I’m actually writing this post as a point of reference to an Email I got. The details of the email are private and aren’t important, except that it asks the age old question, what is the absolute fastest way to make money online? I’m a firm believer that online income needs to start out as a supplement to your preexisting income then eventually work its way to a full time gig. Trying to dive right in with some cash you got saved up is a way dangerous move. There are no guarantees here, at least none that I have found. There are however solid investments. There’s nothing more I would love to contribute to this blog than a huge article detailing project investments, but for today we’ll start out with the basics. There are long-term, short-term, and mid-term investments. If your goals include a career making money online you need to focus on long and mid-term investments, while using short-term investments to fund your long term investments. It definitely takes money to make money and the Internet is no exception. So naturally the statement that usually follows a question like what’s the fastest way to make money online is, I only have $__ and i need to figure out a way to turn it into an income I can live off of. This is a scary and all too common question. The best answer is naturally projects that can be categorized as long term slow growth investments, but sometimes life doesn’t allow you the luxury of time. So in that case you need to consider the short term investments that are going to pay out big, and then go balls to the wind with them and see what comes out. So let’s see if I can clear up a tough situation like this for the first time ever without using a single example.

What Is The Absolute Fastest Way To Make Money Online?My answer to this question is Link Injection. Link Injection is simply a process of trying to put in your affiliate links into already established popular sites with preexisting traffic. A more specific example of Link Injection would be Social Site Spamming.

Uhhhg You’re going to talk about Myspace or Craigslist spamming aren’t you?

I could take that approach with this post, but then a few people would try it. They would make a few bucks. Some things would change with their systems and the post would become worthless very quickly. So instead I’d like to take a more generic approach and talk about how to approach any link injection possibility and successfully come out with some serious cash which you can use for your long term investments and to get by on while you’re transitioning into the industry. So let’s evaluate these types of targeted traffic sources and how to exploit them for some quick bucks.

Methodology:1) Pick a social site or link injection source. There are definitely no shortage of them. A quick list might include: Myspace, Craigslist, Google Base, Facebook, Yahoo Answers, Forums, Blogspot.com/Blogger.com, Top Sites Lists, Tagworld, or even chatrooms. Feel free to fill the comments with more.

2) Get out your handy Notepad and start taking notes.

3) Create an account. Be sure to make a note of every form field you fill in as well as the URL to the signup form. Make a note of any captchas or secondary forms you have to fill in. Also be sure to note if you have to confirm your email address or not, or any other account verification methods.

4) Evaluate your market. Try to get a feel of the type of people that use the site and offers that might interest them or at least convert well. For this step it’s perfectly acceptable to simply write down, “General Idiots-dating offers.”

5) Find a niche that can fit a large majority of the users. The best advice I can give for this is to “be useful.” For instance if you’re attempting some link injection on a site that helps people with problems consider things like the tools and utility niches. A good formula to follow will be (total_visitors-percentage_not_interested_in_niche) * conversion_rate * $commission_per_conversion = $income.

6) Find an affiliate offer that you can promote. Try to find one that is inconspicuous. You will want one that you can promote discreetly while helping people. Finding a high converting offer is important but consider the fact that you will be getting an absolutely huge amount of traffic to that offer, so the discreetness of the offer will be quite a bit more important. So don’t just go for a random porn and webcam sex offer. Yeah, I caught you didn’t I

7) Log back into your account and manually go in and attempt to make a single post or attempt to get your affiliate offer in there. You may need to stuff some interesting text or instructions around it. You’re single goal is to get that link to stick. Hell your ultimate goal is to get people to thank you for the link. If you got that you got ultimate link injection stickiness. At the very least make your link interesting, trick them if you have to just make them want to go to your link and see what’s there.

8) Do some further testing. Make notes of how long your link sticks, make notes of how many people see the link and how many click through and how many actually convert. Try to get some kind of feel for how big you are going to take this in order to make the money you are needing. It’s not a bad idea to work your way from the bottom. I personally like to make the link as discreet and hidden as possible, see how long it sticks. Then start making it more and more “in your face” with each attempt. Make a log of the results of each attempt. You will want to find the optimal medium. The point at which the link will grab the most attention while sticking for the longest. From there it’s just a matter of tweaking with the creative to get it to convert better once they do click the link.

9) Repeat the entire process in it’s entirety. Once you found your groove and know exactly the results you want it’s time to write your pseudo code. Pseudo code is simply a very simplistic way of describing a process. If it helps, think about describing exactly what you want done to an infant. The more details the better. From there rewrite your pseudo code and replace everything you would need to specify such as your account info and link info with user input tags. It’s very important to specifically what information you are willing to donate to the process. The rest will ideally be automated.

10) Find a programmer. As you are probably starting to realize by now, doing this all by hand is not a very efficient use of your time. Give your pseudo code to the programmer and work out your payment details. Decide in advanced how much you are willing to pay. If you are incapable of paying anything to get a program made, you have two options. Either do it by hand until you can afford it, or learn how to code it yourself. You could also make some form of bargain or trade. A lot of times you will be bombarded by pre-made publicly available programs that are already providing nearly what you were wanting to do. This isn’t a bad option to help you get started until you get your own custom program made, but by rule I never rely on pre-made programs. If they exist, then they are used. If they are used then they will become worthless quickly. Therefore they are a bad investment. As much of a pain in the ass as it seems, custom made is the only way to go when you’re link injecting. Lastly, make sure your program or script allows for proxy use.11) Talk to your account manager. Make some form of contact with your account manager for your affiliate program. If you are producing some volume or have a good idea of the volume you will be producing work out some form of deal with him. Get some better rates. You’re goal is to make quick big cash. More the better.

