You can’t throw a rock right now without hitting a blog post or article about curation!  People are giving curation a lot of lip service, but no one is really training on the topic.

What is curation?

It is the process of filtering information on a topic to come up with the best articles, videos, photos, or social discussions going on at a given time.

It is done by social marketers and content marketers.  Robert Scoble is primarily a social curator for example.

He shares tons of great things daily that he find among all the noise generated in the tech and startup markets.

People love him for it because they don’t have to do everything he does to stay on top of the market.  They just follow him and use him as a filter on the market whom they trust to bring the goods.

Mashable.com is an example of a “hub curator.” Hub curators are sites that watch the news and thought leaders in their niche and report on the best information they find.  This is the content marketer’s sweet spot.  We spend a ton of time creating (or having created) articles and blog posts from scratch.

Curation enables you to “riff” off of the news in your market and just give your two cents on a topic without writing 100% original content all the time.

It sounds like a fantastic dream come true.  But does it really work?

And how do we implement it in our markets?

My good friend Jack Humphrey is going to explain what curation is and how he developed an amazing software which helps him to create pages which rank really high in the search engines.

If you are interested in getting a lot of search traffic, loyal visitors, and direct traffic from social sites through content, then click here to learn more about Jack’s amazing software:

Content Curation Made Easy

You can actually download and test it for free!

Alan

As you know, I am active in many different niches ranging from animal websites, music composition and gardening (hey… I have loads of interests!).

Online video marketing is a relatively new area for me and I’ve tentatively started creating my own videos. Some are hosted on my YouTube channel and some are on my own Amazon S3 server.

I’m not going to pretend that they are fantastic works of art but they do give me a chance to create music soundtracks (and link back to my music website) AND link back to my niche site – a double whammy! I get to promote two websites with one video.

This kind of online marketing appeals to me and I’m going to be looking into creating more videos in the near future.

If you’re just starting out creating your own videos, here’s some interesting reading material to get those creative juices flowing:

Essential Video Marketing Secrets | Understanding Online Marketing

[Online Video Marketing] – Video Marketing Secrets – Part One. Essentially your “perfect video” is as long as it … Mandy Swift – Your Online & Video Marketing “Personal Trainer”. Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger. …

Google Plus Vs. Facebook – Online Video Marketing … – Sharethrough

Check out Carethrough, Sharethrough’s team of do-gooders.

Reasons For Using Online Video Marketing – - A1 Answers Articles

Reasons For Using Online Video Marketing. If you are not convinced that your internet business should be using online video then the incredibly revealing statistics from YouTube should be enough to convince you that this …

Online Video Marketing Strategy (Tip #362: Death By Details!)

A SOLID Online Video Marketing Strategy (www.JamesWedmore.com is essential before you make the PLUNGE into video?! Follow the simple steps outlined in this Youtube Video to show you exactly how to overcome the fears and details of Online Video Market…

Have YOU discovered a quick way to get your online video marketing off to a flying start? If you have, please leave a comment or get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear from you!

Alan

Related online video marketing articles

• Tips on how to get your Video seen by your customers (marketing.yell.com)
• How to create an engaging video for online video marketing (marketing.yell.com)
• Free Downloads Make Cases for Online Video, Healthcare Marketing Done Right (prweb.com)

Thanks to everybody who has subscribed so far – nice to meet you all!

However, I’m also setting up a couple of newsletters in non-IM niches (my hobbies) and so it looks like I’ll have my work cut out.

The reason for this post, however, is to talk about how I’m getting subscribers for my email list. My main method, at present, is using ListCrew, a kind of co-op where visitors to your website are given the option to join related newsletters from other marketers. A pop-up also appears on their websites and their visitors are given the opportunity to join your mailing list.

Here’s a free pdf explaining how it all works (right click, save as): Automatic List Building For IMs.

It’s a simple system (once I’d got the correct list ID from my autoresponder company, ImnicaMail) and seems to work very well. I’ll report back once my testing is complete and I see how many new subscribers I get.

