Monday, March 17, 2014

The Best Backlinking Tips You Didn't Know About!

SEO strategy like outbound links, keywords and editing your title page, is very well known tactics to be recognized by Google’s search engine, but it is important to understand that being recognized will only get you that far in your quest of a high search engine ranking. What really matters to Google is how authoritative your website and content is. One of the most effective ways to show Google that your site is an authoritative source of reliable information is by having a lot of backlinks from other authoritative websites. Connecting to outer authoritative and reliable websites shows Google that your content is extraordinary and noteworthy. The reason for this is that authoritative content is exactly what Google wants to show up as high as possible on their search engine to make Google searches be as helpful and valuable as possible to its users.

Simply put, the more backlinks you have from other authoritative sources, the better Google will recognize that you have good content, and the higher your website will rank. Follow these five tips and your backlink profile will show that your website is the authority on the subjects you promote!

Content
To get enough backlinks to rank high in the search engine rankings, you need a link-building tactic. Some might say that simply having great content is enough, and we are agree 100% that the highest priority for any website is good content. However it is still very important website needs to get noticed, and for that there are some tricks which will make it more likely for people linking to your content:

 - Using relevant keywords which people are likely to search for
 - Being controversial in the title to catch the eyes of readers
 - Use phrases which are beneficial for the reader (“earn more money” or “reduce expenses”)

Asking for it
While using the above content tips help to have more linkable content, there are more direct tactics to ensure that you will get quality backlinks. The most direct one is the most obvious one; asking for it. This could be from friends, family, customers, partners, vendors or anyone else you have a relationship with. In most cases they will gladly help out, but be aware that they might want you to backlink to their website too.

Guest blogging
A different, but maybe more safe, way to build backlinks is by guest blogging. Guest bloggers usually get between 1-3 links to their own website. Assuming that you target relevant, authoritative blogs for your guest blogging, your backlinks from these posts will give your site a lot of credit.
Alternatively, you can write a blog on your own website reviewing another blog and link back to that blog. As a result of your review you can hope that they posts a reply and include a link back to your review-post of their blog.

Interview
Another way to get an authoritative blog or website to link back to your website, is by running an interview with someone from the website and post the interview on your own website. When the interview is up on your website, you can then send the link to the person you interviewed, thanking them. It is likely that the website will put the interview up on their own website to promote themselves, and by doing that you have earned yourself a backlink.


Contests
The last tip for having lots of backlinks is by having contests. Everyone loves contests on condition that there are good prizes on stake. You need to know who your audience is, and offer prizes in accordance to that. Once you have the right prizes, you need to spread the word of the contest as much as possible to optimize the amount of backlinks you will get from the contest. Having a contest on a regular basis will encourage a lot of continual link building, while on the other hand having a contest once a year enables you to hype it resulting in a lot of backlinking during a shorter period of time.

The issue when dealing with backlinks is that the definition of what is legal and illegal backlinking, according to Google, constantly changes. Something which is not punishable today could be punishable tomorrow which is why it is important always to be aware of Google updates and in touch with relevant forums. A good rule of thumb is everything in moderation. Too many guest posts or too many interviews can potentially hurt your SEO. The only thing you cannot have too much of is good content... there is no such thing as too much good content! So make use the above tips and write a alot of good content, and before you know it Google will rank you as the #1 authority on your subject!

Friday, March 7, 2014

Quality Score - Be Relevant

In internet marketing, it is vitally important to be relevant for the users. If you are not relevant, you will not have anyone visiting your website, and those who do end up visiting your website will not be very interested in the programs you are promoting. Quality Score, the system Google uses to measure the relevance of your website, will be low. To understand what that means, first we need to understand what a quality score actually is, and how it is calculated.

First of all, a quality score is given to every keyword individually, so while a score can be the highest (10) for some keywords, it can be the lowest (1) for other keywords. According to Google, there is a long list of factors which decides the quality score of each keyword. In short, the final score is determined by how relevant Google sees your keyword to your ads and to what a customer searches for, but additionally Google also takes general details about your website by looking at the quality of your landing page, how well your ads have been doing on a site, and how successful your accounts at Google have been in the regions you are targeting.

One factor which really makes a difference to whether your quality score is high or low is your click-through rate (CTR). As a lot of testing has shown, the higher CTR, the higher your quality score.

There are great benefits of having high quality scores:

  • It’s easier for your ad to show on the first page of search results 
  • It makes it easier for your ad to show towards the top of the page 
  • Your ad will show up higher on the page 
  • You pay less per click (lower CPC) 

It is all about being relevant to the group of people you are targeting, and if you keep having relevant keywords and landing page, and increase your CTR, you will be rewarded with a high quality score. It takes lots of hard work to improve your quality scores, but when you see what that improvement will do to your ad campaign, it will be more than worth it.



Thursday, January 30, 2014

Little Known New AdWords Feature that you Can't Afford to Miss!