12) Get out while the going is good. This is the most important step and unfortunately the most ignored. Your gut will tell you when to get out of a soon to sour market. Listen to it NOT the money. Understand that you are making a short term investment. I see so many people fall through the cracks like that. They do a bit of link injection on a certain network. They think they found their golden goose and they hammer it as hard as they can. They spend all their money thinking it will just keep pouring in faster than they can spend it forever. It’s such a sad and all too common mistake.

13) Understand your investment. I have a firm rule I stand by with my business that has never failed me. My short term investments pay for my long term investments. My long term investments pay me. Never the other way around. I know this is hard but consider it mandatory for your own good. Whatever link injection method you are doing it will not last forever. So any money it makes needs to go to stuff that will grow your income overtime.It’s okay to pocket a few bucks for yourself to get by on, but not for one moment think; I am now making 4-5 figures a month or day or whatever, Yay for me! It’s a false sense of security. If you really want to make online income your full time job you will need a good grasp on this concept.

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This was originally a guest post over at Net Business Blog. It’s been over a month so I reposted it here for preservation sake. Here’s the original Comments. Enjoy!

Hello everyone. This is your captain speaking. First I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Eli from BlueHatSEO.com. I do a little SEO here and there when needed. It’s not everyday that someone like Matt offers you an opportunity to do a guest post on one of the best internet business blogs on the net like NetBusinessBlog. So I’d like to start off by expressing how extremely honored I am for the chance to write this post and demonstrate a few things to the NBB’s community. Writing about the business aspect of SEO is not something I get a chance to do very often so I think this is a great opportunity to talk about what I think is one of the toughest business transitions in the industry. The move from affiliate to full blown E-Commerce publisher.

The reason why I say that E-Commerce is the toughest transition to make is because if you’ve ever attempted it, whether you were successful or not, you find out very quickly why it’s called the big boys club. In the affiliate market industry you have several people above you. First the manufacturers. Then the suppliers.. Next the E-commerce sites. Lastly the affiliate network. Everyone above you wants you to succeed. Your success means their success. In the E-Commerce world the model of authority changes. It is just you and the manufacturer. The manufacturers want you to succeed but not so much that it hurts their real cash cows, the local retailers who will spare no time complaining about their online competition. Frankly you are nothing more than a necessary pain in the ass. In that spirit the manufacturers use their biggest asset, the suppliers/distributors, to put up barriers so the average Joe can’t just jump into the business. You go through the suppliers and the suppliers make sure you don’t upset the manufacturers. Understand that to them it’s fine to field complaints about places like Tigerdirect or Walmart being too price competitive. You just laugh and say yeah that’s them! Fielding questions about some guy/girl in a bathrobe out of their house is a different form of headache for the manufacturers. A headache they are not willing to accept. So what about the average Joe? How do we break into the business?

First understand that I’m going to explain in deep detail how, but that the information I’m telling you does not come from lots of research and reading. It doesn’t come from learning from other people and attending conferences, nor lots of personal success or luck. Instead it comes from tons upon tons of failures. I’m too embarrassed to say how many failed E-Commerce sites I have laying around on my servers in ratio to successful ones. Let us just say the numbers aren’t pretty. I learned the true secrets the hard way and in an effort to help you not do the same I present to you this guide.

The Niche

The obvious first step is to pick your niche. You should be an expert on this by now. So this step should be easy right? Sorta not really, this is where the most average Joe’s fail. When searching for niches as an affiliate marketer you look for easy to sell items that have low competition for their keywords. In E-Commerce its exactly backwards. You’re looking for those products that are seemingly impossible to sell online with extremely high competition for their keywords. I’ll explain why. The natural Internet nerd like ourselves wants to sell something we like or use ourselves. For instance computer parts or electronics. You can easily find long tailed phrases with low competition and get your hands on lots of products to ship. However, you are force to compete with everyone else. If you think you can score the same margins and prices as places like Newegg or CDW you are kidding yourself. They will absolutely crush you and leave barely anything left for the rest of the competition to wipe with. I hate to be blunt about it, but that’s the harsh reality of the situation. Instead do some retail research around town. Try going to a local mall and start writing down every product you see that would possibly have a big gross margin(the dollar amount between your buying price and selling price) that you think might be difficult to find online. You will be shocked at where you find these products. They aren’t on the bottom shelves at large retail outlets they are typically hidden in specialty shops.

After you have compiled your list ask yourself some questions about the products. I’m going list an example. Please don’t take it literally because I have done no actual product research on it. I’m strictly using it as a superficial point of reference. Lets assume you walked into a kite shop. So now we have a potential product to sell, kites.

1) Does this product potentially have a high gross margin? Yes, I would imagine kites would have a high gross margin because they seem fairly cheap to make and yet certain ones like two stringed kites sell for very expensive.

2) Does this product potentially have a MAP price(minimum advertised price allowed by the manufacturer)? Kites possibly do but more than likely don’t because kite shops are sparsely located in places where kite flying is popular like coast lines. *Products with MAPs in place are very good for starting in ecommerce because they allow you to get the product cheap, and still be able to compete with your prices against the heavy competition.

3) How hard will it be to get my hands on this product? With kites I would imagine it would be pretty hard. There probably aren’t very many kite distributors, and the few around are probably big enough to service the entire country.

