How Contextual Advertising Works

As you read this post, you will truly appreciate the power of contextual advertising. Right now your focus is within the text of this article, and should there be any links within this text, they would be much more likely to grab your attention versus any banners or text links outside of the main content. The concept of contextual advertising is to create text advertising links within your content, which means they are right in the face of your readers, but also relevant at the same time.

Think about the success Google Adsense has had over the years, but instead of taking up the big banner ad space that Adsense requires, contextual advertising is placed within your content, allowing site owners to maximize their site space. When someone clicks on a banner or link from Google Adsense, the visitor will leave your web site. This is not true with contextual advertising, as the link will usually spawn in a new window. Which not only means you will keep your current site visitors at your site, but you will also be making additional revenue at the same time.

Just like Google Adsense, most contextual advertising networks will pay their site partners on a cpc (cost per click) basis. Some networks also back out their earnings on a commission basis, but in the end, you still see a cpc average in your earnings report.

While all of this may sound amazing and complex (and it is…), it’s actually quite easy for any web site or blog to get setup and running with contextual advertising. Many of the contextual networks will provide you with a simple line of code that you can add to your web site, or a nice wordpress plugin for any blog owners. You will also have access to a wide selection of options which include changing contextual links colors, underlining, how many links to display, and more. This way you don’t have to worry about people confusing regular site links versus contextual ad links.

What Sites Will Contextual Advertising Work on Best?

As much as I would like to say contextual advertising solutions will flood your pockets with a nice monthly recurring income, that simply isn’t the case. Depending on the type of web site and visitors you have, you will see a big difference in click through rates and earnings. Here are three examples:

• An education or technology web site will earn more revenue per click with contextual advertising, versus a recipe or cooking based web site. This is simply due to the fact that education and technology advertisements are higher end and they are spending a lot more money per click.
• A web site or blog with a webmaster or internet marketing audience will most likely experience a much lower click through rate, as the readers are already familiar with how advertising works on web sites, and will know a contextual link versus a regular link.
• Review, resource and shopping web sites will experience the highest click through rates and overall ecpm earnings, simply because the visitors to these web sites are already in a buying and researching mode. These site visitors are looking for relevant links and looking to click.

What is INTENTclick, and Why Do They Matter?

Now that you have a good understanding on what contextual advertising is, and how it may work with your web site traffic, let’s get back to INTENTclick and how they can improve the revenue generation on your web site.

If you asked a bunch of online marketers bout contextual advertising, many of them would probably be familiar with the name “Kontera“. INTENTclick is actually an exclusive performance network driven by the Kontera brand network. Kontera has established themselves as one of the premier advertising companies online, and have exposure across millions of web sites, many of which you already know.

So why does INTENTclick matter and how are they any different from Kontera?

If you’ve ever worked with Kontera or contextual advertising, you already know how their content based advertising works. INTENTclick is run off that same concept, except they are focused on higher end advertisers and content rich web sites that can drive high volume and results. If you’ve ever found success with contextual advertising or simply looking for a new revenue source for your web site or blog, you will want to give INTENTclick a try.

As the owner of a web site or blog, it’s not only important to know what your audience is looking for, but also how you can make the most money out of your traffic, while also providing quality content. Let’s take a look at three different ways to generate revenue from your site, while also providing value to your readers.

Recommended Products & Services

When you are a big fan of a blog or web site, personal recommendations go a long way. Using this blog as an example, I’ve used Neverblue for many years now, and through my recommendations on this site, I’ve been able to refer them over $2 million in new business from affiliates. In addition to making mentioned of their ad network here and there, I’ve also written tutorials on how to setup search and ad campaigns using their network offers. Instead of creating a product and charging a cost for this information, I simply used a referral link to Neverblue and would get a commission on all referred affiliates. This not only provides useful and free content to my readers, but also provides a value in the time it takes me to create the content.

In-Content Contextual Advertising

I’ve been playing around with INTENTClick contextual advertising on a few web sites over the past couple weeks. Contextual advertising is quite interesting. From a webmaster and internet marketing stand point, we already know what these links and advertisements look like, so we are more likely to avoid clicking on these links… however, on an information or review based web site, people love these links and find them very useful.

