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Search Marketing
1. A Major Change in the Industry -- and an Awesome Opportunity for You! We've got some big news for you this month! First of all, have you heard the crazy news about the Microsoft/Yahoo deal? It's been a long time coming but we still can't believe it's actually happened: Microsoft and Yahoo have inked a deal in which Microsoft will now be powering Yahoo's free AND paid search services! ... So if you aren't optimized for Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, and don't know your way around Microsoft Ad Center, now's the time to learn! We'll tell you everything you need to know below. Also, we'll give you the scoop on Google's latest "Caffeine" update and share a great new traffic strategy for you to try out, as well as a simple tip that will help you make sure the stats you're getting from Google Analytics are as accurate as possible. Finally, here's something else important that you absolutely need to know:
This October, we are folding the Search Marketing Lab into our exclusive, members-only Internet Entrepreneur Club. You see, we've been running two separate forums (Search Marketing Lab and the Internet Entrepreneur Club) for two years. But it just doesn't make sense to continue offering two separate entities when Search Marketing Lab members like you NEED more advice about your business than simply how to get more traffic, and our Internet Entrepreneur Club members need to know the latest in search as well as everything else! So what does this mean for you? ... As a new member of the Internet Entrepreneur Club, you will continue to get ALL the search marketing information you have come to expect PLUS a huge selection of other benefits:
We'll answer all your search marketing questions PLUS help you with any challenges you might be experiencing in finding a product to sell... writing salescopy that converts... email marketing... as well as joint venture ideas and new opportunities that will grow your business bigger than ever! And the great news for you is, you will get FULL ACCESS to the Internet Entrepreneur Club (a $97 per month value) for the same low monthly fee you've been paying for Search Marketing Lab! ... You'll receive your last issue of Search Marketing Lab Report in September and will learn more about your new Internet Entrepreneur Club membership and how to access it then. In the meantime, here's a preview of the cutting-edge strategies and information you'll receive as a member of this exclusive Club.Until then, if you have any questions or comments about this transition, please don't hesitate to let us know by emailing us at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . We'd love to hear your input -- and we're really excited about welcoming you to the Internet Entrepreneur Club! To your online success, The Internet Marketing Center Team 2. How Other People's Mistakes Can Unleash a Flood of New Traffic to Your Site How would you like to scoop up some really great keyword-rich domains that are already getting decent traffic -- and use them to "piggyback" your way to the top of the search engine results and open up powerful new channels of traffic to your site? That's exactly what we're going to teach you how to do today... by taking advantage of other people's mistakes. Here's what we mean: Every day, hundreds of previously owned domain names go back on the market -- because their owners have neglected to renew them. Here's where another person's loss can be YOUR gain. If you know how to identify and snap up these expiring domains as soon as they come available, they can become a valuable source of new visitors to your website! All you need to do is follow these four simple steps... 1. Compile a list of your top keywords 
Make sure you look for keywords that are directly relevant to your business as well as phrases that are tangentially related (ones that hold a strong appeal to your market but aren't directly related to what you sell). Also keep an eye out for long-tail keywords. These are phrases that include five or more words in them, which means they tend to be more focused and specific than shorter, more general phrases. (For example, the long-tail keyword, "chemical-free lawn care tips" is more specific than "lawn care" and addresses the needs of a more easily identifiable market.) Long-tail keywords are often overlooked by your competitors which means it may be easier to find domain names that include these phrases. And that's good news for you, because recent studies show that long-tail keyword searches are on the rise.2. Search for expired and pending domains based on those keywords Once you have your list of keywords ready, it's time to start searching for recently expired or "pending" domain names.  Our favorite tool for this is DeletedDomains.com.
This service allows you to find recently deleted domains as well as domains that are on the verge of expiring. Plus, it will show you the amount of traffic these deleted or soon-to-expire sites are getting, so you can identify domains that could be a great new source of traffic to your site! You can even sign up for daily alerts that give you advance notice when your preferred domains go back on the market, so you can scoop them up before anyone else! A one-week subscription of DeletedDomains.com goes for US$9.99, or you can register for a full month for $14.99. A full year's subscription costs $99.99. At only $5 more than a week-long subscription, the one-month option will give you more time to discover how useful the service can be. 3. Snap up valuable expired domains as they become availableKeep on the lookout for keyword-rich domain names with decent traffic numbers. When one goes back on the market, here's your chance to score a major traffic generation tool for your main site! Register the domain as soon as it becomes available using a reputable domain registry and hosting company such as Hostica or 1and1.com. Once that site is yours, don't just let it sit around doing nothing! Search engines look at the "age" of a website when they figure out where to place it in their results -- and as soon as your new domain expired, its age rolled back to zero. This could have a negative impact on its ranking, unless you take action and put some fresh and relevant content up on that site right away. This new content will also appeal to your human visitors and help keep your traffic numbers up. ... Which is good because you're going to want to use your new domain to send those visitors to your main site! Which leads us to our next step... 4. Set up a blog to send your main site some "link love" -- and visitors!  The reason you just bought your new keyword-rich deleted domain was so you could use it to propel your main site to the top of the search engine listings. So how do you do that?
