2010 was a memorable year in my IM carrier. What was magical about it was the fact that I had initially planned on achieving these goals in 2013 but they happened in 2010.


Currently I’m in grad school and I’m graduating in 2012. I didn’t think I could maintain a GPA of 3.9/4.0 and achieve my IM goals before graduating. But I was WRONG!


I have learned a ton from Warrior Forum (both free information and paid WSOs) and I thought it would be terribly wrong if I didn’t give anything back to the forum.



What's below this point is what I wrote back in March 2011. Some of the details may have changed, but the basic principles remain the same even as of January 2012.

All of above was from free traffic. Currently I have over half a dozen #1 rankings on Google and another dozen or so elsewhere on the first page. Most of them are similar to sniper sites with an average of about 4-5 posts. Two of them are larger sites with multiple rankings for various different long tail keywords. These two larger sites have about 30 - 80 posts in them.


The video below shows the products for which I earned a commission on Black Friday



My income comes from ClickBank, Commission Junction and Amazon (and like $50/month from adsense).

If you can't find all the videos, here is my YouTube channel where you will be able to watch all the videos


I intend to share my on page and off page SEO strategies in this thread. However, I STRONGLY believe that my SEO knowledge played a relatively small role in this success. If one asks me to list the factors in the order that they contributed to this success, I think my list is going to be something like this.

1. Positive attitude – I had ABSOLUTELY no doubt in my mind that I was going to achieve these goals
2. Ability to think BIG – think 4 steps ahead
3. Ability to prioritize things (e.g. read ‘Think and Grow Rich’ vs watch American Idol)
4. Realization that knowledge means NOTHING without ACTION
5. TAKING ACTION
6. Ability to take a ‘failure’ as a lesson and to move on – I had many failures when starting off; but I always thought “if others could do it, I could do it better”
7. Sticking to one system instead of jumping from one model to another – there are many ways to skin a cat; but you only need to learn one way to do it
8. On page and off page SEO
9. Picking the right niche market (and then the right product)
10. Providing value to customers and engaging them for better conversions – in some of my review sites, my #1 recommended product gives me a smaller commission than #2 and #3 products. I’ve seen a lot of reviews simply based on the affiliate commission instead of the actual product value, but I just don’t do that.

: My personal belief is that you need to get above 1 - 7 right regardless of what you want to be successful in. This is purely my personal opinion. I have not had a formal education in business or marketing.


I WANT TO REALLY STRESS THE FOLLOWING POINTS. I'm far from perfect. I have many weaknesses. I will list a few of them below.

1. I’m slow – I hate to admit it, but I am. I’ve been wanting to write this since December, but it took me 3 months to get it going
2. I’m not very organized – I have many incomplete websites; I have many domains that I have purchased, but never used; I have got content written for about a half a dozen new websites, but they are still in my inbox (from outsource-rs); for some websites, I don’t have analytics installed so I don’t know the keywords that are bringing them traffic/sales; for some websites that are already on the 2nd page, I don’t have any affiliate links – I’m probably leaving money on the table; I have never used an auto-responder and thus have no list – again I’m losing money in the long run here
3. I can’t multi-task. I can only do one thing at a time. I cannot think about building links while I’m still making a website or studying for an exam.
4. My business model is not the most stable – I have a few sites bringing all my money. Should a couple of them get thrown away from their current positions, I will lose like 50% of my IM income. I am aware of this; but haven’t done a lot about it. I’d rather have 10 sites that make $500/month than 4 sites that make $2500/month (unfortunately my current situation is closer to the latter than the former)
5. I get emotional and attached to my websites – my very first websites were all failures. Either they were in the wrong market, targeted the wrong keywords (with no commercial intent) or they had no significant search volume. Yet I was reluctant to move to a different market or different keyword, instead wasted a lot of time and $ trying to squeeze water from stone.
6. I’m not the most outgoing personality – as a result, my WF avatar doesn’t have my picture, I don’t have a Facebook or Twitter account and as a result I don’t do any social networking (thus missing out on the whole social marketing thing). This is also why I’m not in the IM niche. Come to think of it, I don’t even have my real name in my profile …. maybe one day… soon!!

Because I want you to understand that one does not need to be perfect to be successful in IM. I have many deficiencies. In spite of all those, I have been relatively successful in IM with the few hours (as little as 1 – 3 hours/day) that I can spend on it.