Here are some quick stats from my experience with testing INTENTClick contextual ad links. The first set of stats is from a pet web site that is mainly on coupons and pet health. People are coming to this site and looking for good information on their pets and how to save money in the process.

The second set of stats below is from a webmaster / blogging type site, which the users of the site are more inclined to know about advertising methods and are probably less likely to click on links that may look like ads. Between the two ads/sites, notice the difference in CTR and eCPM.

Depending on your type of web site, contextual advertising can work very well for your site. You will likely earn a lot more money with an information, product/services or review type site versus a  webmaster/blogging related site. Since contextual advertising doesn’t take up any extra web space on your site, it’s becoming an extra and preferred source of revenue for many sites.

Personal Products and Consulting Services

This last point is more for established blogs and brands versus a regular web site. When people are coming to a blog to read what someone has to say, or learn from them, they are truly interested and passionate about the topic and person running the web site. It takes a lot of time and trust to build up a loyal following, which eventually turns into a “brand”. Through that branding, you can then brand out and start creating your own high end products and consulting services. Since the blog is all about you and what you do, there is nothing wrong with offering your services and products through out the site, an your visitors will actually be more interested in your actual promotions, then seeing you promote/offer someone else’s services.

Clean Site with a Monetized Mailing List

Through the use of mailing list services like Aweber, some web sites have made it their goal to build up a massive mailing list, which is where they focus all of their monetization in. It’s a great plan and it works really well. One example is to pump out really great content on a clean web site, then offer an exclusive offer or follow up email course. The goal here is to keep the focus directly on your content, and getting the user to subscribe to your mailing list. It’s much easier to continually stay in contact and convert a mailing list subscriber into a lead, then a one time visitor to your web site. Through a mailing list, you can also create an autoresponder series that will do all of the work for you, while you just focus on getting new traffic and subscribers through your site.

Finding the Right Revenue Model for Your Web Site

Just like all web sites are not the same, neither are the ways we generate traffic with our sites. From Amazon’s associate program, to Google Adsense to Contextual Advertising using yourself as a person brand, your options for generating revenue are limitless. The mindset you should have, is to continually try different methods and see what works best for you, while also keeping your user experience in mind.

Think about it for a second… is there anyone from your past, maybe a client, friend or even someone who is jealous of your success, that could potentially damage your name or brand online? In the end, all it really takes it a few high end and well established web sites to start posting negative reviews and content, that can rank really high in the search results and do some damage.

So what can you do?

That’s where reputation management comes in. With the usage and power of the internet growing larger and larger every day, it’s more important for every day small businesses and even Fortune 500 companies, to make sure they have a great reputation online. Through the use of reputation management services, anyone can help improve their reputation online, and lower any fake or negative comments/articles out there about their company.

How does reputation management work?

Let’s take a look at a case study of how Reputation Changer, one of the top reputation management firms out there works, and how they are helping their clients deal with reputation issues.

Case Study: UWC Corp received malicious listings online that were showing up under their company name: UWCCorp.com. In less than 6 weeks, Reputation Changer completely surpressed those listings from page 1 of Google and repopulated new / positive listings. With a brand new, very positive online reputation, UWCCorp.com saw an immediate spike in revenue.

A few weeks later, UWCCorp.com started to see an improvement in their search results, with more and more new and positive articles taking over the negative listings and pushing them down off the first page of Google.

You can take a look at the full slide show process and see a bi-weekly breakdown of how Reputation Changer dominated the first page of results for UWCCorp.com.

Improving Online Reputation through Google Suggests

While the majority of searching done online is through Google and looking directly for a company or brand name, have you ever thought about how much of an influence “Google Suggest” comes into play? When you start typing a search phrase into Google, it will start to suggest other alternatives or variations of what you might want to search for.

Another case study and winning example from Reputation Changer, is how they helped improved Michael Vick’s reputation through Google Suggest, which you can see in the screenshot below.