4) Is this product easy to find and buy online? One search on froogle for the word “kite” gives me only 36k results. By comparison yeah I’d say its pretty hard to find the right kite online. *The harder to find a product the better. It means there is probably loads of information about it, but few selling it. Meaning, if you manage to get your hands on some product fulfillment; competition will be easy to deal with.

5) Are there plenty of variations of this product? Yes there are many many different types and shapes of kites. *Variations are a good thing, it means you may possibly be the only etailer to sell a particular model that a customer may be looking for. It also means your website will be large enough to draw enough traffic to convert. People may come to your site looking for one model or specific product but then decide on another while browsing your site.

Fulfillment and Shipping

Next define a specific plan for fulfilling your orders and shipping methods to your customers. You have several options to pick from.In-House Inventory – You buy the products directly from a distributor or manufacturer and then ship them to your customers yourself. This has several obvious upsides and downsides. On the upside, since you are for sure purchasing the products you can bargain for cheaper prices and suppliers are more willing to respond favorably. Storing the products yourself also allows you exact control over your own inventory. The downside of course is that this piles quite a bit of work upon yourself. You have to have space for all the product. Likewise you have to manage your own inventory counts and personally ship the products yourself. A lot of people in the industry have done very well with this method, but don’t expect to be an overnight success without a ton of work on your part. It’s best to build up to your own inventory not start out there.

Private Manufacturing – You can cut a contracted deal with a person you know who invented something and have them make and ship the products for you. You just make the sales and inform them of the orders. This is ideal because it allows you the benefit of exclusivity to a product. The downside is of course the reliability. Since they are your only sole supplier if they take off or quit you are still responsible for their actions and your business is instantly doomed. You could do this in mass, so if one flakes out you can just drop their products and continue selling others, but then you are dealing with N times the number of headaches. I personally have gotten many offers from people wanting to cut deals like this with me. Just as a preference I would never go with this method despite seeing others around me become very successful doing it.

Drop Shipping – This is the golden nugget that gets most people started in E-Commerce. Drop shipping is where a distributor cuts a deal with you to handle the product fulfillment to your customers for you. They carry the inventory you just notify them of the orders and they ship directly to your customers for you. Besides not having to carry your own inventory, this has the added benefit of cutting your shipping costs. Instead of having to pay for the products to be shipped to you then have to pay to ship them to your customers. You just pay the shipping from the distributor to your customers directly. Likewise you also get a much larger inventory at your disposal. Typically distributors carry very large volumes of the products they carry because they have access to the manufacturers directly. You essentially get access to that entire inventory. You also get access to much larger brand names that people are likely to look for and recognize.

Blind Drop Shipping – Blind drop shipping is exactly like drop shipping except the distributor also agrees to ship the product to the customer with your company name on the package instead of theirs. This way there is no confusion on where they bought the product from. This helps dramatically with drawing return customers back to your site.

Drop Shipping

For our kites example we are going to attempt to score a drop shipping or blind drop shipment deal. Like I mentioned, drop shipping is probably the most attractive option for people wanting to get into the business. Unfortunately, it is also the reason why most fail. This is simply because drop shipping is an ideal solution made up of smoke and mirrors. Remember what I said. Manufacturers do not want the average Joe getting into E-Commerce, at least not successfully anyways. It is bad for overall business. So drop shipping is a solution for them to turn affiliate marketers with grandeur dreams of E-Commerce right back into affiliate marketers. That is essentially what you are doing after all. So bear in mind that the illusion of the perfect world drop shipping preaches isn’t what it seems. If you follow the conventional path you will make the conventional mistakes and fail like everyone else. So let’s evaluate these traps and come up with a slightly complex but workable solution.

Drop Shipping Directories and Sources

There are several directories and sources that are specifically setup for people wanting to find distributors that are willing to do drop shipping. One of the most notable is World Wide Brands. This is a nice solution. Distributors that specialize in providing drop shipping and blind drop shipping can sign up and people can find them and directly apply to promote their products through the website’s application process. They also are very good at weeding out the fake distributors through a screening process. Sometimes people get the sneaky idea to pretend to be a distributor. They buy from another distributor, jack up the prices and then drop ship for others under the illusion that they are a genuine distributor. The people selling their products get screwed because the prices are so high and they have so many people selling the same products that it makes it nearly impossible to sell while maintaining a net margin for yourself. However, while this trap is taken care of for you through their screening process you are still stuck selling the exact same products as everyone else for nearly the same prices and very little margins. This is because distributors that specialize in drop shipping typically only sell products that the manufacturers are happy to get off their hands and don’t mind online competition. For their pain of having to deal with an automated drop shipping system and the extra cost of having thousands of clients these drop shippers also tend to raise their own margins and lower yours. This draws some negativity to your ultimate goal, but keep in mind that many of your sales will be from people that come to your site looking for one product and end up buying another. So its not a bad idea to keep the drop shipping directories on the back burner to help fill your finished E-commerce site and supplement its product count later on. Another trap to note with drop shipping sources are the sources that claim to manage the entire process themselves. You pay them to join and they supply you with a generated website and automatic inventory management system. This seems like a cool idea because then you have no actual work to do yourself. They offer to manage the product listing, the hosting, and the payment processing after all, but keep in mind that this is an all too common scam. When searching for a drop shipper its always a good policy to remember; Anyone who wants YOU to pay them to sell THEIR products is a scam. There is no exceptions to this rule no matter how attractive the offer.

