Its been a while since I posted anything here so I thought it high time I got my finger out, so here is a piece I have plagiarised.

No seriously the following article by coaching expert Annabel Sutton landed in my inbox this morning and I immediately was struck by how much of it applied to affiliate marketing so much so that I contacted Annabel and asked permission to reproduce it in full here, enjoy.

The Art of Getting it Wrong by Annabel Sutton

Mistakes are the portals of discovery. (James Joyce)

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. (Albert Einstein)

When was the last time you watched a small child learning to walk?  They’ll walk a couple of steps, fall over, pick themselves up and try again.  Heaven knows how many times they fall over before they master the art of walking.  They might cry the first time they fall down — they might be a bit surprised and perplexed — they might have a bit of a chuckle — but do they give up?  No.  There isn’t the tiniest question of giving up and they get back on their feet and try again.

Just imagine, if a child stopped and thought too much about walking, he or she would probably never start.  They could spend days, weeks, months thinking about it and preparing for it, take umpteen courses, read books on how to walk but never actually do it.  Perfectionists can learn a lot from toddlers.  Not only do they put off doing things, but sometimes they’re so paralysed by the fear of not getting it right that they shelve an idea completely.  We procrastinators are exactly the same: we over-think things and over-prepare, worried that we’ll never know enough or be good enough.

Entrepreneurs and toddlers have a lot in common.  They’re both risk takers and refuse to give up.  Successful entrepreneurs often don’t become successful overnight.  In fact, they often suffer several disastrous forays into business (and lose horrible amounts of money) before they make it big.

So what can we learn from this?  Maybe to overcome the curse of perfectionism – and procrastination – we have to return to child-like thinking.  Don’t prepare. Don’t think or analyse.  Just do it.  Be prepared to fall over, pick yourself up, fall over again.  Enjoy the process, rather than worrying about the outcome.  You may not get it right the first time, or even the second – but with persistence you’ll make it in the end.

Several years ago I was struggling with trying to write the text for my first website.  I kept putting the job off because of the fear of not ‘getting it right’.  I was on the verge of giving up completely when I read a newsletter by US marketing guru, Robert Middleton, on exactly this topic.  He recalled how, many years before, he had been writing the text for his first website.  It wasn’t perfect — in fact, the look and feel of the site had changed several times since that first effort.  He had, effectively, fallen over many times before eventually fashioning the product he wanted.  The point was that he had made a start and done something.

This was a revolution in thinking for me and has helped me a lot over the years.  Accepting the idea that what you do actually doesn’t have to be perfect first time.  It can be changed. It probably WILL be changed!  Sometimes you just have to recognise that what you undertake probably won’t be perfect.  But you can always strive for 80%.  We’ll do the very best we can, at the time, and with the resources available to us.  The important thing is to get started.

Question:  Have you made enough mistakes recently?

 

© Annabel Sutton, Coaching Tips – 2010

Annabel Sutton, BA (Hons), PCC
ICF Professional Certified Coach
Author of 52 Ways to Change Your Life
Coach University Graduate
Member International Coach Federation
Tel:     44 (0)1747 871196
Email: annabel@annabelsutton.com
Web: www.annabelsutton.com

To receive Annabel’s Coaching Tips: email annabel@annabelsutton.com and type ‘subscribe tips’ in the subject line.

When thinking of branching out into a new niche one first questions that pops up is who sells relevent products? the task of finding out recently got easier thanks to a new feature that Easy Content Units (ecu) have added to their already fantastic product.

To do your research simply log into your ECU account and click on the Product Search link in the menu, type in a key word, click search and bobs your uncle…

…and it doesn’t stop there you can filter your results by Merchant, Brand and Network.

And theres more, now you can either select and store the products you want, this allows you to make a content unit later, or if you click on the link icon a box pops up with a deep link url, a HTML link, an image link and the Html for an image with product link embedded, all nicely configured with your affiliate tracking code.

This is just scratching the surface of what you can do with the product search from Easy Content Units, give it a whirl.

Online marketing is evolving at an astronomical pace and one of the major influences in this change is Twitter, if you have any type of retail business selling absolutely anything and you don’t use Twitter to get the message out there you are seriously missing a significant audience.  One of my websites is currently getting 7% of its traffic via twitter thats over 200 targeted visitors a day extra.

The most recent innovation by Twitter is Twitter Lists, and believe me Twitter Lists are awesome. Once people have added your twitter to a list your  tweets may potentially appear all over the internet. They will turn up on websites and blogs and there is a great likelihood that they will send you a lot of targeted traffic.

Oh and a little tip (for anyone who could be arsed to read this far down) Twitter Lists make an outstanding addition to your research armoury whether you are a merchant or an affiliate make lists of tweeters in niches you are interested in and bingo instant ideas.