Alan

I’ve just added it to a gardening website that I am building into an authority site (lots of content, all white hat, etc). I placed the geo tags around some Amazon ads for 3 specific books. Now, when a visitor from the UK arrives, they’ll see Amazon.co.uk and be able to buy the book there. US and Canadian visitors see the same ad but for Amazon.com.

I set it up this afternoon and it works like a dream. Finally, no more lost sales because Amazon (or any ad network) doesn’t carry forward an affiliate sale from UK to USA and vice versa.

Find out more about this plugin: Geo Targeting Content.

Alan

Why?

With Halloween just around the corner, my 30 costume sites are starting to produce income in affiliate sales as well as Google Adsense.

As you know, I set up the majority of my sites last year following a plan laid down by Brian Johnson and his Halloween Super Affiliate training. You can’t buy the training now as it’s sold out again! However, if you get the chance, join it next year as it’ll be an investment. Remember, Americans spend over 6 billion dollars at Halloween, even during a recession!

I’ve also set up a bigger authority site covering all kinds of costumes, not just Halloween. Also, I’ve just pit the finishing touches to a Halloween information site which will be monetized with Adsense ads.

If you’re still waiting to make money online, I can’t recommend highly enough getting into the Halloween niche. Yes, there’s lots of competition but it’s because there’s lots of money changing hands!

Happy Halloween!

Alan

Halloween Super Affiliate is the brainchild of Brian Johnson and it really ‘cuts the mustard’ when it comes to helping beginners and intermediate marketers make money online.

I made some good money last year and set up around 30 websites to cash in on the Halloween spending frenzy (billions of dollars are spent on costumes and accessories).

This year, I’m expecting my sites to do even better as they now have some age on them and this helps with search engine rankings.

Things are already hotting up and I can see my Commission Junction account looking much healthier as we head towards Halloween!

There is work involved – this is not for people who want to simply push a button and hope for money to roll in. It involves setting up WordPress sites in a specific way but there are videos and training manuals to help you every step of the way.

What I will offer, is that if anybody buys the course (only $97 – I paid $497 last year!) through the link below, I’ll be around to help you (via email) if you get stuck or have any questions. Remember, I’ve set up 30 Halloween websites and they ALL made me money last year and are starting to kick in again this year (and it’s 2 months until Halloween!).

So, if this sounds like something you might be interested in, head over to the Halloween Super Affiliate website and then let me know you purchased via my link (send me an email to admin@cleanstartmarketing.com — NOTE: you’ll receive a challenge/response reply from SpamArrest: you must verify that you’re human or I won’t receive your email! Check your spam box as well for this email).

Can’t wait to meet you and help you set up your websites. Remember, once you’ve set your sites up, they’ll be there earning you money EVERY year!

Here’s the link again: Halloween Super Affiliate

Alan

Mark himself regularly makes over 100k per month from affiliate promotions, so he knows what he is talking about and has numerous examples to show you on this one-of-a-kind webinar.

http://www.affilorama.com

You’re about to learn what is probably the quickest way to get yourself making 10k a month online and more and you’ll be taught by a man who has trained thousands of people from around the world to do extremely well online, including many total newbies (this includes his own father).

This is a webinar you should not pass up lightly, I strongly recommend that you set an alarm in your phone right now for one of the event times on the page below:

http://www.affilorama.com

Enjoy!

Alan

• Open 2 browser windows
• Go to Google and perform a normal search for your keyword (no quotes)
• In the 2nd browser, type: inanchor:”KEYWORD” and hit return
• Compare the 2 windows and see whether any websites appear in BOTH searches

Now, if you find a lot of sites appearing in both browsers then you will have a tougher time trying to rank for that keyword.

Why?

Well, the sites in the inanchor window are obviously building backlinks for that keyword and if they also appear on page 1 of Google, they’re pretty successful at it too!

Tough competition!

Ignore all search numbers – they mean nothing. Concentrate on the sites on the first page ONLY. This is especially true if they have the main keyword in bold (exact words).

Also, before you start this process, check with the Adwords tool to make sure that there are actually enough people looking for that keyword to make it worth your while.

With practise, you can almost predict which spots on page 1 you can overturn and rank for.

