Web Developement | Affiliate Marketing Tips from Super Affiliate Zac Johnson

Buy and Sell Websites through Rouper

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Rouper for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Recently, all the buzz has been about buying and selling web sites. Over the past couple of years, the process of buying and selling web sites has become a lot easier through the use of online marketplaces. No longer do you have to search through old forums, or try and contact web site owners directly. Here are just a few of the problems you may come across when it comes to buying or trying to sell your website outside of using a third party or market place.

Annoyance of finding contact information
No medium for actual value of web site
Accepting or actually getting paid
Fraud, scams and denial/refund of payment

The list can go on and on, which leads to why we need a marketplace for buying and selling web site. Flippa has shown us the importance of having a marketplace where buyers and sellers can connect and they are pushing some massive volume the amount of web sites trading hands on a daily basis… however, there is plenty of room for competition.

Rouper.com, a new marketplace for buying and selling web sites has caught my eye recently. I’m starting to see their banners appear on many familiar web sites, and as I’ve been watching their web site over the past weeks, I am seeing more people listing web sites and using the service. Though the marketplace is new, I think if they play their cards right, they can be a top competitor in this unsaturated game. In the screenshot below you will a preview of one of the site listings.

If Rouper.com wants to compete in this competitive space, they will need to be offer something the top players in the game aren’t. I also think some extra work into their site design is needed. Right now the site is a bit too plain and could use the following upgrades to their site:

Main page shows full directory, and not option to choose to BUY or SELL
All listings with in directory should include screenshots
Minimum amount of listing information and text required
Provide all web site information/stats/seller info etc on listing page (no tabs)
Increase overall activity and attract some big site sales

As mentioned earlier, the marketplace is new, but that doesn’t mean they should be overlooked. You never know who may come across Rouper.com and find a web site they really like, and end up purchasing. As for listing fees, you can see the Rouper.com rates below, which are listed in their terms and conditions.

Success Fee. Payable upon any sale.	5% of the dollar value of the sale net of any taxes. The minimum success fee is $100.
Success Fee (upfront option)	Instead of paying the 5% success fee upon sale completion you may choose to pay a non-refundable $499 success fee upfront when creating your listing.

It will be interesting to see how Rouper grows and continues to develop their marketplace in the coming months. It would be healthy for competition and the business of buying and selling web sites, to see a few more big resources and names pop up in the industry.

List Your Web Site on Rouper

Now that you have an idea on what Rouper is all about, why not list a web site and see what happens? From now til October 31st Rouper is offering a coupon “64W0SJ87“ that will allow sellers to list for only $1 instead of the regular $49 price. In the meantime, whether you are a buyer or seller, keep Rouper.com on your radar and check out their site listings for any hidden winners.

20 October, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Blogging, Site Reviews, Web Developement

10 SEO Tips To Quickly Rank in the Search Results

Starting a new website or blog can be very exciting and fulfilling. The only downside is waiting for your site to get a pagerank and waiting on those rankings to increase. For some people this is something that happens pretty quickly, while others anxiously and impatiently wait and wait and often end up with disappointing results. What gives? Well, unless you really have a good grasp of SEO, then you’ll end up frustrated and wanting to give up. Don’t give up though because we’re about to give you 10 tips to help improve your rankings more quickly and also boost your motivation.

Scope Out the Competition

It’s good to know as much as possible about your competition so that you can know who you’re up against and what you should strive for. For instance, you may want to start by finding out how many incoming links your competitors have. This way, you have a good idea of how many you need in order to pass them. Also take a look at where they rank in search engines, what keywords they’re using, and what’s in their meta tags. You can’t strive for the top spot unless you know what you’re competing for. So be sure to analyze your competition as an initial plan of action.

Research Your Keywords

It’s one thing to optimize your website for keywords, but if you’re using keywords that are not even being searched for then it’s a huge waste of your time. There are plenty of free tools available on the Internet that can help you find the best keywords that are being searched for consistently. These are the keywords that you want to optimize your site for. Also think about using long tail keywords, which are keyword phrases that have 3-5 words in them. These are great for drawing in targeted, quality traffic. Lastly, be sure to use evergreen keywords which have longevity and will be relevant for years to come. This way you can always count on them to bring you traffic.

Write Quality Content

If you’re not writing quality content, you really don’t stand a chance at ranking very high. Your content needs to be useful and original. When you create content, keep in mind that you want something that will make others want to link to it and share it. Try to focus on How To’s, tutorials, and lists because these tend to generate the most traffic. If you can, add numerous supportive facts and references. Also be sure to link keywords within your content to other useful and relevant web pages. When others see that you’ve linked to them, it will encourage them to link to you which will in turn help boost your rankings. Images and visual examples like charts, videos, images, and screenshots are also very useful and add to the quality of your content.