Real Distributors

Alrighty, now that we have eliminated all the scams and nearly every possibility to break into this business without carrying your own inventory lets talk about attempting the seemingly impossible. We are going to attempt to contact and setup a relationship with a real big time distributor. We are going to do this tactfully and even to do it through the actual manufacturers. We are also going to convince this distributor to change their entire system for us and to drop ship for us. This will be easier than it seems but at the same time keep in the mind the ultimate goal of selling the products no one else is allowed to sell online at the absolute highest margins and price competitiveness. Hang on to your seats we’re going to the promise land.

The Process

1) Build a beautiful E-Commerce site of the products you are wanting to sell. For our kites example we will build the best looking kites website and fill it with fake products. It would be easiest if you got an open source shopping cart system such as OS-Commerce and then heavily modify it as well as add in your own custom template. Distributors look at a lot of websites related to their products on a daily basis. They should be very well versed in the sites available out there so it is important to make one that will visually impress them.

2) Make a list of recognized brands for your niche. Don’t worry about availability. Just focus on building a big list of brand names. For our example we will make a list of all the major kite brands.

3) Get a business license. This is a mandatory step. You will never even have a chance to talk to a proper distributor if you don’t have a valid business license and bank account. Also, get a credit card or bank card in your business name. The best advice I can give you is to do everything possible to appear like a legitimate long standing business. It is also helpful to get your own business phone. Every detail will matter. You are now a legitimate successful business no matter what the IRS says.

4) Take your list of brands and call all the manufacturers. Contact the sales department. Once you are in the sales department say your name and what company you are from as well as your city and state. Say you are interested in finding a distributor that will supply their products. Before they get a chance to forward you on tell them you would like to speak to the regional sales manager for your area. For instance if you live in the North East. Ask to speak to the North East Regional Manger of Sales or an equal. From my experience the regional managers are very good at micro managing business relations with the distributors in their area and are the absolute best person to talk to when wanting to find premo distributors.

5) Once you get a hold of the regional manager SELL SELL SELL. If you are a timid person now is the time to let the bad ass business person inside shine through. The only reason you are talking to this person is because someone in his company said he was a very good person to talk to. You show him a lot of respect but at the same time let him convince you to go with one of his distributors. A good way to get the ball rolling on this is to ask him what is his BEST distributor in his area. Feel free to embellish and let him know you are from a major E-commerce development company and allow him to sell you on a specific distributor. After that is finished politely request some personal information from him. One of my patented moves is to say something like, “Well great I’m looking at their website now they seem pretty good. If you don’t mind me asking you for your personal opinion since you seem to really know what you are doing. Who would you recommend I talk to at that company? We move a lot of products and are in constant communication with our suppliers and I would really like to know who you would recommend in their company to work with. I always enjoy working with a person who’s really motivated and a go getter when it comes to their clients.” This is usually when the regional manager will lower his professional tone and really start to like you. He will usually give a personal recommendation (which will become a very important piece of leverage later). When he says something like, “Alrighty, just my opinion, but you should definitely talk to *James* over there. He is really smart and motivated.” I just used the name James as an example, but just be sure to write down the persons name, the distributor name and their contact information as well as the regional manager’s name.

6) Call up the distributor immediately after getting off the phone with the manufacturer’s regional manager. Don’t bother introducing yourself to the receptionist just ask directly for the person he made the recommendation for. “Hi James, my name is ___ I am from *yourcompanyname*. We’re a large E-commerce development company in your area. I was just speaking to *regional managers name* the regional manager over at *manufacturers name* about you guys. He seems to think highly of you and recommended I talk to you personally about buying some products.” Remember your goal is to convince this guy to not only push your account through but to agree to drop ship for you. At this point all he knows is the guy in charge of one of the company’s coveted manufacturers and whom his boss has weekly conference calls with and flies out to have lunch with just made a personal recommendation to speak with him. For all he knows you may be golfing buddies with him. At this point he’s blind, he just knows he better seal this deal with you as if his christmas bonus depended on it. So let him know you’re not interested in the details but at the same time make all the important requests. “Are you guys capable of drop shipping for me?” “How about blind drop shipping?” When he responds with a sure we can probably make that happen then stop the deal making and rush the rest of the process. “Alrighty, well that sounds great. I’ll talk to my lead developer and have him start integrating your product lines into our system.” “Go ahead and fax me an account application and any paperwork I need to get signed. Don’t bother with a credit app. We pay for everything up front when the order goes through using our credit card, but go ahead and send over the paperwork so you can put that information on file. I’ll give you a call when everything has been taken care of okay? Here’s my personal number if you run into any questions.” Right before you hang up remind him to send you a list of his product lines (all the brands his company sells). Then end it right there! Try not to get into talking about your site or your business, although if he asks happily show him your website. Either assure him it already gets lots of business or assure him it will very soon because your company never fails at producing a successful E-Commerce site. If he is quick on his toes he will start warning you about his company’s “protected lines.” Protected lines are the brands that only his company is allowed to distribute in their region. All others are restricted by the manufacturer to never touch their products. These protected brands tend to also have very tough restrictions on selling online, which typically means absolutely not. Not in a million years. You are a jerk for asking. Divert any questions he may ask as to “which lines are you interested in selling?” “Well James I’d have to look at what you have. Go ahead and send me a list of your product lines and I’ll have my PT (product tech) look over them. I don’t know a damn thing about kites. All I know is how to sell them.” If you get too much into that conversation it will result in him telling you all the brands you aren’t allowed to sell and eventually end in you only selling a few kite strings.