Have you ever taken the time to see what Google Suggest comes up with when someone is searching for your personal or business name?

Do Reputation Management Services Work?

Now that you have an idea how reputation management services can improve rankings, search results and how people can search for relevant information on a company, the best question to ask is “Do reputation management services really work?“. As you can see from the case studies mentioned above, they clearly do work, as the average person is most likely going to look through the first page of results to make a quick decision on whether or not they want to use a recommended service or company.

The business of reputation management is growing daily, and even Business Week has written a full article on the topic. In the article, a few interesting points mentioned where that there has been an explosive increase in reputation management over the past couple of years due to social media and the amplified voices of individual internet users. It was also mentioned that typical costs for a small online company, can range from $1,000 to several thousands of dollars a month for search engine related reputation management.

What’s Your Online Reputation?

When is the last time you took some time to really look into your search results and see what other people are saying about your name or brand online? Reputation Changer focuses exclusively on managing the reputations of Celebrities, Professional Athletes, Brands, High Profile Individuals, and Fortune 500 Brands.

If you would like to see how Reputation Changer can improve your image online, please feel free to contact them and see what they can do for you. Mention ZacJohnson.com and you will save an instant 10% off your reputation improvement package.

Let’s look at three different ways you can start increasing the quality of your click throughs and leads generated.

Stop Trying to Trick the User

Remember those banners that would flash non stop and say that you were the millionth visitor and were awarded a prize? Those banners were doing exactly the opposite of what we are talking about here. They were going after as much traffic as they could possibly get, then sending their visitors to an email/zip submit type of offer. The data provided usually has a very fast turn over rate, and is sold to multiple media/ad buyers.

Instead of trying to trick your audience into clicking on a link, think about the ways that you can relate to your audience and make them want to convert. While an insane blinking banner may bring in a lot of clicks, the conversions might be terrible. Spend more time on targeting the right audience and giving them banners they want to see and can relate to. Your cost per click may be higher, but you will also see higher conversions and provide the end advertiser with better quality leads.

Make the User WANT to Click

One of the best ways to find an audience of people who are anxious to click on your little blue text links, is to provide them with exactly what they are looking for. Let’s take review and coupon sites for example. How many times were you searching for a product or service to buy, and you were just looking for the right review or coupon code? Once you found the information you were looking for, you would gladly click on a link in their web site to go forward with the sale or purchase.

This is exactly why coupon and review sites do so well. When is the last time you did a search for “web hosting reviews” on Google? The web sites paying to rank for these terms are paying a lot of money for where they rank, but all of the traffic to these sites are high quality. Sure, the site owners are probably getting $100+ in commissions per sale, but they know they can convert their traffic because they are providing exactly what their site visitors are looking for.

Pre-Sell Your Audience: Withholding the Click!

Another excellent example of getting high quality click throughs is through the use of video marketing. We can relate to this method all too well. How many times have you received an email from another guru/marketer, and you have to wait and watch their annoying video before being able to click to the next page and/or place your order?

It’s annoying, but it works! By making the viewer not be able to click away from the page, it’s actually making them listen and watch your video, with is continually selling them on the dreams of what their product can do for you… further increasing the chances they will stick around and buy once that final “Click Here to Purchase” link becomes available.

What Type of Traffic Are Your Providing?

Don’t get me wrong, there will always be a market and business of cheap, dirty and crap leads… but when you are looking for long term and high end commissions, lead quality is where your focus should be. When promoting any ad campaign and pushing volume, it’s important to keep in touch with your ad network or the advertiser directly. If you are pushing quality leads that continue to convert on their backend, they will gladly send a few more dollars your way to increase the volume and reward you for your efforts!

For years companies have tried to create a platform that could easily be sent through email, without the hassles of getting blocked by filters, while also making it a big frustration for the email users to send/receive mail. WRAP Mail is that solution.

The best way to explain what WRAP Mail can do for your business and branding, is to show you. You can visit the WRAP Mail web site and watch the short video on their web site, which is quick and fun, but also shows you how easy WRAP mail is to use, and how it works.