Simple -- you start a blog. We've said it before... starting a blog is the fastest and easiest way to load a site full of useful content that has been optimized for your main keywords. When you include a link to your main site in each blog post you write, you are building a network of valuable backlinks that will boost your site's relevance in the eyes of the search engines. And they'll reward you for that by moving your site up to the top of their listings. Not only that -- because your domain name was already attracting human visitors, your new blog will encourage those visitors to check out your new site as well, resulting in even higher traffic numbers for you! Here's the easiest way to create your blog:
If you're worried about the amount of time a blog would take to maintain or don't have any idea about what sort of information you could publish on your blog, don't be. Creating a keyword-rich blog is easy and only takes a few hours a week to maintain. Your blog posts don't have to be long -- frequency is more important than word count. Just 200 - 300 words per post is more than enough. In fact, your blog posts don't even have to include much writing at all -- you could include relevant pictures instead, with a bit of explanatory text. (Just make sure you optimize every image with a relevant keyword.) For example, you've just snapped up the ChemicalFreeLawnCare.com domain to complement your main site, OrganicGardeningTips.com. Now you want to use that domain to send backlinks and visitors to your main site. So you set up a blog. Then, every day you post a picture of a lawn with a short keyword-rich description explaining how that lawn or garden could benefit from the organic gardening tips you include in your eBook, like so: Organic lawn care tip for dealing with dead grass  To keep your grass green, set your mower as high as it will go and leave your clippings on your lawn to seal in moisture. Like this tip? You can get more organic gardening tips here!"(The linked text includes the keyword "organic gardening tips" and leads to your main site.) That blog post took only 10 minutes to put together -- and resulted in a new keyword-rich backlink pointing to the main sales site. Not bad for a few minutes' work! A few similar keyword-loaded blog posts a week -- each including a link to your main site -- will give the search engines exactly what they're looking for. That will ensure your new domain maintains its ranking with the search engines. Plus, you'll be offering your human visitors a lot of useful information, as well as encouraging them to visit your main site. You win on all counts! So once again, our winning formula for boosting your search engine ranking and driving more visitors to your site is: keywords + expired domain + blog = relevant backlinks + traffic However, putting up a blog isn't the only thing you can do with a recently purchased expired domain. Here are some other ideas you might want to explore:
So that's how you can use expired domains to boost your search engine rankings, increase your traffic numbers, AND grow your business. 3. Highlights from Search Marketing Lab "And then there were two" -- Microsoft and Yahoo join forces to tackle the Google juggernaut
After all the rumors and last-minute botched deals over the years, it's finally happened: Microsoft and Yahoo have reached an agreement to merge their search services with the hope of finally being able to compete with the grand search overlord, Google. Under the new 10-year, $275 million agreement, Microsoft's new Bing search engine will power Yahoo Search, while Yahoo Search Marketing (aka Panama) will be powered by Microsoft AdCenter. So what does this mean for small business owners? Well, keep an eye on your Yahoo rankings because they are going to change once the Yahoo search engine gets replaced by Bing. As for your Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns, the good news is that your ads will now be seen across a greater number of websites. If you've been running campaigns through Microsoft Ad Center and Yahoo Search Marketing, once the change takes effect you will only have one campaign to manage, which will free up your time to work on other search marketing strategies. If you have never bothered with Microsoft's search offerings, the best way to get ready for the changes to come is to be proactive and learn what you need to do to optimize your site according for Bing and become familiar with the rules and regulations of Microsoft AdCenter. Bear in mind that this is a HUGE change and will take months to fully come into effect. But the sooner you align yourself with Microsoft's search policies, the better positioned you will be to ride the wave of change to the top of Bing's -- and Yahoo's -- search results. Google's "Caffeine" update only a minor jolt
If you've been worried about what this update might mean for your place in the search results, you can relax. According to Google itself, this update has focused more on tweaking the Google's architecture and less on the actual algorithm that determines which sites are worthy to appear in the coveted first page of results. The main change noticed so far by people who've been test-driving the new version is that Caffeine delivers results at least twice as fast as before -- and that's good news for everyone, because happy searchers mean more exposure for everyone who's listed with Google. Another significant change to note is that Wikipedia entries seem to have been given slightly lower priority. Again, good news for online business owners who are tired of their sites always appearing beneath listings from the online encyclopedia giant. However, the BIGGEST change is that for the first time ever Google have actually gone public with their upcoming update and are letting people test-drive the new Caffeine version before it goes live. That level of openness on Google's part is unprecedented. It's especially cool because it means webmasters like you can get a sneak preview of the search engine and see how your site will be ranked when the changes roll out in full. These two tools also let you see the difference. CompareCaffeine.com shows a Google query and compares the results side by side. The Sembience.com tool lets you choose your site and a keyword. It then reports the difference in rank. Our experts have been testing the new beta "Caffeine" version and have noticed that the results it produces for certain keywords are somewhat different from the ones we're getting from "old Google" right now. Check it out: Old Google top results for the keyword, "dog house"... 