For example I’ve just started a list of UK fashion merchants and fashion bloggers http://twitter.com/#/list/KeithBond/uk-fashion and I expect it to prove to be a useful resource of ideas and another way of getting through bloggers block.

Continuing on from my post of September 14th I move on to the second search engine secret from that document of 1999, the year when Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was the highest grossing film.

Secret #2 The little known secret to getting better positioning than your competition even they have the same identical keyword.

List your important keywords more than once on your site!!

Some of the major search engines will rank your website based on the relevancy of the key words used in the search engine. For example if your site sells Ray Ban sunglasses and the words “Ray Ban” are keywords listed on your page, your site will come up when a user searches on “Ray Ban”. And the same for a competitor site with the same sequence of keywords. However if you list Ray Ban not once but several times throughout the page, your site will usually get better positioning than the site who has it listed less times than you.

Many savvy web professionals list their relevant keywords as many times as they possibly can throughout their site because of this. You can also achieve this by listing your keywords several times at the bottom of your webpage, away from your main page, hidden and out of site. Maybe you have seen this for yourself on other websites. It may take a little longer for your page to load, but the extra attention your site receives because of the higher search engine positioning should outweigh the couple of seconds of extra downloading this causes.

So how can we use Search Engine Secret #2 in 2009?

First of all totally disregard the paragraph in italics, this today is considered keyword stuffing, when the article was written Alta Vista was the main search engine and that sort of thing worked pretty well, today if you are discovered using the technique you are probably looking at a Google ban.

As for the first part, still very wise advise in my opinion, but make sure you include relevant content too, include the keywords in key phrases in your title tags and heading tags, and mention them a couple of times in the body text too, keep the surrounding text relevant and contextual and as unique as you can possibly make it.

Hopefully that will help you move up a few places in the serps, but the Google algorithm is an enigma and there is more to getting good ranking than a few well positioned key words (and I’m certainly no SEO guru), but this is a better tactic than simply listing Ray Ban a few dozen times in your footer.

Tidying the garage recently I came across a document I had printed off on 6th June 1999 entitled:

“11 Power Packed Secrets For Using Search Engines To Build A Consistent, Steady Flow Of Traffic To Your Site”

Naturally intrigued I took a look through to see if any of it was still relevant, and was mildly surprised that amongst the dubious tactics which are likely to get you penalties these days were a few gems which can be adopted, adapted and utilised, over the next few weeks (months) I will revisit some of these gems of 10 years ago … * note I have edited out some of the waffle usually by putting …

Secret #1 What to “name” your site to draw traffic like a magnet.

The name of your site has a dramatic effect on the number of visitors your site receives. Let’s do a brief exercise to see how this works. Let’s say you are surfing and would like to find out more about accounting tax laws, and ways to save money on your taxes …

… take a look at the following website “titles” and determine which site you would click on first.

1. Waterman, Jewel, Rathburn Accountants Home Page Statewide Financial Management
2. Frank’s Accounting Practice. Accounting Office Reception.
3. Jealously Guarded Accounting Secrets The IRS Prays You Never Find Out!

Which one did you choose? Did you want to know more about the Waterman, Jewel, Rathburn Accountants Home Page or Frank’s Accounting Practice? I suspect like most people you probably wanted to know what the Jealously Guarded Accounting Secrets were. Of Course!!

The article continued in the same vein for a couple of pages giving several more examples.

So how can we use Search Engine Secret #1 in 2009?

At this point its worth mentioning that when the article mentioned to the “name of your site” it was referring to the <title></title> and not the url, this was originally published on www.hotyellow98.com/secrets.html (surprisingly the domain still exists although the content is long gone).

Basically the piece is telling us to be keyword rich in our page titles, today we can take that a step further and grab a keyword rich domain to suit, make sure the homepage has a good title and do the same with internal pages and posts.

Say you have a website about men’s flip flops you don’t want to choose an obscure name like Andy’s  Flip Flop Emporium andysflipflopemporium.com pick a name more fitting to what you are selling like Mens Flip Flops (obvious eh) incidentally mensflipflops.org.uk is available and there is nothing of worth on the .co.uk or .com “Mens Flip Flops” gets 9,900 exact searches according to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Give your site a good title such as:

“Mens Flip Flops – Where To Buy Mens Flip Flops online”

and finally make sure your internal pages and articles have good titles too:

“Men’s Havaianas Flip Flops World’s Best Rubber Sandals”

Thats it for now hopefully I can get around to revisiting another ten year old search engine secret before too long.

If you want read more about buying domain names that are relevant to your niche take a look at the marathon thread on affiliates4u.com help and advice for newbies and people who need a kick up the backside in 2009 where Smingle (Frank Paul) gives a lots of sage advice, I suspect all his domain suggestions will be long gone but its not difficult to research your own.

PS: if you use mensflipflops.org.uk please link to my main Fashion Website.