7) Fill out all the paperwork and have it faxed or emailed back by the end of the day. You are not a company that screws around. When you say something will get done it gets done immediately and you expect the same from everyone you work with. This is very important because when you assure him that your site will produce them enough sells to compensate for the bother of them drop shipping for you and only you, you are not really assuring him, you are TELLING him. It is important for him to adjust to the fact that everything you tell him gets done at a pace he’s not accustomed to with his typical brick n mortar retailers. Immediately after the paperwork is sent call him (or have another person call) and let him know it has been sent and you are waiting on him to push the application through the approval process. If he or the credit department is slow to push the applications through be sure to let him know that you are slightly inconvenienced by that.

Be prepared. If they are a big enough distributor with a big enough line of protected products they WILL investigate your company. Here is what you know about your company. You’re business license is new because you either switched names, management, or states recently. Your company has little or no credit because you pay for every product and order up front with your bank card. You personally have great credit, and anyone else who signs the paperwork has great personal credit. If this doesn’t apply to you I’m sorry to say this business isn’t for you. Big time distributors will need you to prove that you are responsible enough to pay your own bills before you start managing 5-6 dollar figures worth of orders a day. Yes, you eventually will be doing that kind of volume if you are the only one selling those lines. Those big protected lines are the products consumers want, many don’t have places in their cities that sell them so they have to buy them online. If you are one of the only ones selling them you will make sales. Lots and lots of sales.

8) Once you get the account approved talk to him about the protected lines. Email him a list of all the brands you would like to sell through your website. Don’t ask him to look through the list and figure out what ones you are allowed to sell. Most if asked will just send you back a very short list of the ones they are sure of. Your goal is to sell every single product they have. If he tells you no, that’s okay just ask what you have to do to sell that brand. Sometimes they will require someone in your company to be certified in either the installation of or repair of their products. Sometimes they will require authorization through the manufacturer. He will happily handle all this for you. Just fill out any applications you can and get as many products as you can, especially the protected ones. There are many protected lines you will not be successful in obtaining authorization to sell. For those I have had some success in directly contacting the manufacturer and getting authorization to sell a few of their products. This works great because if you show your responsibility there you can eventually move up to new protected models as they come out. Just take whatever you can get. Every product is potentially worth thousands in profit a month.

9) Finish the website. Get all the products in and remove the fake ones that were in there for show. Then repeat the first 8 steps and get more and more distributors and products. Try to load up your website as much as possible. Put in useful and good information about each product and make it as high converting as possible.

10) Advertise! Advertise! Advertise! Make sales. Make sales anyway you can. If your site is not performing within the first month buy some of your own products for your relatives across the country. Just do whatever you can to produce some results. Some great ways to advertise include joining an affiliate network. One of the cheapest is Share A Sale. The cheap ones are good to start off on. Then as your site grows you can move on to bigger ones like Commission Junction and shopping.com. Also be sure to utilize free advertising such as Froogle. Just be sure to produce some kind of results.

11) Rank for your terms. Pick a recognizable term for your site. For instance we will want to rank for “Kites.” Follow basic SEO and do some of Matt’s brilliant ideas that he shares to be sure you rank. This is a great way to make sales but its also quite a bit more than that. When finding distributors in the future it gives you a bragging right. Tell them to search for Kites on Google. When they see your site in the top 10 they will KNOW that you make sales and work hard to get your business. This also works for your current distributors that have locked you out of too many items and/or are being difficult to give you custom pricing. Say something like, “Hey, I’m making tons of sales through these other distributors because this last week we started ranking for Kites in Google. We are having a hard time keeping these products in stock. You got to help me out and give me some more products to sell or give them to me at cheaper prices so I can compete in the price market.” Just saying that gets them pacing around their cubicle while talking to you on the phone.

12) Follow up with your distributors. Always be pushing down your own pricing on the products. If you are exclusive and picked a good niche pricing won’t matter too much, but it always helps to convince the customers that your more expensive item is much much better than the cheaper one your competitors are selling but only slightly more expensive. View your distributors’ account managers as your personal friends and business partners. Once you are in they are there to help you succeed. They want you to sell! If a competitor is just stomping out your prices show them their website and ask them why. They have direct contact with the manufacturers and they will investigate and figure out why they are able to get the products to their customers for cheaper than you can. They also love investigating etailers that are selling products they aren’t supposed to. If a competitor is selling a product line that is protected; they can figure out who they are getting it through and whether or not they got authorization through the manufacturer to actually be selling them. If they don’t have the proper authorization the manufacturer will sick the rabid legal dogs on them until they take the products off their website. They are like your own personal guardian angels of your business. It is their job to protect you and take down anyone trying to stop you from being successful, or at least get you to a competitive level. All you have to do is continuously produce sales and make them as hassle free for the processing as possible. Every distributor has its price. No matter how much of a pain the fulfillment is, if you produce enough sales/day or convince them that you will they will happily work with you and do anything it takes to help you succeed.

Anyways, I hate to cut it off but I am making this post entirely too long. There is so much in this business that it’s tough to fit it all in only one guest post. There are hundreds of other ambiguities and dilemmas you will face in the business. However, this should get you the solid start you will never read about anywhere else. If you follow closely and make sure to understand all the traps and advice I’ve given you are sure to succeed. I understand that there are many articles that claim to be the “secret” to e-commerce, but I figured Net Business Blog was the only suitable home for the one and only post that really does dispel the secrets and information that no experienced e-commerce professional wants people to know. I’d like to thank Matt for this opportunity and allowing me to write for you guys. Feel free to fill his comments with your questions and I will happily answer any I am experienced enough to answer. Welcome to the big boys club

Good Luck and Keep Reading!

