SEO is an expense that is usually one of many marketing costs that a site has, but is often one of the hardest to justify. Because it's so relatively 'new' (in offline terms), people don't know what to think. They use tracking codes, redirects and scrutinize server logs to track visits and see what these lead to. They want to see conversion on the traffic they recieve.

Let's apply this to a Darwin-type model. If a big SEO, with all of it's technology, were to spam engines, all this would do is bring irrelevant traffic. When a person types in a search term, that's what they want, and if that site isn't that, they leave. Plain and simple. This would kill the conversion rate, the client would get upset and drop the SEO firm.

Only the firms that bring the most qualified traffic survive because they please their clients most. If not, they never even make it to being a large firm. Only the large firms, for the most part, have the time and resources to use techniques like 'cloaking' because of the high maintainence and server demands. And, if at any point they start spamming, they die because they just killed their conversion rates.

So with that, do your best to NOT bid on high end terms. In my testing, I have found that popular terms always get fraudulent and junk clicks while the less popular and niche keywords get better quality clicks.
So don't do the obvious, go for more words that get less traffic.

As for people wanting to try them out, base the trial on a few things.
1. How much do you have to spend/lose?
2. How much profit do you make per sale?

So from this, you can easily put it into perspective and see just how much you will need to sell to make back your costs.

As a smart rule, start with $50 or $100 and consider it either the best $50 you spent, or the best $50 you lost. Either way you will WIN! because you'll get an answer cheap and will either now know that it is worthy and to continue, or to not waste your time.

check your links via google search

search phrase
link:www.yoursitename.com

These are your sites quality links.

Set your google preferences to dispaly 100 results

Press [Ctrl & F] keys at the same time on your keyboard
enter yahoo in the search box - click on [Find Next] a few times and see if the the yahoo directory comes up in the search.
If not and if you have more than a 100 listings linking to your page then click on google page next page and repeat the process.

if yahoo directory does not appear anywhere in the results - then the directory is most likely NOT adding PR to your site

You can check for even more quality and non-quality links with the following search:

link: www.yoursitename.com

Note the space after the colon [:]

This will bring up most of the sites linked to your site:

re-check for yahoo listings

Of course, if you have many thousands of links to your site - it becomes a mammoth task.

25,000 uniques * (0.05 / unique) = $1,250 a day in costs. Now to hit my goal I'd need to get $3989.726 in revenue. This leads to an ECPM from all advertising of $39.89726 which in the overall scheme of things seems high. But some other features I've built into the site will see revenue coming in from multiple streams besides relying on AdWords traffic to convert. That is about as far as I can go into the financials before I start giving away my business plan.

But it isn't that far from a reality. However, here is a last worse case scenario I am imagining:

ECPM sinks to $20, therefore to hit $2739.726 with an average of 3.2 page impressions per person I would have to spend $9783.07 per day and get 195,661.4 uniques. In this case some things would have to be tweaked, retweaked and retweaked again to raise the ECPM.

I heard somewhere that autotrader get like $40 CPM for banners. I have never dealt with banner advertising in a long time, but I remember on one of my real old sites a few years back the best I could get was $12 or so. In my estimated I am hoping for $0.30 to $0.50 CPM banner rates.

3) Say I come up with an idea, do my research and it seems like a good niche, how the heck could I possibly write 50 to 100 pages of content? I'm not trying to knock myself here cause I'm educated, etc., but do any of you folks find either other sites or magazines, etc. to find your content? Any advice would be great.

You're focusing on the size and content. That's the wrong focus. Focus on the site, and providing value to your visitors. Solve a problem. Make things easier.

For instance, your site may be a site dedicated baby diapers. Compare the pros and cons of cloth versus disposable diapers. Include affiliate links to buy cloth diapers and cloth diaper cleaning services. Compare the pros and cons of the various brands of diapers. Have a price comparison of the various brands. Direct people to the cheapest place to buy diapers (through affiliate links, of course). Include the ability for people to vote and/or leave comments about their favorite diapers. Maybe even incude a forum. Include AdSense ads. Include banner ads or other links to things that parents of young children would be interested in.

adsense too much - "You need a very loyal following to generate big income form just adsense ads"

Wrong. Less loyal and a daily supply of NEW visitors seems to do better.

