I personally recommend www.affilorama.com/premium), but no one has the ultimate, definitive solution.

There are occasionally good pieces of software developed that can also speed things up, but there's nothing that will automate everything for you. You'll still need to know what you're doing, and you'll still need to work; The gold-rush days where you could just rock into affiliate-town one day and strike it rich the next are steadily diminishing, if not gone altogether. Anyone who tells you different is (obviously!) selling something.