Deep Link to Other Pages

Deep linking involves linking to other pages within your site (other than the homepage) from within your content. It’s important to link to internal pages with anchor text that contain at least 3 of the keywords for that page. This will not only help with rankings, but it also helps to keep people on your site longer – thus reducing the bounce rate. We worked heavily on this at a neon signs store I advised to and it showed great results.

Optimize Your Meta Tags

Google hates duplicate content, so if you want your website to be indexed properly then you have to make sure to optimize your meta tags. The title tag and meta tags should be different on each page of your website or else you could risk penalties. One thing that you don’t have to worry about too much are the meta keywords, since Google has already stated that they do not use these in their ranking criteria anymore.

A few pointers to remember is to keep the title tag under 60 characters and the description under 160 characters. Both of these tags both should also be relevant to the content on the page. You want to stay away from spam-like methods such as keyword stuffing and falsification of what’s in your content. Remember that in order to get to the top of the rankings, your information (that is displayed in search results) has to be attention grabbing so that people will click on it within the search results.

Optimize Your Headings and Subheadings

Just like your meta tags, you also want to be sure to optimize your headings and subheadings. These are your H-tags (H1, H2, H3, etc) and they really play an important role in organizing the information on your web pages. You should have only one H1 tag (the largest header) on your page; this is usually the title of the page or the title of your article (i.e. if you have a blog). You can then break up sections in to H2 tags and even further into H3 if needed.

Each of these heading tags should contain a keywords that you want to rank for. Since search engines consider the headings to be more important than the actual content, it’s really important to get those keywords in there.

Optimize Your Title and ALT Tags in Images

Next we have the title and alt tags that are used within images to describe what they pertain to. Again, these can be optimized with keywords to help you rank higher. Remember that most search engines now have image search capabilities. When users search for specific images, the search engines use the keywords within your title and alt tags to help them display relevant images. This is why it’s so important to use them and include your keywords, so that people can also find your content through image searching.

Optimize File Names

When you save your images (before uploading them to your site), what kind of file names are you using? Are you using something like image 1, image 2, image 3, etc? If you are doing this or anything similar, it’s a very bad idea because they don’t say anything about what your image is. Your file names should be relevant to the image and, you’ve guessed it, should also include keywords. Doing this also helps you rank high within image searches because it shows that your content is relevant to the search term.

Really anywhere you use any kind of words is an opportunity to optimize your website, include keywords, and increase your rankings. So also be sure to use this same type of technique with web page names as well as the slugs for your blog posts. Add those keywords where you can because unless you’ve blocked robots from viewing a certain page, all of your words are visible by search engines and will be indexed.

Use An XML Site Map

Sitemaps not only help your visitors find content faster, but they also help search engines understand the structure and layout of your website. This is one of the easiest ways to increase your rankings because web crawlers can quickly find your content. Also, sitemaps are fairly easy to create, so why not take advantage of them?

Validate Your Source Code

Lastly you want to be sure to validate your code and fix and errors that are found. This helps to ensure that you don’t have any broken links, images, or invalid code that may cause issues for your visitors. The easiest way to do this to use the free W3C Markup Validation Service. Google does penalize for a large number of errors, so be sure to fix as much as you can if you have any errors.

If you’re up for another tip, you can even go as far as validating your search engine optimization. A great tool for this is the Website Grader by Hubspot. It lets you see how well your website is doing and whether it has any SEO problems. It also shows you how well you’re doing on Twitter. So once you’re done with these 10 tips, also be sure to find out the grade of your website and use the provide tips to boost your SEO even further.

This guest post was written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant who works for various online companies including a popular online to-do list app and a psd to html company.

10 October, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Blogging, Web Developement

Five Great Fiverr Jobs for Internet Marketers

Most of you have already heard about Fiverr.com. In short, it’s a marketplace where people will do nearly anything for $5. Everything from video testimonials, to coding web sites or even dressing up in something silly and saying whatever you want. The bottom line is that Fiverr has a lot of potential and opportunity for you to outsource simple jobs that can be completed quickly and for just a few dollars.

Here are five quick jobs that you can start outsourcing to Fiverr.

Paid Tweets!

Honestly, the rates to have some celebrities and people send out a “sponsored tweet” to their audience is quite insane. We’re talking thousands of dollars for Kim Khardashian to send out a tweet to her millions of users. Sure, it would be great for branding, but the ROI is usually never there. Instead, you can play with $5 at a time and see the results you might get through Fiverr users tweeting out to their audience. Don’t expect high quality and amazing results… but when you compare the rate of $5 to have your message sent out to 50,000 followers, or going the other route… the difference is rediculous!

Video Testimonials

There are actually full agency companies that specialize in the business of providing legitimate video testimonials for companies, which are then used on commercials and landing pages across the internet. Going this route will cost you thousands of dollars. If you are looking for something much simpler and quick, there are plenty of users on Fiverr offering video testimonial and review services for only $5! Depending on what you are having reviewed, and how you are going to run these… check with legal counsel first just to be safe.