In short, WRAP Mail…

• Turn every day emails into brand marketing
• Wraps your emails with a unique interactive letterhead
• Shows your email recipient your regular text email, with a great design
• Reports to you “Click Alerts”, which tells you who is where on your web site.
• Provides benefits for any type of  business, web site or personal use

Driving New Sales & Customers with Daily Emails

Now as I mentioned earlier, the average employee sends 38 emails a day… If you only send around 27 emails a day, that’s still over 10,000 emails a year! Using a system like Wrap Mail can dramatically increase your business by putting your brand and advertising right in the face of your customers. If you were to only convert 1% of the people reading your email, with the additional branding and links within your wrapped email, that’s an extra 100 leads. Depending on your sales or lead generation, this could actually be much higher.

What Will Your Wrapped Mail Look Like?

After talking with Rolv from WRAP Mail and looking through the different options and services they offer, it’s quite a great looking program. Nearly any web site or business can customize their emails with a wrap that represents the look and feel of their business, while also increasing the bottom line.

The Wrap Mail design team can built a customized look for your web site or business. Just take a look at some of the custom designs posted on their site from current customers.

Yes, You Can Even Earn Money with WRAP Mail Too!

With such a unique and fun service, you would think there would be an ad serving network attached to it, right? Well, there is! WRAP Mail is in the process of rolling out their new advertising program, where clients can earn money for users to get paid when people click on their links and complete offers or decide to sign up for a product. This platform will be similar with Google Adsense, in that the users of WRAP Mail can opt-in to receive a pay per click rate based on their recipients clicking on advertisements placed within their email wrapping. Since many people are using WRAP Mail as a personal choice and looking to customize their email, and not specifically promote their own business or web site, this introduces a whole new world when it comes to emailing. You can read their latest press release on this announcement here.

What Does it Cost, and How to Get Started?

Surprisingly, WRAP Mail PRO is free for companies and individuals looking to use their services, as long as they are less than 100 employees. It’s easy to signup, all you need to do is fill out a short form and you will get started immediately. If you would like to set your 100+ employee company up with an account and custom email design, simply contact WRAP Mail directly.

A new pet affiliate network that I’m working with has a wide variety of affiliate offers that any pet lover, pet blog or resource web site would love. While looking through their selection of offers, I thought it would be a great idea to take one of these offers, then show how you can study what you know about the offer, then start promoting it through different sources.

One of the well branded offers on the network is PetCareRX, which is a discount pet supplies and medication web site. The offer pays $30 per signup and is only for email promotion, but there are plenty of other offers on the network which allow other methods such as banners, social and web site advertising. Since PetCareRX is a well known brand, let’s go through some of the different ways we can research the company/offer, then build a campaign around their site.

Quantcast User Demographics

First let’s run over to Quantcast.com and pull a demographics report on the type of visitors that are going to PetCareRX.com. Right away we can see some key figure in the chart below. The ones with blue have the majority of percentage for each demographic. At a quick glance it looks like we have mostly females, who are 35-50+, caucasian, have no kids and a mid range income. While the information may not be 100% accurate, it’s a great way to get a quick feel on the type of demographics that might perform best with your offers.

Plenty of Fish = Plenty of Pet Owners

Next let’s head over to ads.pof.com and create some ad campaigns to promote PetCareRX. We aren’t going to focus on ad copy right now, but instead how easy is it for you to take what you learned from Quantcast, then put it into action at POF.

Check out the screenshot below from within the POF ads manager. How cool is that? I just targeted all of the demographics that were pointed out above, but I was also able to go even a step further and target only pet owners!

Facebook Ads = 1 Million Pet Lovers

While Plenty of Fish doesn’t tell you exactly how many pet owners they have on the network, the next best thing is to head over to Facebook Ads and create a campaign targeted to people that already have an interest in “Dogs” and “Cats”… and by the way, just targeting those two terms in the US brings in over 1 MILLION users! You can even target “PetcareRX” on Facebook interests, and reach 6,000+ die hard fans. Think about all of the other popular pet web sites and interests that could be targeted.