When dealing with Google AdWords bidding in the past, the choice would be between three different bid strategies; CPC (cost-per-click) bidding, CPM/CPI (cost-per-impression) bidding or CPA (cost-per-acquisition) bidding. The strategy suitable for a campaign would depend on what type of goal you had with your website. For people wanting to a lot generate traffic, CPC bidding would be the best choice, to increase brand awareness, CPM bidding would be fitting, while websites with the main focus on conversions would be likely to choose CPA bidding.

VIPAffiliates Binary Options Affiliate Program : Little Known New Adwords Feature you Can't Afford to Miss!Recently Google announced a whole new way of bidding in AdWords called Target ROAS (return on Ad Spend) as a part of the ongoing flexible bidding strategies initiative to improve real-time bidding in AdWords.

Before we explain this new bidding strategy in deeper terms, let’s quickly remind ourselves what ROAS is in the first place. In simple terms, it is the total revenue generated for a specific marketing channel divided by the total spend on that vertical. Basically the percentage total of your profit vs advertising cost

As a formula it looks like this: Ad revenue/Ad Spend * 100. As an example, if you spend $500 on advertising and your revenue is $1000, your ROAS is 200%.

Fairly simple, but how does this apply to AdWords bidding? Google's new automatic bidding algorithm looks at the reported conversion values you report to them through Conversion Tracking, and by looking at those values, AdWords predicts future conversion and associated return or profit. In accordance to these values and conversion you will be able to set your personal ROAS % goal of how much revenue you want to make for each ad-dollar spent. From there your job in technically done. In accordance to this goal, AdWords' automatic bidding will set a maximum CPC bid to maximize your total conversion value, at the same time as trying to produce an average ROAS equal to your set goal.

VIP Affiliates Blog : Little Known New Adwords Feature you Can't Afford to Miss!The reason why I say your job is 'technically' done is that even though this is an automatic bidding service, you do not want to just leave it assuming it will take care of itself. As with all automatic bidding strategies, you need to check-in now and then to make sure that you are achieving the results you strive for. Since it is automated, there are factors like seasonal trends, problems with tracking etc. that will not be taken into considerations, which you will need to adjust manually. The feedback from this new bidding strategy has been very positive, and it is something which should be considered or at least be studied more in order to decide if it can be profitable for your campaign.

At VIP Affiliates we encourage everyone to be cautious with automatic bidding. If you do not have a great deal of experience with AdWords or bidding, or don't have a deep insight in how it works, it would be better to take advice from experts and run your bidding manually. We are happy to share with you our experience, and give you the right tools to succeed with your biddings, so contact us today!

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Bitcoin or Bust! Trading Bitcoin as Binary Options.

Lately the trading market has seen a huge interest, or hype if you like, on a crypto-currency called Bitcoin. What is so different and interesting about Bitcoin is that it is a virtual currency which is decentralized, meaning that it is not backed by any government or regulated by any central authority. The way the value of Bitcoin is determined is by the acceptance of the users who uses it. Back when it was starting to become popular in 2009, the value of one Bitcoin was $230, while now, 4-5 years later, the value lies around $1000 for a single Bitcoin.


The big issue is, what if you don’t HAVE $1000 to trade Bitcoin? Since there is no sign of Bitcoin becoming less prominent, the value of a bitcoin is likely to keep rising, and so it will not help to sit and wait until you can afford it.

Many Binary Options brokers have provided a solution to this problem by offering Bitcoin amongst its currencies. As you don’t actually ‘buy’ or ‘sell’ in Binary Options, but only speculate the value of whatever you are trading, it does not require $1000 to trade Bitcoin. All it requires is the minimum deposit of the broker you choose to trade with, and then you can spend whatever amount you feel like trading Bitcoin. 

Amongst of the bigger brokers who offer Bitcoin trading are CapitalOption, GOptions, AnyOption and TradeRush (all of whom VIP Affiliates have great offers at) and will show up in the “Currencies” list of assets between 6:00 and 20:00 GMT time. So if Bitcoin is something which interest you, we recommend trying it out at one of these brokers. Even if you do have $1000 lying around, trading Bitcoin with binary options is a good way of getting a feel on the currency before spending them.

Friday, January 10, 2014

Stand Out with Webinars

Have you ever thought of how many websites offer (almost) exactly the same features as your own website? By now the majority of blogs, content, affiliate websites or product-selling websites are just duplicates of many other similar websites. With the amount of competition in every sector of the internet marketing your website has to offer something extraordinary to stand out from the rest! But how can you find something which will make your conversion rate reach new heights that every internet marketer dreams of?

A really good way to stand out from the rest and convert your visitors to converting customers is by doing webinars. This concept has been around for some 15 years now, but it is still a pretty rare sight on the internet today. The concept is both simple and, if executed correctly, very effective.