Backlinks & Link Wheels

Everyone is always talking about building backlinks to web sites and how important it is. The usual deciding factor on your SEO efforts comes down to time and money. When outsourcing to Fiverr jobs, you save both time and money. Don’t expect the same type of results as going with legitimate guys like SEO Link Wheelers, but instead n Fiverr you will have people spin articles and get your links out there. Not the type of stuff you want linking back to your main home page, but can definitely help if you know how to build incoming links to your landing pages which lead to money pages.

Banner & Ad Copy Creation

There is such a demand to make money online that even design services are now offered on Fiverr. You can get full landing pages and banners designed for anything you can think of. You will have to try a few different jobs out, as many lack in quality, but there are some decent designers offering services on Fiverr. For $5, you can’t go wrong… and we all know that ugly ad copy and banners continually surprises us and works better than flashy and expensive designs!

Writing Services

Everyone always needs a copy writer or something to keep producing new content for your web sites. Fiverr is full of everything from original content writers, to people who can spin articles, or even critique some content you have written. Many writers on Fiverr will create unique 300-500 word articles for only $5, which comes out to under two cents per word. Not bad compared to many other paid writing services out there.

To find any of the jobs listed above, just head over to Fiverr and search any of the key title phrases above. To make your browsing most effective, make use of the Fiverf filters, which will allow you to only see the popular jobs, best rated, and those that have videos and are completed within 24 hours.

Fiverr is a gold mine of information and services which can be outsourced for cheap. The difference between having success and failure is actually taking the time to find the right services and sticking with those that offer high quality and work. I’ve personally done over 200 orders through Fiverr in the past year, and it’s all about finding the gems within the sea of mediocre jobs.

02 October, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Web Developement

Angry Birds – 350+ Million Downloads

By the time you read this post, another several thousands of iPhone and mobile devices will have downloaded the world famous Angry Birds gaming app. I’ve already written on the app several times now, but there just doesn’t seem to be anything that can slow Angry Bird’s growth down.

In the latest Angry Birds news, the company has now reported that there have been over 350 million downloads of their gaming apps. Quite amazing! Last year I wrote about how Angry Birds generates over a million dollars a month, imagine how much it generates now! With over ten times more downloads and users, the company is just a pure cash cow!

Here’s a few more amazing statistics from Angry Birds / Rovio.

Every day over 300 MILLION minutes are spent playing Angry Birds on mobile devices.
3 MILLION plush toys of Angry Birds have been sold since June 2010… but latest reports are over a MILLION plush toy sales per month!
Over 1 MILLION Angry Birds tshirts sold every month!
Angry Birds is now playable on over 25 different platforms, including iOS, Android, Nook, Chrome Web App

So how does Angry Birds keep the trend going and make users keep coming back for more? It’s all about the updates and new versions of the game that come out each season.

Make Money Off the Angry Birds Craze

Let Rovio worry about how they can continue to bring in more and more players. Instead you should be worrying about how you can start cashing in! Refer back to my “Make Money with Angry Birds” post a few months ago and read about how some web sites are selling for over $80,000 on Flippa, just for helping other figure out how to beat Angry Birds levels! Since I wrote this article, there have been several more Angry Birds sites that have been sold for big money on Flippa.

As mentioned earlier, there is also a huge craze for Angry Birds plush toys and clothing. Yes… there are even Angry Birds Halloween costumes available. Halloween and Christmas are going to be very kind to Angry Birds this year. Don’t forget to get in on the action!

12 September, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Make Money, Marketing, Web Developement

Landing Page Converions: Before and After

Here we are. After reviewing our original landing page, and making a ton of changes and tweaking to best target our customers and create a winning call to action, it’s time to compare the before and after landing page results.

Conversion Rate of Old Page

Conversion Rate of New Page — on our first revision we took 1.73% increase in conversion. Not bad !

Summary: With some redesign and sprucing up of ad copy, we lowered our cost per conversion $3.29 which resulted in a 25% reduction in lead cost!

I am pretty optimistic that we can take it even further. Right now I am going to request the client secure a BBB rating and come up with a warranty guarantee seal that will deliver solid product backing in an effort to shoot the conversion rate even higher. A seal of Made in the USA is also another good addition.

Lets go over your checklist for your redesign

Headline — are you conveying the right sales message in 5 seconds or less?
Supporting Bullet Points — support the headline
Call to Action — arrow or emphasis on the Big Button
BIG Button – Mini Call to Action on Button — SUBMIT – FREE ACCESS
Testimonials — always make sure above the fold
Supporting Body Copy — keep pushing the conversion moment
Product Shot — yes you are legit !
Trust Building – you can be trusted
Additional Body Copy – last chance to push your product
Secondary Call to Action — sometimes you can use this tactic to save the reader from scrolling back up — remember avoid that IADD!

This post is part of a 4 day series of posts all about creating winning landing pages. This guest post series was written by Michael Salvaggio of SEO Brand.