"Most ads seem to pay only .1-.45 each so you need alot of good trafic"

No. CTR plays a big roll. 100 clicks off of 10000 visitors or 1000 clicks off of 10000 visitors. Big difference. Even at 1000 visitors per day and 100 clicks makes about 40 per day (.40 per click) $14,600 per year. hmm then do it again with a new site. $29,200 per year. How about 10 sites. $146,000 per year. How about 20 sites $292000 per year. (hell why not hire someone for about $60,000 per year and double the twenty. Or two people at $30,000 per year and train them yourself and triple the sites/content. Then do it again. The great thing about the internet is another law.

The law of automation makes work so much easier. I have sites change content throughout the year according to holiday day of the week or whatever I want really. When a holiday is approaching I have certain content pre-made and ready to go. It goes on site 1.5-2 months before the holiday so it is ready and ranked in the search engines. Also there are ways to have content generators that uses visitors to build your content. They supply reviews/input/or whatever.

There isn't any need for SEO. You don't need to worry about a search engine's new algo. You don't need any links. Little bandwidth to pay for. Very little content to write. You don't even need a site. It is a distinct and complete area of the web onto itself.

You often hear whining from affiliates who found an item with a nice sales volume around a product's release date and then claim the merchant's reports must be wrong or they're being ripped off in some fashion because their sales falls off. A combination of being on the down side of that bell curve and more competition for the same item is often the answer they refuse to acknowledge. Then there's always the possibility that a new version had made the one they're selling obsolete too.

The bottom line is to know your products, know your market, and know your competition. It takes a lot of work, trail and error, and perseverance to make good money from affiliate marketing.

There is no doubt that the ultimate is a site with a small number (possibly large number) of direct, detailed affiliate schemes will outperform any other cpm, cpc etc - but bear in mind this is a science very few people have mastered multiple times - it takes, luck, knowledge and a huge amound of trial and error...

Adsense is great because it is ideally suited to the novice/intermediate revenue bracket - its reletively easy (in comparision at least) to get working well, and much of the same lessons are learned a lot less painfully than with some other methods...

I've never found a web site with an accurate, complete list of reputable affiliate programs. There are tons of affiliate directories. There are places that claim to list good and/or bad affiliate programs. I've never found a list I agree with, though. I've had great success with programs that others consider bad and poor success with some programs that others rave about. Doing your own research and testing them yourself seems to be the only way.

I've found that the key to a successful website is to provide a service, utility, or function that can't be found anywhere else. My sites have usually things that I would want to use myself. Kind of like Google's concept of organizing the world's information. People will copy you, but you have a huge "first to market" advantage and as long as you stay ahead of the curve, you'll continue to grow. Most people who use affiliate links just put up links. That accomplishes very little, which is why I think most people have bad opinions of affiliate programs. It just doesn't work that way.

I've found that another huge key to success is to automate everything you can. That will let you build more and more sites without taking more time.

Normalization.

This is a subjective mistake. What one database accepts is not necessarily acceptable in another. There are no hard and fast rules. However, there are simple guidelines to follow.

Table Examples.

Consider two types of data. They are 'Addresses' and 'Children'.

In a table named, Addresses, there are usually fields to capture mailing information. The form of this data is predictable. On the other hand, a table named, Children, is tricky. There is no way to anticipate the number of children possible in a family. Some have none, 1, 2, or 3. Others have over 10.

Guidelines.

Intranet solutions Inventory Software Asset tracking software information management report viewer

How do you determine how to create a table, when one attribute is unknown? What if it is unrealistic to anticipate the occurrences of an entity or process? In these cases, it is a good idea to create the table, with a link to a parent record.

Remember. This is only a rule-of-thumb and not a hard-and-fast rule. It depends on how the data is being used.

1. You are my friend. I tell you so.

Which makes me immediately suspicious. Overfamiliarity is commonly employed by con-merchants.
Whether I am your friend or not, is up to me to decide, not least because you are "approaching" me. If you want to say you are my friend, that's fair enough, but that's quite different from telling me that I am your friend.