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I’m going to assume you read the title wrong because making money off draft blog posts would just be ridiculous.

When you’re making a post on your WordPress blog you have three options under the Post Status. You can have your post be Published, which means its live and public, or you can have it as a draft which means you’re still working on it or lastly private meaning only you can view it. Draft posts have their obvious purpose. It allows you to do one of those nasty habits you pick up in college called proof reading. Other than that they really have no significant value. However there is a sneaky way to make some decent reoccurring cash off them. Yes, I’ll be happy to show you how!

First, in an effort to better my posts I’m going to experiment and take a different direction with my explanation of how to do this tactic. I get an abundant supply of people telling me my methods are too hard to follow. Perhaps its my engineering book method of explaining it. I find it easier to learn that way but perhaps it’s not for everyone. I would like them to be; so instead of posting the usual processes and methodologies I’m going to tell you a story.

Once upon a time…There was a studly Internet marketer named Eli. Eli loved spam blogs. He loved them so much he called them Splogs because he talked about them so much the words kind of meshed into an incomprehensible word that for some reason everyone understood. On this particular gloomy day our lovable hero Eli was making a Splog to test the stickiness of trackback links. Eli knew all about trackback links and how they were useful for notifying other blogs when he posted a link about their individual posts through a link that showed up in their comments. He was also well aware of the fact that most blogs post a special url on each post that you can use to post your trackback links on. With this information in his pocket he was equipped to perform an experiment, an experiment in figuring out a way to increase the percentage of bloggers that would keep his trackback link live in their comments.

This was no ordinary experiment. Danger and wacky misadventures were inevitable. He first tried sending unrelated trackbacks to older posts from abandoned blogs with some success. However he wanted new posts from big time blogs that are updated consistently and he desperately wanted some of their continuous traffic stream. This posed a problem for our young marketer. They would always delete them before they could gain enough link value and throughput traffic sufficient enough for ad profit. A worthy adversary. Thinking on his toes Eli started targeting blog posts that were relevant to his desired ads. He then put up a post saying saying something like:

“I just got this new *product name* today from Circuit City. Its really cool and it got some great reviews. Check out *trackback target 1*, *trackback target 2* ….etc. They post some great insight into the *product name* and what you can do with it.”

He then made sure to include NONE of his own ads. This was very risky but hey he was willing to sacrifice for the sake of knowledge. Luckily success! The big time blogs with continuous traffic saw no reason to remove his trackback links. Eli complimented and linked to their blogs with no ads and motive to do so and they were stoked about it.

Eli was beaming with joy. His Splog was gaining in daily traffic from all the trackback links. the more posts he made about this seemed to draw in more daily traffic from the links. Eli frantically upped his post count hoping to duplicate the success a 100 fold. However much to his dismay the success rate of the trackback links sticking went down. The big bloggers would see all his extremely similar posts and delete his trackback. If he wanted to keep his stickiness success rate he was going to have to delete some posts. This was not a reasonable solution and it made him sad. So instead he took all of his posts over two months old and changed their status to “Draft.” This made them not appear on the actual blog but if you went directly to the urls by following a trackback link they were still there in their entire form. In a stroke of genius he also made a few fake posts that made his Splog look legit and put their post date for the next year and made them so they would always be on the main page of his Splog.

Success! Eli was driving in even more traffic to the individual posts because of the sheer volume he could produce without anyone being the wiser. Once a post became 2 months old he would automatically change it to draft mode. Eli also knew that bloggers only checked their trackback links once or twice for legitimacy before forgetting about them. So after 4 months he started replacing his original posts and their links with affiliate links to the individual products. Eli’s Splog continued to get traffic from the trackbacks and each visitor was greeted with a nice affiliate link VIA a snazzy sales page to where they could buy the product. He made much money and lived happily ever after.The End

Story time is over kids. Get back to work.

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If you’re just now joining us we’ve been talking about creating huge Madlib Sites and powerful Link Laundering Sites. So we’ve built some massive sites with some serious ranking power. However now we’re stuck with the problem of getting these puppies indexed quickly and thoroughly. If you’re anything like the average webmaster you’re probably not used to dealing with getting a 20k+ page site fully indexed. It’s easier than it sounds, you just got to pay attention and do it right and most importantly follow my disclaimer. These tips are only for sites in the 20k-200k page range. Anything less or more requires totally different strategies. Lets begin by setting some goals for ourselves.

Crawling Goals

There are two very important aspects of getting your sites indexed right. First is coverage.

Coverage- Getting the spiders to the right areas of your site. I call these areas the “joints.” Joints are pages on the site where many other important landing pages are connected to, or found through, yet are buried deeply into the site. For instance if you have a directory style listing where you have the links at the bottom of the results saying “Page 1, 2, 3, 4..etc.” That would be considered a joint page. It has no real value other than listing more pages within the site. They are important because they allow the spiders and visitors to find those landing pages even though they hold no real SEO value themselves. If you have a very large site it is of the utmost importance to get any joints on your site indexed first because the other pages will naturally follow.

The second important factor is the sheer volume of spider visits.

Crawl Volume- This is the science of drawing as much spider visits to your site as possible. Volume is what will get the most pages indexed. Accuracy with the coverage is what will keep the spiders on track instead of them just hitting your main page hundreds of times a day and never following the rest of the site.

