What Works? Blogging 101?

Yes and it is the most important thing to consider when writing a content. Google keyword tool will only change the name and some functions but the keyword tool stays almost the same.

Not really sure what you mean. Are you referring to internal SEO/backlinking? If so, this is still important and has nothing to do with Google penalty.


Social signals is the most important thing to consider in today's SEO...
Not as effective as before and I don't want to waste my time working with them especially Squidoo.

People have different thought about SEO after panda/penguin updates. The most important thing to consider is writing quality that people love to read..

Keyword research is everything man. I personally use Longtail pro because it enables me to filter out a bunch of keywords I don't want. It dominates, trust me.

Nope, but you need to know what you're doing. Right now high PR links combined with some pillowing campaigns on SEnuke or GSA are working well.

Still hippy ass shit if you ask me. Google uses a linking algorithm and please, if they were to start offering more weight to social signals, SEO would become even easier. Everyone would just go and buy a bunch of likes and comments for $5.

They won't hurt you, but they won't do much as far as giving you pages a boost up the rankings. You gotta start leveraging page rank and combine that with a ton of lesser quality backlinks that help vary up your anchor text.

There are some guides out there, but no one is really doing a good job of explaining a step by step process.

I literally just wrote up the process I started using a few months back in this thread - http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...-strategy.html

I'm at $7k/month and climbing. It's super basic once you find a list of keywords that are easy to rank for.

Hope that helped man.

I can't answer your third question at all, but will try the other four.

Only to people who want businesses that depend on search engine traffic. (There's a high turnover of those people, in forums like this: quite often their businesses don't survive for the long term. :p )

As a full-time affiliate marketer, it almost doesn't matter to me at all, and I haven't done any real keyword research for over a year.

SEO is certainly something I'd urge you, as a fellow affiliate marketer, to stay away from, as much as you reasonably can. I advise you not to put your time, effort and energy into trying to attract "organic SERP's" traffic, for two main reasons: first, it's very precarious and makes your business Google-dependent, and any business that's Google-dependent is no more than one algorithm-change away from a potential accident (or even a potential disaster), as so many Warriors have been finding out over the last year or two, some of them to their very great cost; secondly, for me, search engine traffic has been uniformly the worst-converting traffic out of everything I've ever tried in 8 entirely different niches over the whole of the last 4 years - search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often and actually buy anything by far the least often. I admit I do get tons of search engine traffic to all my main sites (just because of all the high rankings I've got, incidentally, from article syndication to relevant sites) but I'd certainly hate to have to make a living from that traffic! Google rankings, in short, are not really much of a "traffic-generating plan" at all: that traffic's very poor quality and often temporary, too. Just reading this forum regularly will convince anyone of that.

The fact that it might happen to be a WordPress site has nothing to do with it at all.

Google will penalize you (if it can work out what you've done, and they're quickly getting better and better at that) for "private blog networks", spammy backlinks, large numbers of backlinks on non-relevant sites, bought backlinks, linkwheels, mass-submitted/automated backlinks, and so on. The type of backlinks for which you're likely to be penalized tend to be poor quality links from non-relevant sites. This sort of backlinking footprint is really easy for Google to detect. For me (and for others, whose SEO books I often read), "private blog networks" would probably be the very top kind of high-risk backlink to avoid. And anything automated.

No, but they won't benefit you, either, in terms of their backlinks. Of course, that's never been part of their purpose anyway. Article directory backlinks are worthless (and backlinks are not the reason for using Ezine Articles anyway - explained here: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5068872 ). Squidoo external links are all no-follow anyway.

Ezine Articles can be very helpful to people, provided they use it correctly (many people don't!), and don't try to use it to get potential customer traffic to their sites via EZA, and certainly not for the "benefit" of its own backlinks.

This is very good (I'm not an affiliate, but I recommend it simply because there are so many really bad equivalents full of misleading and mistaken and out-of-date "information" that it's nice to be able to recommend a really good one): Affiliate marketing training for beginners

Unique keyword based content added often still works really well. I have lots of WP niche blogs which I post to weekly most sit on the first page for lots ok buying keywords.