2. I spin a yarn. Usually starts with a bit "I'm just like you".

I very much doubt that. >;->

3. Along the way my page is littered with testimonials or endorsements.

I don't understand testimonials.
Which ones are genuine and which ones aren't? Is it even safe to assume that any are genuine?

4. Of course, like any good microsite, I make you feel that unless you act now you'll miss the deal, time's running out ya know? The offer will expire today.

I will buy your product (or not) in my time, not yours. If you wish to withdraw the product before I have decided in my own time, that is your problem. In this case I keep my money for another day and I am satisfied that had you been confident of the quality of your product you would have also been confident to let me make my decision in my own time.

This one always sets off warning bells.

5. Like a good infomercials I always offer lots of extras with the essential deal: You get not only 1, not 2 or 3, but today only you get 237 Ginsu knives plus a hungry Rotweiller.

So what are you saying? The product isn't worth the price you're selling it for? Why don't you just get rid of the "free" gifts and lower the price?

--- First off, there is no where to click to except the buy button. So, the visitor has two options, leave or keep reading. ---

You [the merchant] don't understand the medium, do you? One of the advantages of the web is that I read the information I want to in the order I want to read it. The fact that you have put your entire website on a single page makes you look like a bit of a berk, but the fact that you don't even provide internal navigation up and down the page is just clumsy.

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Not everyone will come up with all the mental responses above when they encounter the different techniques applied in one-page-wonders, but I'm sure at least one or two of these thoughts will pass through almost everyone's mind.

Take a step back and look at some of these aspects from a buyer's perspective:

- Low barrier to entry. ie, just about anyone can become an affiliate, costs are low, and you dont need a great deal of knowledge to get started (though being sucessful is a different matter).

- The money you make is dependent on the skill of the marketer(s), their ability to identify and exploit new market opportunities, their ability to produce effective copywritten material, etc etc. (so unless your taking over a business with skilled staff, you proberly wont go very far if you have no experience/skill, even if that business made $1M the year before).

- The only real thing in the business that makes it profitable is the skill/ability of the AM.

- As the business does not have any tangible stock, may not have any property(eg, purchased offices) or machinery (most cases, unless your throwing in your old PIII :p), and in most cases (not all) websites are effectivly "junk" sites that can be built in a day or 3, and in most cases (not all) those sites do not offer any recurring visit quality (the best ones IMO do) - what you could claim to value your company assets at is debatable - but (in most cases) proberly not a lot.

I think really the only thing you can value the company on (from a buyer's perspective) is the existing web properties, copywritten materials and current SE rankings.

Given that SE rankings can disappear over night, they are not worth a great deal, but this is all dependant on so many factors. An important one would be "how many websites that *YOU DO NOT OWN* link inbound"?

Quality of domain names - if your including "widgets.com" as a part of the sale, your asking price can justifiably be a lot higher than if your offering "buy-widets-somecompany.biz".

Of course, if you can find someone to buy a company for an amount that exceeds its realistic valuation, then enjoy your new house/car/yacht/etc

Using the tools they give you figure out how many clicks you will get per day and how much it will cost you. Then figure out what your conversion rate will have to be for you to break even.

Example:
You pay $0.50 per click and you are estimated to get 100 clicks per day ($0.50 x 100 = $50)

A pricepoint is $75 with a 10% payout will give you $7.50 per unit. So you will have to sell 7 units per day to cover expenses. So that's a 7% conversion rate.

Floating the mone can really be a killer. If you spend $50 a day in August your credit card bill will be $1550. You probabaly won't get the commission until October, so make sure you can float the money. Paying intrest will take a bite out of your profits.

Allow for deep linking and make it easy for the affiliate to do so.

Provide tools for your affiliates, as well as assistance in implementing those tools. For example, amazon offers some scripts to help affiliates utilize their web services. If you have a datafeed, teach your affiliates how to use it or create scripts for them that help them implement it.

Long return dates -- the idea of a customer being a customer for life is a fantastic one and would sure motivate the heck out of me to promote your site. Especially if the customer is linked to the affiliate in your database, then we needn't worry that we're losing future sales when someone goes and deletes their cookies at the end of their internet session.