However, you still need unique content, backlinks, and this is going to be a lot of work. However, at least you’re not shooting in the dark and trying to make sense of search numbers, etc, etc.

Try it!

Alan

In a nutshell, I’m finding related, high ranking blogs in my niche and leaving useful comments. I’ve chosen about 8 blogs that seem to be doing well in Google and I’ll be making comments on them for the next few weeks.

I’ve also added these sites to my blogroll and clicked through so that it registers on their traffic stats.

Then… I’ll be asking for a blogroll link back to my site. Hopefully, they’ll agree as the webmaster will have noticed my presence (I say, HOPEFULLY!).

Now, it’s not going to work in all cases, but I’m expecting to get a handful of high quality links back to kickstart my site rankings.

Later in the month, I’ll be looking at getting a few lower quality links (but lots of them).

I’ll keep you all updated on how I get on.

Alan

It’s starting to look really good, no monetization at all and traffic is starting to arrive.

As part of the 300 Internet Marketers Training, Brian Johnson is taking us through his recipe for getting backlinks – quality backlinks.

This sits well with me because I’m tired of being bombarded with the latest and greatest ways to get thousands of links – most of them spammy and low-quality.

I’m pleased that the site is starting to look like a quality, authority site and I really feel that it adds substance to the gardening niche in general.

Only time will tell if this site will make tons of money, but I couldn’t have made it any better AND I’m enjoying creating it!

Alan

Here’s the link to a webinar where you can find out more: Easy Redirect Script Webinar.

Ever want to promote something but NOT send traffic to the sale page of the product you’d like to promote?

Maybe it’s because it has too many pop ups, the site is just not optimized to convert or you want to bypass the squeeze page.

Whatever.

This script let’s you create cool little “stealth” redirects that can allow you to finally take total control as an affiliate.

There are tons of other great things this little script can do as well, including promo redirects, and even QR codes (I’d never heard of those!).

Get the full scoop by visiting the site.

Here’s the link: Easy Redirect Script

Every affiliate should use a tool like this and I’m going to be using it extensively in the future for all my marketing.

Alan

As part of the 300 Internet Marketers training, we’re supposed to use a free WordPress plugin to cloak links and make them nofollow (Google isn’t a big fan of internet marketers!).

However, I’m trying to be different and reduce the number of plugins that my gardening site uses.

Here are my thoughts on the matter and a great solution that I’ve just discovered and I’m implementing imediately.

There are 3 reasons you should consider never using a free URL shortener or link cloaking service.

1) A lot of ISPs block them because they often collect your data and share it with other sites. ISPs don’t like that!

2) You don’t control the service, so if they go out of business all your links quit working overnight.

3) Those URLs you shorten are impossible to remember and/or edit later.

This is why need to use an affiliate cloaking/redirect script that protects you from all these things and more.

And here is perhaps the best one on the market. Go to the site now and see all the cool features it can do, including “hot linking”, “promo redirects” and more.

I’ve just installed the script on one of my sites (a private one) and I’ll use that for all my cloaked links in the future – a kind of one-stop-shop for cloaking!

Check it out: Easy Redirect Script

Alan

Basically, I’ve got 7 pages (over 1,000 words on each) with “how to…” type articles on them, pictures and sometimes a YouTube video embedded to make the pages more ‘sticky’.

I’ve got about 20 posts added and they too have pictures and video to make them more entertaining. Some of the posts chart my progress in the garden and others are based on videos I found at YouTube.

The rest of May will be spent adding lots of posts (over 3/day) and building up the site.

No monetization options for a few months so that the site gets off to a good start.

Let’s wait and see what happens!

Alan

I’ve also been battling with the intricacies of WordPress, Flexsqueeze and Genesis Themes and the Excerpt function.

If you didn’t know, you can add some unique content to the Excerpt box when writing a post in WordPress and you can have this content show up on the homepage and the category page.  In this way, you reduce the amount of duplicate content that Search Engines see.

Basically, if you make a post, it gets it’s own post page, appears on the homepage and can appear in various category archives, etc.

This is not a good thing!

I’ve managed to get Excerpts onto my homepage (and category page) but now I can’t get a “Read More…” link to show after the excerpt.