Google Keyword / Site Search

Wouldn’t it be great if you knew what keywords and search terms PetCareRX were bidding on to bring people to their site, or what long tail keywords people are coming across in the search engines, and getting to their site? Sure enough, we can do that! Head over to the Google Keyword tool and run a report, but not under the keyword section, but instead for the petcarerx.com web site. Google will then pull up a massive report of relevant keywords that you can use to advertising your landing pages and search engine marketing.

Help, I Need More Banners & Ad Copy!

It’s a growing trend that affiliate networks are not providing as many banners and ad copies as they used to. For such a scenario, you can usually head over to Moat or MixRank and pull up a ton of banners and creatives that are running through out the web. Unfortunately neither of these sites had any banners or creatives for PetCareRX… what to do? Get old school and head over to Google Images and perform a search for the domain name / site you want to advertise, then use the “Exact Size” feature and you will probably find some banners that you were looking for, like the screenshot below.

Putting Everything You Know into Action

Woah, we just covered a mega ton of information on how to promote an offer. Best of all, this same process can be used to break down any affiliate offer or web site out there. In this example, PetCareRX was only available for email promotion, but imagine of how many other campaigns are out there for social networking, cpv, search and banner advertising… a ton! Never before has it been so easy to break down WHO is buying WHAT, and how you can TARGET their exact DEMOGRAPHICS in an ad campaign.

Since I’ve already laid out everything for you on how to make money with pet affiliate offers, why not head over to PetAffiliateNetwork.com and check out what other offers they have on the network.

Through holiday sales figures, you can get an inside look on what the hottest toys, games and products are going to be, and how you can start making money with each. Let’s break down a few different places that you can start using when doing your holiday due diligence. Even if you missed out on the massive buying this holiday season, you always have next year… and the year after, and after!

Amazon is Your Friend

The business of Amazon.com just keeps growing and getting better every year. While it’s a customers dream to log on to their web site and be able to order virtually anything they can think of at discounted prices, it’s just as much of a dream work for online marketers.

When Christmas and the Holidays come around, Amazon.com is ready and they are cranking out the top / most wanted gifts like crazy. Even when it isn’t the holidays, you can still browse through their web site and break down virtually any type of product or brand in the order that they are selling best.

Internal Ad Networks and Consumer Buying Trends

Amazon isn’t the only place you need to visit to see what people are buying. There are plenty of ad management companies out there that are willing to share their data and buying trends that they are seeing on their back end. VigLink, a contextual marketing company, has compiled a few lists of their top 10 best selling products during the holiday season. Since they are currently serving ads across millions of web sites, they can weed out what products are selling and getting the most clicks.

• Top 10 Mobile Devices for the Holidays
• Top 10 Gaming Consoles for the Holidays
• Top 10 Hottest Kids Toys for the Holidays

After looking through the lists, you will notice that many of the top selling products are brand names and items that are top performers every years, such as Apple/iPhone, Video Game Titles, Barbies and Movies related Toys. Building a niche web site for each of these products or brands can deliver holiday traffic and sales year after year.

As a holiday promotion, if you register and install VigLink before Dec 15th, you’ll be entered to win one of the top 2 products on each list that are featured on the top selling holiday products that were listed above.

National Sales Reports & Buying Trends

As you can see, nearly all of the shopping and advertising companies already do the work for you when it comes to reporting what the best selling items are, and the forecast from buyers during the pre-Christmas holidays. Know where people prefer to shop online and where they feel safest with their order processing, can play a huge part in your overall marketing efforts and conversions.

Just take a look at some of the highlights and stats provided by the retail industry and news/research organizations.