When I started writing this, my plan was to write the whole thread in one go. But it has already taken me like 12 hours (including figuring out Camtasia and making the videos) and I think I have like another 40 hours of SEO that I want to share with you in my head. For example I wish to talk at least about the following broad topics:

1. Keyword research – I’ll be honest here. This is probably my weakest area. I do a few basic things. I don’t think any of that is unique to me. In the early days, I used to be a lot conservative, but now I’m not afraid to compete with big players; so I’m not too concerned about kw research. Currently I’m ranking #12 for a relatively broad keyword: a two word phrase e.g. boys games (just an example) and I’m super excited about it. All the keyword tools that I used told me to keep away from this keyword, but I didn't listen to them. In the early days I would have never gone for this. Instead I would have gone for something like “young boys outdoor games”. (: )
2. Basic and advanced on page SEO – if you’ve been in IM a while and you have multiple #1 rankings, you should probably not waste your time reading my methods. But if you are not there yet, I can assure you that you will learn many things that will do you a whole lot of good if you put them to action. I will probably try and spend a lot of time on the interlinking structure as I don’t see many people addressing this important aspect of SEO enough.
3. Basic and advanced off page SEO – my typical #1 position has fewer backlinks pointing to it than backlinks for #2 and #3 websites combined. This is not true when I outrank Amazon.com or Wikipedia. Because they are authority sites, they get ranked with much fewer or no backlinks. I believe I will be talking about some advanced off page SEO. I also understand that for some relatively new warriors these concepts will be super-advanced while for others (e.g. those like Dan Thies or Leslie Rhodie) my advanced SEO may be basic.

I have many checklists etc. on MS Excel sheets and I will share them with you when I figure out how to upload them to this thread.

By the way I don’t call myself an SEO specialist. I may only know a fraction of what people like Dan Thies or Leslie Rhodie know. But the fact that I have over a half a dozen #1 rankings that earned me my first six figures online probably suggests that I know enough SEO to give a beginner a jump start in their IM carrier.

I’m going to call it a day now and will come back tomorrow to start some SEO. Got to go do something that will actually make me some money

and 4 potential keyword phrases. For some of them 'exact match domains' are still available.

The 5 videos were nearly 1 hour long and kind of cluttered the page. So I took them to a post further down this page. The text added on Day 4 on keyword research should be more concise and organized than the videos. However, the videos address certain aspects that I don't in the text. So if you have time you are encouraged to watch them, but if you don't have the time (like me); the text on Day 4 should give you a good foundation.




The importance of keyword research cannot be emphasized enough. If you pick the wrong keyword, you can spend tons of time and money without a significant return. Sometimes, you get the coveted #1, but you find it has no commercial intent and therefore ZERO $$ (been there done that ).
In the past, I have spent a couple of hours on keyword research (for a business that I’m going to build that will earn me $1000s for life) and paid the price dearly. Only now am I realizing the real importance of it. This is the foundation of your business. Don’t be afraid (or lazy) to spend days on it (instead of hours) if you have to!


Now that I have produced several winners, I don't go in to a LOT of details because I know a few tricks to beat my competition. But if you are starting out, it's best that you pay as much attention as possible to this initial step of your business. Remember, you're building a business, not just a website!



Whether you use manual methods or paid tools, the goal should be to find a keyword with

1. Sufficient search volume
2. A level of competition that you can handle
3. Enough commercial intent (instead of informational)

Different people use different parameters depending on their personal preferences/strengths

1. I personally think you cannot give concrete figures for the search volume. For example, if you were to sell an expensive $1000 item (Jewellery, industrial equipment on Amazon – hint hint!!) with a 7% commission, 10 sales/month is $700. For a laser targeted buying keyword with high commercial intent, a search volume as little as 300/month can give you that $700. The other extreme is also true. So you really have to make a call depending on the product you are promoting.
2. The general consensus is that you should target a search phrase with approximately 3000 exact searches/month. That’s 100 searches/day and will get you 40 visitors/day if you
   1. Obtain #1 position on Google
   2. And if you get traffic ONLY through that single kw – this almost never happens; you are bound to get traffic from all kinds of long tail kw.
3. If you are starting out, it is VERY IMPORTANT that you start on a POSITIVE note. In other words, you don’t want to be targeting a highly competitive keyword just because you want to go with the 3000 searches/month norm. You’d rather target a keyword with only 750 searches/month (exact count), get that #1 position and get some confidence going even if it is only going to earn you $75/month. THIS IS ALSO WHAT I DID at the beginning. Had I targeted a term like ‘Dog Obedience Training’, I may have already given up internet marketing and may not have been in a position to write this post today.(I did right at the beginning, but thankfully I failed fast )