Nearly all the backlinking I do to the blogs is also relevant content based (No junk).
You have to build the blogs out and make them useful and helpful to your audience, the 3 page sniper type site don’t work well today.

1) Does keyword research matter anymore? If so, what's the best keyword researcher tool out there these days? I hear the Google Keyword Tool is going away.

There isn't a huge difference between Google's Keyword Planner and the Keyword Tool. Personally, I have come to like it a lot because it provides a lot of useful functions for determining your Adwords Campaign.

2) What about links going back to your Wordpress site? Does Google penalize you for them like I'm reading?

Depends on what links you are talking about. Paid links, blog roll links, and press release links are definitely a big no no. You'll have to apply nofollow refs for those types of links.

3) What about Social Signals like Facebook "likes". Are they vital now? If so, with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, etc... What are the most important ones?

Social signals play a minor role in SEO but we can definitely expect to see a growing influence over the next few years.

4) Will articles on sites like EZines, HubPages & Squidoo hurt you? Some seem to think so.

I believe Matt Cutts mentioned at some point that mass article backlinking will do more bad than good.

1. In a sense, yes. Think of what you're writing about first.
THEN...find a low competition keyword that fits in with it.
Use it as naturally as possible and research basic SEO tactics.
Google Keyword Tool is good. I also recommend using a free LSI tool.

2. Nope. In fact, I recommend linking to other pages WITHIN your site...
FROM other pages in your site but only where it works. Don't force it.

3. Sure. Twitter is great for business but for blogs, go with Facebook.
Post your blog's updates to Facebook, pay for sponsored posts, build a fanbase.

4. Not sure about that but I'm not a fan of them. Instead...
Build relationships on forums, do guest posts, and work on quality content.

5. Hopefully you'll get something close to that in this thread.

What works best now is having a product that really solves an issue people need. I would focus on developing this instead of worrying how to promote it i.e. blogging, ezines, hub pages, twitter, etc.

Then here are four threads which may help you ...

What are the best ways to promote click bank products?

Is it a good idea to spend some time on building a mailing list ?

Without Building a List, How Consistent is Your Income from Affiliate Marketing

Does anyone even make money online without an email list?

Exactly the same things that worked well before the Panda and Penguin updates: building relationships with subscribers who respect and trust you, and buy on the strength of your recommendation because they respect and trust you. That's the underlying basis of affiliate marketing.

SEO considerations are hardly relevant at all. I always suggest to people that they shouldn't put time and effort into trying to attract SEO traffic, for two main reasons: first, it's very precarious and makes your business Google-dependent, and any business that's Google-dependent is no more than one algorithm-change away from a potential accident (or even a potential disaster), as so many Warriors have been finding out over the last year or two, some of them to their very great cost; secondly, for me, search engine traffic, in every single one of my niches, has been uniformly the worst-converting traffic out of everything I've ever tried - search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often and actually buy anything by far the least often. I admit I do get tons of search engine traffic to all my main sites (because high rankings for multiple keywords happen to be a minor side-benefit of the main targeted traffic-generation method I use) but I'd hate to have to make a living just from that traffic. If you have a good look round the forum, you'll also see plenty of other Warriors making exactly this point.

Not to me, but I'm an affiliate marketer, so it wouldn't, to me.

I don't use WordPress. But between you and me, you'll never be penalized by Google for natural backlinks from relevant sites (not just "relevant pages"), made without money changing hands, without trying to manipulate Google's ranking algorithms, and without using any kind of mass/automated submissions for them.

No. But articles on HubPages and Squidoo probably won't help you, either. This might help: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post8109462

Having additional copies of articles in EZA can help you if you use it only for its intended purpose (i.e. not for backlinks or to try to generate traffic from EZA to your own site) and know how to make sure that your potential customers never find those copies. Explained in detail in posts #2 and #6 of this thread: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5068872