Black Friday Weekend Sales Results According to the National Retail Federation (NRF):

• $52.4 billion was spent over Black Friday weekend
• 226 million shoppers were in stores or on websites making purchases over Black Friday weekend
• Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers spent an average of 9.3% more in 2011 than the same weekend in 2010

Black Friday, Thanksgiving, and Cyber Monday Online Sales Results, According to market research firm ComScore:

• $816 million was spent online on Black Friday 2011, which was a 26% increase over black friday 2010
• $479 million was spent online on Thanksgiving Day 2011, which was an 18% increase over Thanksgiving Day 2010
• Year-over-year Cyber Monday sales were up 22% in 2011, when compared to Cyber Monday 2010

Cyber Monday 2011 Results According to IBM Smarter Commerce:

• Year-over-year Cyber Monday sales were up 33%
  The average purchase amount was $198.26, 2.6% higher than the Cyber Monday purchase average for 2010

Cyber Monday 2011 Internet and Mobile Shopping Results According to IBM’s Cyber Monday Benchmark Report:

• 11% of shoppers used a mobile device for their Cyber Monday shopping, an increase of 3.9% over Cyber Monday 2010
• 6.6% of all Cyber Monday purchases made on Cyber Monday 2011 were made from mobile devices
• The Apple iPad was the mobile platform which generated the largest number of retail sales on Cyber Monday
• The percentage of sales from mobile devices was higher on Black Friday 2011 than on Cyber Monday 2011 (9.8% and 6.6% respectively)
• Online shopping peaked at 2:05 PM EST on Cyber Monday (during regular working hours for most)

Did You Miss Out This Year?… It’s Not Too Late!

With Christmas just a couple weeks away, it’s probably too late for your to make a big pay day this year, but don’t get discouraged. With many customers still relying on last minute buying and still unable to get some of the hottest products of the year, getting creative and advertising through social networks like Facebook Ads, can get your ad campaigns and web stores right in the face of potential buyers.

If social advertising isn’t your forte, and you are more focused on web sites and ecommerce, take what you’ve learned from this year’s sales figures and put them into action for next year. Everyone is looking for coupons and review sites. Look at the top selling products for the past five years, and many of these items will be top sellers again next year.

The bottom line is, many businesses are built around the concept of making a ton of their money during the holidays, and if this isn’t one of your focuses, you need to see what you are missing out on.

There’s a great web site tool out there for finding brand name and web site banners spread through out the internet, and best of all… it’s free! Not even an email or free membership is required. The site is Moat Ad Search, which is a search engine for online display ads, making it easy to find your favorite brands and to discover what banner ads are running on top sites.

First, let’s take a look at their main page.

The main page is stupid easy to use, and it’s straight to the point. All you need to do is enter the domain or brand name of a competitor or web site that you want to start promoting. In addition to the search box, you will also see what other people are searching. (Recently Seen Ads at the bottom)

Now let’s take a look at Moat in action and really get some use out of the site. I’m going to use a popular offer that is on a lot of affiliate networks right now, which is Groupon.com. In the screenshot below you can see a wide selection of banners in different sizes, all of which you can immediately download. If you would like to perform an advanced search and only pull certain banner sizes or flash banners, use their advanced search criteria.

There are a few reasons why Moat is an awesome free service and how you can use their banner search to your advantage:

1. As mentioned earlier, it’s a great way to get more banners than what networks provide you with.
2. It’s an amazing resource for new ideas on what brands are doing to make banners convert/click.
3. Not all websites and brands are available, but searching names like AllState provides some awesome results.

Moat is an awesome web site, and if you aren’t using it yet… you should be!

All businesses take time, but online marketing and businesses are special because they take a much smaller investment to get started, while also being able to obtain profitability in a short amount of time. A good way to look at your destiny for online marketing is setting goals and asking yourself, where will you be six months from today?

If you focused on one method for making money online, failed for the first month or two, then finally had a great understanding on how to build campaigns and start turning a profit, that is a massive improvement compared to other retail businesses and working for someone else. The key takeaway is, the internet is making money for people 24 hours a day, every day… even if you are only making minimal improvements on your ad campaigns and ROI with web sites, that is continual growth that will keep increasing every hour, every day.