It’s never been a problem before and this function seems to change from theme to theme.

Oh well, here’s hoping that the Studiopress Support guys come good.  It’s been a long day!

Alan

Basically, the month of May consists of adding loads of content:

• 3-8 SEO Keyword optimized pages (1,000 words approx)
• 3 posts per day (200 words) including a video

Now, I could normally manage this, but I’m also following Johnny G’s Healthy Wealthy Affiliate course as well.  In a nutshell, Johnny provides a 5 page site with unique content and now I have to blast out loads of quality articles for the site and for article directories.

What I like about Johnny G (aka John Gill) is that he guarantees a sale within 3 months or your money back ($29/month).  Worth having a go, I think, and the monthyl fee includes domain name, hosting and a great backlink service.

I’ll report back on Healthy Wealthy Affiliate as soon as I get into the promotion of the site.

That’s if I can still tap on a keyboard!

Alan

I’ve now added an SEO optimized page of 1,000 words, keyword in title, description, etc.  A YouTube video has been added to make the page more ‘sticky’ and keep visitors on the site for longer.

My first, introductory post has also been added as have a few LSI categories and links out from the site.

As my website is in the gardening niche, I’m busy snapping photos to use on the site – the weather’s been great here in the UK for weeks, so this helps to get some good piccies!

Just to make life even more difficult, I’ve started a second training course which involves creating another authority site in the health niche.

In a nutshell, I’m going to be writing many articles each day for the websites and article directories and web 2.0 platforms.

In fact, this is a turning point for me – I’m going to forget internet marketing for a while and concentrate on being a better publisher.  This suits me as I love reseraching and writing, although it does get tiring day after day.  I guess when the money from these sites rolls in, I’ll spend some of it on outsourcing and building the sites out even more.

Listened to a great webinar from Brian Johnson last night and it’s got me all pumped up!

Alan

Studiopress’s Genesis Framework has some great SEO functions built into the theme.  However, Brian Johnson is teaching us how to tweak our sites using the All in One SEO plugin (which I am familiar with).  At the moment, I’m struggling to find all the plugin settings that I need to implement in the Genesis framework.

Hmm…

I’ve decided to use the plugin (which disables all the Genesis SEO options so there’s no conflict).  This seems like a backwards step to me, but easier!

Any thoughts?

Alan

Well, not a lot to report, other than the fact that I’ve posted some bookmarking stuff to IMAutomator, added pages to my costume site (which is still plummeting because of Google’s algorithm changes!!) and sorted out the posts (wooden ones!) for my veggie garden (the subject of my authority site – I’ll divulge the URL once it goes live!).

Took a few photos to document the whole process.

Just shared 2 bottles of wine and it’s probably time for bed.  I have a satisfied feeling and the weather is great for gardening, so hopefully I’ll get chance to continue tomorrow.

Alan

Well… it should be!

Ive just had one of those days when everything went wrong.  I tried to move my 300 Internet Marketers site to another host.  However, I changed nameservers too early and couldn’t clone my site as it wouldn’t propogate.  Six hours later (after changing nameservers BACK to my original host) I managed to clone the blog and upload to my new server all the necessary files.

It gets worse!

Somehow, I managed to screw up the cPanel login on my new site and had to contact support.  Sorted out an hour later.

Finally, after about 8 hours the job was done and everything is fine.

Trouble is, I’ve done absolutely nothing to advance my internet marketing ambitions.

C’est la vie

Alan

I’ve gone with Genesis as it seems to offer some great customization options and I also like the ‘child themes’ that can be easily bolted on.

The only trouble is that I now need to get up to speed on using this new theme and learn how to customize it as per Brian Johnson’s teachings!

My Halloween websites that I set up last year are still bringing in a few sales, although my main costume authority site has taken a bit of a hit with Google’s recent algorithm changes and I’m hoping that it will bounce back.  This is frustrating because I have unique and quality content on the site (I hired an ex-literary agent to contribute!) and all I see are huge commercial sites, like Amazon, above me in the search engines.

What do you think?  Has Google stopped indexing the web and is now merely promoting its highest paying commercial sites?

Hmm…

Alan