This screenshot is from a new Madlib site of mine that is only about 10 days old with very few inbound links. Its only showing the crawlstats from Feb. 1st-6th(today). As you can see thats over 5,700 hits/day from Google followed shortly by MSN and Yahoo. Its also worth noting that the SITE: command is as equally impressive for such an infant site and is in the low xx,xxx range. So if you think that taking the time to develop a perfect mixture of Coverage and Spider Volume isn’t worth the hassle, than the best of luck to you in this industry. For the rest of us lets learn how it is done.

Like I said this is much easier than it sounds, we’re going to start off with a very basic tip and move on to a tad more advanced method and eventually end on a very advanced technique I call Rollover Sites. I’m going to leave you to choose your own level of involvement here. Feel free to follow along to the point of getting uncomfortable. There’s no need to fry braincells trying to follow techniques that you are not ready for. Not using these tips by no means equals a failure and some of these tips will require some technical know-how. So at least be ready for them.

Landing Page Inner linking

This is the most basic of the steps. Lets refer back to the dating site example in the Madlib Sites post. Each landing page is an individual city. Each landing page suggests dating in the cities nearby. The easiest way to do this is to look for zipcodes that are the closest number to the current match. Another would be grab the row id’s from the entries before and after the current row id. This causes the crawlers to move outward from each individual landing page until they reach every single landing page. Proper inner linking among landing pages should be common sense for anyone with experience so I’ll move on. Just be sure to remember to include them because they play a very important roll in getting your site properly indexed.

Reversed and Rolling Sitemaps

By now you’ve probably put up a simple sitemap on your site and linked to it on every page within your template. You’ve figured out very quickly that a big ass site = a big ass sitemap. It is common belief that the search engines treat a page that is an apparent site map differently in the number of links they are willing to follow than other pages, but when you’re dealing with a 20,000+ page site thats no reason to view the sitemaps indexing power any differently than any other page. Assume the bots will naturally follow only so many links on a given page. So its best to optimize your sitemap with that reasoning in mind. If you have a normal 1-5,000 page site its perfectly fine to have a small sitemap that starts at the beginning and finishes with a link to the last page in the database. However when you got a very large site like a Madlib site might produce it becomes a foolish waste of time. Your main page naturally links to the landing pages with low row id’s in the database. So they are the most apt to get crawled first. Why waste a sitemap that’s just going to get those crawled first as well. A good idea is to reverse the sitemap by changing your ORDER BY ‘id’ into ORDER BY ‘id’ DESC (descending meaning the last pages show up first and the first pages show up last). This makes the pages that naturally show up last to appear first in the sitemap so they will get prime attention. This will cause the crawlers to index the frontal pages of your site about the same time they index the deeply linked pages of your site(the last pages). If your inner linking is setup right it will cause them to work there way from the front and back of the site inward simultaneously until they reach the landing pages in the middle. Which is much more efficient than working from the front to the back in a linear fashion. An even better method is to create a rolling sitemap. For instance if you have a 30,000 page site have it grab entries 30,000-1 for the first week then 25,000-1:30,000-25,001 for the second week. Then the third week would be pages 20,000-1:30,30,000-20,001. Then repeat so on and so forth eventually pushing each 5,000 page chunk to the top of the list while keeping the entire list intact and static. This will cause the crawlers to eventually work there way from multiple entry points outward and inward at the same time. You can see why the rolling sitemap is the obvious choice for the pro wanting some serious efficiency from the present Crawl Volume.

Deep Linking

Deep linking from outside sites is probably the biggest factor in producing high Crawl Volume. A close second would be using the above steps to show the crawlers the vasts amounts of content they are missing. The most efficient way you can get your massive sites indexed is to generate as much outside links as possible directly to the sites’ joint pages. Be sure to link to the joint pages from your more established sites as well as the main page. There are some awesome ways to get a ton of deep links to your sites but I’m going to save them for another post.

Rollover Sites

This is where it gets really cool. A rollover site is a specially designed site that grabs content from your other sites, gets its own pages indexed and then rolls over and the pages die to help the pages for your real site get indexed. Creating a good Rollover Site is easy, it just takes a bit of coding knowledge. First you create a mainpage that links to 50-100 subpages. Each subpage is populated from data from your large sites’ databases that you are wanting to get indexed (Madlib sites for instance). Then you focus some link energy from your Link Laundering Sites and get the main page indexed and crawled as often as possible. What this will do is, create a site that is small and gets indexed very easily and quickly. Then you will create a daily cronjob that will pull the Google, Yahoo, and MSN APIs using the SITE: command. Parse for all the results from engines and compare them with the current list of pages the site has. Whenever a page of the site (the subpages that use the content of your large sites excluding the main page) gets indexed in all three engines have the script remove the page and replace it with a permanent 301 redirect to the target landing page of the large site. Then you mark it in the database as “indexed.” This is best accomplished by adding another boolean column to your database called “indexed.” Then whenever it is valued at “true” your Rollover Sites ignore it and move on to the next entry to create their subpages. It’s the automation that holds the beauty of this technique. Each subpage gets indexed very quickly and then when it redirects to the big site’s landing page that page gets indexed instantly. Your Rollover Sites keep their constant count of subpages and just keep rolling them over and creating new ones until all of your large site’s pages are indexed. I can’t even describe the amazing results this produces. You can have absolutely no inbound links to a site and create both huge crawl volumes and Crawl Coverage from just a few Rollover Sites in your arsenal. Right when you were starting to think Link Laundering Sites and Money Sites were all there was huh

As you are probably imagining I could easily write a whole E-book on just this one post. When you’re dealing with huge sites like Madlib sites there is a ton of possibilities to get them indexed fully and quickly. However if you focus on just these 4 tips and give them the attention they deserve there really is no need to ever worry about how your going to get your 100,000+ page site indexed. A couple people have already asked me if I think growing the sites slowly and naturally is better than producing the entire site at once. At this point I not only don’t care, but I have lost all fear of producing huge sites and presenting them to the engines in their entirety. I have also seen very little downsides to it, and definitely not enough to justify putting in the extra work to grow the sites slowly. If you’re doing your indexing strategies right you should have no fear of the big sites either.