SixMonthsFromToday.com is a private forum that is focused on teaching those who want to make money online, how to get started and get profitable. The forum is run by Chad Hamzeh and Will Haimerl, who many of you are probably already familiar with, as he helped many people learn how to make money through pay per click marketing in his PPC-Coach forums. The focus of the forum is to create a tight community group that allows you to ask any questions you have about making money online, while getting started and documenting your process along the way. Through the help from Chad, Will and the forum, your mission is to have a successful and profitable business running within the next six months.

Let’s take a deeper look into what members of the forum will have access to:

It’s a Private Community, with 1 on 1 Support

Will is obviously a veteran of creating private access forums, but it now seems to be the method of choice when creating a training and membership program. Since users can openly discuss and talk about any existing campaigns or questions they might have, not only can Will and Chad participate in the conversation, but other members of the forum and communicate, offer their opinions and learn from the process as well. As more people join the forum, the more content/case studies/tips are available to everyone else within the forum.

Something different Six Months From Today is doing with their forum, is offering private one on one support. Through their private discussion area, you can post questions or your ad campaigns/creative, to get advice you might not want to ask in an open forum. Whether you are embarrassed to ask such a simple question, or don’t want everyone to see the ad campaign you are working on, only you, Chad and Will can see the posts in this private section of the forum.

Methods of Advertising & Generating Revenue

As mentioned earlier, there are a lot of ways to make money online. Through SMFT, the forum will focus on different marketing tactics such as pay per click marketing, CPV and PPV advertising, media buying, email and social network advertising such as Facebook Ads and Plenty of Fish. Of all the different traffic generation methods posted, the Facebook Ads thread has the most activity. For anyone who likes playing around with social networking/dating ads, Ben from Plenty of Fish is also active in the forum and commenting/answering any related question.

Case Studies and Walk Throughs

I’m a huge fan of case studies, simply because it’s always great to see how creative people are when it comes to thinking up new ad copy and ways to promote ad campaigns. Through out the forum, you will find case studies in different categories. One of my favorite case studies from Chad, is on a Facebook Ads campaign, which breaks down a whole 6 day process of how to create an ad campaign, target your audience, then monetize for maximum profits. The case study is an 18 page downloadable pdf from within the form.

The SEO project is another case study that is being provided through the forum, where the SMFT team will take a site and get it ranked right before your eyes, so you can follow along and replicate the process. Other case studies and walk throughs in the forum include where to find different ad copy images, how the use of ugly ad copy delivers better results and where to find different ad copies for a specific advertiser, like in the example below.

New Monthly Content Opens Up

As an active member of the Six Months from Today community, you are awarded with new content every month. Since you are working towards a goal of having an established business within six months, each of the monthly bonuses are focused on getting you active and creating different types of ad campaigns. The first month for example, is “Follow Along and Make Money With Us“… in this first month, Chad will document and show the process of how he uses media buying and paid traffic to promote the forum. Future month’s content would focus on different areas of advertising, such as Facebook or Plenty of Fish.

SixMonthsFromToday.com Membership Costs

SMFT actually opened their forum doors for the first time a few weeks ago, then closed the doors so they could work with their existing forum base. Today, they are accepting new members into their community. It would be a huge benefit to see a much larger community base at SMFT, as it will increase the amount of content within the forums, while also providing extra value to the members. The current numbers in the forum are as follows…
- Threads: 329, Posts: 1,687, Members: 129, Active Members: 129

The price to join is $49 per month for the first six month, then the monthly rate goes down to $24.99 for months seven through twelve. After a year of being a member of SMFT, your membership rate goes down to a low $12.49 a month subscription.

If you would like to get instant access to Six Months from Today, you can save 50% off on your first month by using coupon code is FIFTYOFF. Simply post this code at the checkout page, and you will only be billed $24.49 for the first month.

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The days of buying massive amounts of links and hoping for the best, are over. Google, Yahoo and Bing are much smarter in the way they rank and list web sites in their directories, which means you need to be smarter about your link building efforts as well. I previously wrote up a review on the software several months ago, but the SEO Powersuite team has made a bunch of noteworthy updates, which I wanted to make everyone aware of.