The newest type of webinars is Google's very own Google Helpout, where people from the Google+ community can offer their expertise as a hangout to other members of Google+. Since it has only been around for a few month, nobody actually know the effect using Google Helpout has on the SEO of a website, but experts seem to agree that it will infact have a positive effect on a website's search engine ranking. Even if it doesn't, the service is a great way to make people aware of your product or service, as the Google+ community is massive and constantly continues to grow.

For the more standard webinar, there are a lot of providers to choose from. A popular and recommended webinar is GoToWebinar. They have an easy setup and a lot of helpful features including the option of recording the webinar which I will get back to.

If we look at the method of creating a webinar, the first thing to consider is what the topic of the webinar should be. The ideal topic of the webinar would be something that you or anyone else working on the website or in the company has an in depth knowledge about. Obviously, anything can become a topic of expertise when putting your mind to it, but the more convincing you are when speaking about something, the more authoritative you will seem to the attendees, and correspondingly, the more trustworthy your website will be perceived.

Before actually presenting the webinar, it is important to promote the event a good period time before, so your visitors will hopefully be exposed to the advertisement several times. Give them as many details as possible about the webinar. What, when, where, for how long, and maybe even give them a sneak peak so they will know what it is all about.

During the actual presentation of the webinar, it is of course recommended to mention your product or service to the attendees. However, it is important to not become too much of a salesman. Make the content of the webinar the main focus, and try to the extent possible to connect the topic of the webinar to whatever you are selling. This might seem obvious, but the more related your product or service is to the topic of the webinar, the more likely the attendees will remember it and come back to buy it.

A good way to end the webinar is by doing a Q&A session, so always make sure there is time for questions to be asked and answered. This will make the participants feel involved, and make sure that they leave with a positive feeling. When the webinar is over it is time to take advantage of this positive feeling amongst the attendees by following up with them by phone or email. Send them special offers and discounts, and in general make them feel like they are important to you. The crucial part of the follow up is doing it as quickly as possible after the webinar to take maximum advantage of the good feeling you have left in the attendees.

If successful, make sure to put the recording of the webinar on your website or on youtube to give new visitors the feeling that you connect with them. Next time you host a webinar, make the video a part of the promotion to get even more attendees resulting in even higher conversion rates.

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Don't Let Your Visitors Bounce - Three Tips to Keep your Bounce Rate Low

As we had explained in a previous blog (click here to read it) about which web data metric is better, page views or unique views, we pointed out that while some websites prefer to have a lot of visitors, other websites care more about having returning visitors who enjoy the content of the website, even if in total there are fewer visitors. Besides looking at page views and unique views, another way to find out whether or not a website’s visitors enjoy the content of the website is by looking at the bounce rate.

For those not aware of the term, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to your websites and leaves again without viewing any other pages on your website. So if your websites bounce rate is 80%, this means that 80% of the people visiting your website only looks at one page. This can potentially tell you a lot about your site. Many affiliate sites such as landing pages for example, are not meant to have the visitor go to more than one page on the website. Other ways a high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad thing for your website is if the a lot of these visitors only viewing one page on the other hand click on advertisements or sign up for the product offered on the website.

Having said that, more often than not a high bounce rate is a bad sign for a website. The longer a visitor stays on a website and the more pages he visits, the bigger the chance there is for him to either sign up for something or purchase a product on the site. Having a high bounce rate shows that while you might be able to attract visitors to your website, you are not able to interest them enough once they are there to have them visit more than one page. The reasons for this can be many. The obvious reason would be that the content of the page is boring or unappealing. Another way to scare visitors away swiftly is to have a bad website design or too many advertisements.

More interesting than the reasons for a high bounce rate are the ways how decrease a high bounce rate.

Here is the 3 most effective ways to decrease your bounce rate:

  • First -  The best thing to do first to make sure of is that visitors immediately know what your site is about when arriving at your homepage. People do not have the patience to spend time on figuring out what the website is about and will quickly move on to a different website if it is not clear.
  • Second - Having professional design is a major factor in keeping your visitors longer on your website. The design should not only please the eyes of the visitor, but also gives them an indication on how serious or professional your website is. As a bonus, a good design can make the eyes of the viewer focus on specific areas of the site, making them explore your site more thoroughly.
  • Third - A feature most people enjoy is multimedia. Images and videos makes the site more interesting, and keeps the visitor at the page longer, decreasing the bounce rate. Just make sure not to have too much multimedia on the page, as this can increase the loading time of a page, and if the page is too slow to load the visitor will leave immediately increasing your bounce rate. Not to mention search engines punishing your ranking as a they prefer websites with low loading time.

But the ultimate secret in keeping your bounce rate low and the main way  to keep your visitors at your website is by having good content. The most used cliche in internet marketing is “content is king”, and without the king, your website is likely to have a very high bounce rate regardless of whether or not you follow the other 3 steps.