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With my last post about Link Laundering Sites we got to go a bit old school. It was a lot of fun, but this time I feel like stepping it up a notch and going a bit more new wave. This time focusing on the money sites, which you can probably guess is my favorite type of site.

The trick to a good money site is its ability to convert, draw traffic, and get indexed. Hmmm… I could of swore I just missed one….Oh yeah! and be automated. This is where Madlib Sites come to the rescue.

What Are Madlib Sites?Madlib Sites are basically the perfect combination of selling a product or offer through through standard SEO using a prewritten madlib and a big frickin’ database. You are probably already familiar with what a madlib is. Its a game kids play where you get asked to name a series of objects off the top of your head. For instance, say a girls name(okay Sally), now say a noun(okay Rock). Then you get a story with a bunch of blanks like *girlsname* jumped over a large *noun*. Then you insert your choices into the blanks where appropriate. So you end up with something like, “Sally jumped over a large rock.” In the SEO world this is typically known as a content rewriter. However rewriting is not what we’re going to be using this technique for. We’re going to use it to sell the users on a targeted product or offer. When done in mass this equates to some serious niche coverage and I’ll explain how.

Lets Get Started1) First we’ll need to pick a broad niche. Lets go with dating. Dating is a nice CPA type offer that tends to convert well if you can throw it in the face of the right type of lonely people. I’d say that fits just about 90% of the people using Google at this moment so lets go for them.

2) Next we’re going to pick some offers. There’s a million and a half blogs talking about how to pick CPA offers so I’m going skip all that rubbish and just go for a good ol’ Singlesnet affiliate offer and possibly an old FriendFinder banner or two.Haha. You probably had no idea Oregon was farming such damn fine honeys did ya?

3) Now we just need to get our hands on a good database. You can find plenty of large databases for sale at public forums like Sitepoint. For this example I’m going to grab a good regional database. A regional database usually contains a bunch of regional information such as city, zip, county, population, local restaurants, gas stations, schools, and other census and GPS information.

4) Next we’ll throw up a site with the general niche as the primary keyword. The main page will give a nice description of the site and how to find local dating. It will then give a directory of all the states. Inside each states subpage will be links to even more subpages of the cities and counties. This is best done through ModRewrite and pulling from the database in an ORDER BY. For instance if the database is organized like:State County CityThen we would have the subpages ORDER BY STATE, then each county subpage would be organized WHERE STATE = $state and so on and so forth for the individual cities. For those of you who don’t live in the United States that basically means we now have one big ass site with thousands of landing pages for each individual city and county.

5) Here comes the fun part, creating our madlib. Using as little of your own words as possible write an entire page about dating in *cityname*. The trick here is to really make it sell your dating offers. Also be sure to use as much of the database content as possible so the pages don’t look like duplicate content. Since I love (pun) this step so much I’m going to write a short example to get started.

-begin madlib page-You look lonely. There now little fella don’t be lonely there are plenty of singles in *cityname*. I realize its tough to meet people in the *countyname* area, but luckily I found *datingsitelink*. I met an awesome *guysname* that worked at *gasstation*. He impregnated me and we moved to Europe where he’s in mergers and aquisitions for a large company. Since then I have recommended all my friends join a good dating site like *datingsitelink*. Here’s a few of my girlfriends who are still living in *city* that joined *datingsitelink*. All three were my best friends growing up and going to *localhighschool*.The best advice I can give for scoring big points white dating in *cityname* is to pick a nice romantic restaurant. I’d recommend you check out *restaurant1* or possibly *restaurant2*.-End madlib page-

That was fun wasn’t it! Hehe. Just remember that there is a perfect balance you must find. So feel free to play around with your madlibs before going live with it. Use as much of the database as possible in order to escape duplicate content penalties, yet at the same time using enough of your own words to really sell the product thoroughly. Also don’t forget to plaster the margins with banners and advertisements for the offers but not enough to distract them heavily from the text because its the text that’s going to drive the conversion through.

6) Next we’ll need to write out the individual pages script for each city and county using the madlib. For you noncoders, don’t worry about hiring a coder to do this, its so incredibly simple. Learn a tiny bit of php or perl (like some echo or print functions) and a few SELECT and sorting commands in MYSQL and you should have it up with hardly any effort.

So now you got yourself a clean 40,000+ page lean mean selling machine. Now you just got to use your Link Laundering Sites to generate some heaving deep linking to your landing pages to help them get indexed and ranking. From this point on its all about SEO volume. It’s also good to notice the huge variants in the niches, offers, and available databases that can be used using the Madlib Site technique. Although not alone, regional is a great example because regional is so expansive and yet contains VERY targeted traffic. The volume also follows suite. There are a lot of golden niches that can be found when you combine a large niche with a large targeted database. You may be shocked what what you find. Not convinced? Do a little keyword research on “online dating Louisville”.Those of you that are still wondering how people are managing to make to make thousands a day online and consistantly through the fads I hope you are starting to come to an understanding

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