Google Caffeine results for the keyword, "dog house"... 
... As you can see, the new results don't feature any of the Google Images results and the top five listings are different. Some of the top five in the "old Google" don't even appear in the "Google Caffeine" results. So don't expect your ranking will go unchanged! Obviously some webmasters will see their sites rise when the new Google gets rolled out in full, while others will see their sites take a dip. The changes shouldn't be cataclysmic, however. The best way to ensure you don't get bumped downward is to keep working on your search marketing strategies and make sure you're not bending or outright breaking any of Google's rules. So see where your site will stand in the new Google -- then let us know what you think! 4. Strategies from a Real-Life SEO Success Story: Eco-Me.com
Soon she was producing healthy alternatives concocted from vinegar and baking soda. And after a while, friends suggested that she put up a website to sell her unique, effective recipes. That's how Eco-Me.com was born. In the three years since, Eco-Me.com has definitely outgrown Robin's pantry -- in fact, her high-quality, environmentally friendly products are practically flying off the cyber shelves! Robin says she's focused on using SEO strategies to help her grow her success. But before she got to where she was with SEO, first she had to learn a very important lesson! We'll tell you what that lesson was in a moment... but first, let's find out a little more about Robin's business. Here's how she describes her products:
We asked Robin who her target market was and she said that's actually a difficult question to answer:
In terms of traffic, Robin says she sees anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand visitors a day. And the funny thing is, her low traffic days are usually the ones that see the most sales!
Robin also places a lot of importance on SEO. But before she started digging deep with her SEO efforts, she had to learn an important lesson: ... And what did she learn? We asked Robin to explain why she thought it was so important to be specific with her keywords:
Finally, we asked Robin if she had anything to share with people who might be a bit "spooked" by SEO, and here's what she told us:
... So there you have it: proof from the successful business owner's mouth that SEO isn't rocket science and is ALWAYS more effective if you do as much of it yourself as you can. After all, just as Robin said -- YOU know your business better than anybody, and ultimately, only you will be able to figure out the keywords and strategies that need to be used to achieve the best results. So even if you outsource some of your SEO work, make sure you stay in the driver's seat so you can steer all your SEO strategies in the best possible direction for your business. As always, thanks for reading! Don't forget that next month's issue of Search Marketing Lab Report will be the LAST you will ever receive. ... After that, as a member of our exclusive Internet Entrepreneur Club you will receive SO MUCH MORE cutting-edge information and proven strategies that will help you build your business. If you'd like to get a preview of the wealth of information and resources you'll get as part of your new Internet Entrepreneur Club membership, check out the latest issue of our Online Profits Dossier. ... That's just a small sample of the real-world advice you'll be getting in the months to come! As always, please let us know what you think. You can contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . The Internet Marketing Center Team |
Un-freakin'-believable!
Google tried to steal some of Microsoft's and Yahoo's thunder by releasing news about their most recent update, dubbed "Caffeine."
Robin Levine had no plans of becoming an "eco-preneur" when she started cleaning her home with simple ingredients pulled from her kitchen pantry. Then an illness in the family prompted her to look for an alternative to harsh and potentially toxic chemicals found in commercial cleansers.