Affiliate marketing, my first steps
It has been a while since I posted something, so I am just going to post what I am currently busy with.
I have started wading into the waters of affiliate marketing and have become a paid member of the Warriors for Hire forum. One thing that I have noticed is the tons of "Gurus" trying to sell you their "100% guaranteed will make you rich as fuck" ebooks, videos and whatnot... Its quite sickening really. I am sure some of these people are in fact real gurus and know what they are talking about and some of their products may even be helpful, but in this morally corrupt day and age, I won't trust all the good reviews and endorsements they throw in my face.
I read about a lot of people that have been in the business for some time and how they wasted tons of money in the beginning on crap that did not help them. I am determined not to do the same. The approach that I am taking is one of observe and absorb as much free information that trickles onto the web from time to time and most of all, using my own brain. If something sounds to good to be true, it is.
After doing a lot of reading and procrastination, I have decided to take the plunge into affiliate marketing. I am going to take the "product review" route and see how that works out for me. I got a killer domain name (well I think so at least 
) which is reviewferret dot com and am going to start putting together a custom coded website now for this domain.
The idea is to create reviews for clickbank products, not just reviews in order to sell some crap to unsuspecting peoples, but to create honest to God reviews that are fair and accurate. If a product is shit, I will say it is shit (without exposing my ass to legal action of course).
My clickbank affiliate links will be seeded on the pages for the respective products of course, a man has to eat after all 
A different way of looking at online marketing
I've lately been trying to create a few websites that will do well in google and will get some traffic that will convert in the sense of getting my ads clicked and generating revenue via my affiliate accounts. Getting ranked on google for short specific search terms can be a bitch though and I simply don't have the time as I currently have a day job and am doing this only part time.
I launched a few sites and got some hits from google and other search engines after the only thing that I did to the site was to submit it to google. As an example, I created a wordpress site and purchased and loaded the MyVideoBlog wordpress plugin to the site. The site then searches for a specific tag on 3rd party video tube sites and then updates my website with the relevant content.
Imagine what your traffic would look like if you had 100 such websites, each targeting a different niche...
This little wordpress plugin seems to do wonders for SEO even though my content is by no means unique. The next step now is to make the content unique by getting some Amazon Mechanical Turk labor to add descriptions and more tags to the videos on my blog. Paying $0.01 for someone watching a video and then adding a description to it is a pretty good deal, especially as it will make the content now unique in google's view.
I am going to write some software now that will manage a network of video blogging sites so that I can track which sites do well and manage them from a central location. Once done, I will add it to the freebies section. Let me know if you would be interested in getting such a script.
Gmail’s SPAM filter and how to get your legit mail through
Gmail is currently one of, if not the biggest free email provider globally. Their ability to block SPAM is also unrivalled and is very accurate and personally I have never had legitimate mail slide into the SPAM folder even if a handful of mails have made it through the net since 2005 when I first got my Gmail account.
I run my own dating website with around 4,000 active members on average. Roughly 70-80% of the email addresses are Gmail addresses. Since starting the website in 2009 I have had to deal with registration confirmation emails and notification emails that get flagged by Gmail as SPAM. This is pretty frustrating and I tried everything to ensure that my mails do not appear “spammy”. Nothing worked.
Nothing worked, that is until today when I read about SPF records and how heavily Gmail’s SPAM filter relies on these records... I created a SPF record my using Microsoft’s handy SPF Record Wizard. I copied the SPF record text from the result that the wizard proved and then created a TXT DNS record with the SPF record.
After I completed setting up an SPF record, I tried sending a mail from my web server again, low and behold finally my mails are no longer flagged as SPAM on Gmail!
Multiple domain names and SEO
A question that sometimes arises is whether it is a good or a bad thing to have multiple domain names for the same website. A lot of webmasters like to register multiple domain names for a single website. For example they may register toys.com, toys.us, toys.info, etc.
Some "experts" like to argue that having multiple domain names is bad, as search engines will recognise each site individually and see the content of the site as duplicated content which will devalue the site. This is true, but only if some rules are not followed.
The truth of the matter is that it is okay to have multiple domain names all pointing to a single website, but you do need to use one of the domain names as the preferred domain name - that is, one of the domain names should respond with a HTTP 200 OK message when a HTTP request is sent to it.
The additional domains need respond with HTTP 301 REDIRECT responses. When the additional domains do not respond with HTTP 301, and respond with HTTP 200 then you have a problem.
If you are have your own web server, it is easy to set up multiple domains in the correct way by adding alliases to your preferred domain. If you configure your aliases on your preferred domain name, the web server will then respond with HTTP 301 responses on HTTP request for the additional domain names - which is good for us.
I have another thought on the subject however. Instead of wasting the domain names, why not setup additional blogs related to the same niche with the aim to target the traffic to your main website? It will be hard work to get all of your pages to rank well, but if you could pull it off - imagine having 5 or more of your own websites on the first results page of google for your keywords...
What are your thoughts on this subject? Please leave a comment and let me know.
Update: Search egines are very clever nowadays so the different domains will need to have different IP addresses and totally unique content. I wonder if search engines do whois lookups in order to ascertain if they belong to the same person...
The importance of your website’s speed
One aspect of web design normally does not take a very high priority with most website owners. This is can be a problem, especially since it is widely believed that your website's load time actually does affect how your website is rank in most major search engines.
Search engines are increasingly indexing web pages in a more human way. Human beings are impatient by nature and most of us just hate having to wait for a web page to load.
If you don't rely on organic search engine results, consider your website visitor's experience. Would a visitor prefer to use your website or will he get frustrated and move on to a competitor's page?
There is unfortunately no definitive checklist on how to achieve good search engine rankings as these "checklists" are closely guarded secrets. We can however piece together good tips, tips that have been tried and tested and implement them in our own websites in order to find our own checklist.
The speed of your website is definitely something to consider, whatever. It can only be good for you to ensure your websites perform at top speed all of the time.
Read more on this subject:
How Does Website Loading Speed Affect Google Ranking?
How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line