SEO PowerSuite is a premium package that built up of four quality SEO scripts; rank tracker, website auditor, seo spyglass and linkassistant. Let’s take a deeper look at each of the components that make up SEO PowerSuite, and what they can do for your web sites.

Rank Tracker

The first component of the SEO PowerSuite package, is the Rank Tracker. Through Rank Tracker, you can see exactly where your web site is showing up in the rankings, while also comparing your listing with other competitors for relevant search terms. Whether you are looking for exact match keywords, most relevant or your top ranked terms, Rank Tracker will pull a nice report together with all of your rankings.

If you’ve ever used Rank Tracker before, or read about it in the previous review, you will notice and appreciate the new design on their keyword reports. In addition to providing more detailed information, the reports are now more visually appealing as well. Pull up a keyword report and you will find where your web site is ranking, all associated keywords and any changes in your keyword rankings since your last report. The “visibility” in the top right corner will also give you a quick glance at your overall visibility and gives an idea of your competition and market you can still be missing out on. Refer back to the main Rank Tracker workspace and you will be able to generate full reports on the historical progress of their web site and associated keywords.

SEO SpyGlass

The second tool in the SEO PowerSuite package, is SEO Spyglass. An important tool for managing and tracking all of your web site backlinks. This backlink checker will create detailed reports breaking down all areas and type of incoming links to your site, which you can see in the screenshot below.

The more visually appealing a report is, the easier it is to understand and grasp the key points and factors that matter. SEO Powersuite has revamped their backlink reports wit the addition of pie graphs, which makes it easy to tell where your big links are coming in, with just a quick glance at the report. SEO SpyGlass will also provide full reports on what backlinks are text based or image based. It’s also important to have access to the different types of TLDs linking back to your web site, along with anchor text… all of which are provided in SEO SpyGlass reports.

WebSite Auditor

WebSite Auditor is the third piece of software in the SEO PowerSuite package. The performance of how your web site will rank in the search engines, is not just dependent on your content and incoming links, but also how your web site is built and structured. Having a fast loading site and the proper structure with your title, body and H1 tags is extremely important. Through the use of the Web Site Auditor, you can make sure your web sites are always running at maximum performance.

Instead of continually showing you what the actual reports look like, this time I wanted to show you what the actual software and behind the scenes would look like. In the screenshot above, you can see what your stats and reports would look like in WebSite Auditor, before converting them into a fancy report. All information is sortable depending on your desired setting and preference.

LinkAssistant

To complete the review of the four different programs that create the SEO PowerSuite package, let’s cover the LinkAssistant. Through the use of the LinkAssistant, you can manage and build new possibilities for gaining important one/two-way and relevant links back to your web site. In short, the software tool can be best explained as a link exchange tool, which allows you to find potential and related web sites that might make for a good link trade. One of the biggest pains about exchanging links with other web sites, is having to worry about them removing your links, while you still keep theirs up. That is no longer a problem, as all of this heavy reporting and tracking is done through LinkAssistant.

As shown in the previous software mentioned, in the screenshot above you can see what it would look like in the actual software as you were building and pulling backlink reports for a web site. If you prefer simple reports, stick to the application, or you can always pull up the fancy reports and blow your mind with their dazzling charts and easy to read reports. The key perks of using Link Assistant, is it’s ability to manage your link partners, which includes their names, email addresses, verification status, and more.

A Total Package for Managing SEO and SEO Reports

The process of managing and working on SEO is not something many people are thrilled about, but when you have the proper software and reporting to keep everything in order and tracking updates for you, it makes it that much easier for you. SEO PowerSuite has been one of the top players in the SEO optimization and management market for some time now.

It’s great to see them continually update and improve their software, while so many other companies in this industry release a product, then you never hear from them again. The new reports from SEO PowerSuite not only make it easier for their users, but also improves reporting that you can provide to your customers if you are providing or serving SEO services to third party web sites.

There is a free version, as well as Professional ($249) and Enterprise ($599) licenses. Visit http://www.link-assistant.com/ to download your trial version of SEO PowerSuite.