1. What competition? That’s what some SUPER AFFILIATES like James Schramko says! When you get to that level, when you have $1000s to throw away, when you have produced dozens of winners you can say that. But if you are just starting out, I personally think you should pick a keyword with relatively low competition so that you are going to taste success sooner than later.
2. The general consensus is that you should target a keyword with less than 30,000 ‘competition’. Here, ‘competition’ is taken as the number of results you get when you do an exact search for your phrase on Google; e.g. “dog training obedience” (the keyword inside inverted commas). Tools like Micro Niche Finder (MNF), automatically gives this (they call it the phrase count). I rank #1 for a keyword with a phrase count of 8 million. I would personally not worry about it too much. Even if you are just starting out, if all other factors look fabulous, I wouldn’t pitch a keyword just because it has a phrase count of 100,000. OBVIOUSLY, the lower the phrase count the better, but don’t let that be the only guideline for analyzing competition.
3. The phrase count kind of addresses the ‘quantity’ of competition. But what about the ‘quality’ of competition? From what I know, phrase count includes any indexed page that has in its text the keyword phrase you are looking for in that same order. It DOES NOT tell you if these sites have the keyword in the title tag, H1 tag, meta tags, hyperlinks, URL etc. etc. This is what paid keyword tools like MNF and Market Samurai (MS) do. The ‘strength of competition’ figure in MNF (abbreviated as SOC) takes some of the above mentioned parameters in to consideration. MNF shows SOC by using 3 colors: green for easy, yellow for intermediate difficulty and red for very difficult. MS shows a variety of other parameters like number of backlinks, domain age, links from authority directories etc. etc. as well. Again, they use the same 3 colors to show level of ease/difficulty. The more green you see in the competition, the better! These tools (and probably others that I have never used) give you an idea about your competition.
4. Again, if you are starting out, shoot for a keyword with not too much competition both quantity and quality wise. With MNF, go no further than yellow!
5. We are still not done! Once you find the above parameters to be doable, you need to look at the CURRENT rankings for that search phrase. What are the top 4-5 websites? Here are some of the things that come into my head as I’m typing this.
   1. Are they all authority sites with 1000s of indexed pages and millions of backlinks? Even if they are, that doesn’t mean you should keep away from them. Amazon is a perfect example that has high PR, high trust rank (whatever that is), a lot of pages and a lot of backlinks. But people (including myself) beat Amazon easily. However, if a particular authority site is laser targeted to the exact keyword you are trying to target, that may be a different story.
   2. How optimized are their ranking pages for the keyword of your interest?
      1. Title tag
      2. Meta Description tag
      3. Domain name/Page name – URL
   3. You can see all above 3 things on the search results page itself. Now you should also click in to each website and look at the following factors
      1. H1, H2, H3 tags
      2. Keyword richness in content
      3. Images – ALT tags
      4. Hyperlinks etc.
   4. Are the above parameters optimized or not? If they are very well optimized, then you may have a hard time beating them if you are just starting out. We want to find ‘competition’ that is not well optimized.
   5. What about the number of backlinks to the competition? This really doesn’t matter if their on page optimization is not that good. In the example that I show in the video the well optimized #1 non-authority site with an exact match domain (EMD) beats not so optimized authority sites with tons of PR and backlinks (for the search term flip video reviews). However, if their on page optimization is also good and they have tons of backlinks pointing to them, that may be another indication that we should keep away from it. The general consensus is that if your competition has 200-300 backlinks (to the exact page – not the domain), you have a winner. But as I have shown above, you may be able to handle more backlinks than that if their on page factors are not so good.

As you can see, I have explained competition analysis in quite some depth. That’s because it is very important. Sure you can do a lot more analyses and it shouldn’t end here. But for those who are not targeting $5K/month keywords, this should be plenty.

1. Do you see a lot of Google adwords for that search phrase?
2. Does Google Adwords Keywords Tool say there is a lot of competition for this phrase?
3. Are there many affiliate websites already promoting products with this or closely related keywords?
4. Do potential products on ClickBank have a high gravity?
5. Are there products on Amazon? What about customer reviews?
6. Does Detecting Online Commercial Intention: Audience Intelligence: adCenter Labs say it has a high commercial intent?
7. Do you have to convince the buyer (e.g. you can save gas by converting your car to run on water) or is the buyer already convinced/desperate and addicted to the product you’re trying to sell (e.g. product name keywords (PNK)?
8. Are there genuine products that will truly provide a solution to the searcher (e.g. home remedy for acne cure) related to the keyword you are going to target?
9. Is there already a ton of free information available on the web? With physical products, you will not have to worry about this.

I believe I have covered keyword research in sufficient depth for anybody that is not targeting $5K/month keywords. As I said at the beginning, this is a crucial step. Get it wrong and everything downstream becomes more difficult.


Once you have selected your keyword, your next step is domain name selection. I am yet to give up a good keyword because I could not get a good domain. The more keyword rich and more specific the domain name is, easier your ranking process will be.


Obviously, the most preferred domain name is the exact match domain (EMD) on one of the three top level domains (TLD; i.e: .com, .net, .org).

Sticking with the example of flip video reviews, that would be flipvideoreviews.com, flipvideoreviews.net, or flipvideoreviews.org.

I have an exact match .info which is #1. Obviously, I built this site when I was starting my IM carrier about 3 years ago and did not want to spend on the .net or .com (honestly I don’t remember if those were available). My feeling is that I have to continuously give it content (posts) or backlinks and if not it falls in the rankings. I have #1s in .com, .net and .org. I have a feeling those are more resilient. However, I CANNOT come in to a scientific conclusion about this because my sample size is very small and the levels of competition are different among the different websites.

However, my advice as well as the general consensus is that you should stick with the TLDs if you are looking at building a long term business.



What do you do if the EMDs are gone? You have 3 options. Either you look for E-M-D, prefixEMD or EMDsuffix. I’m going to list my personal preferences below. Different people have different points of views. This is mine. I suggest you look at the examples I have given and make an intelligent decision as to what you feel suits best for your particular situation.

• E-M-D : e.g. flip-videoreviews.com (one hyphen is better than two hyphens).

Here are some examples of hyphenated domain names ranking at the top

• EMDsuffix : e.g. flipvideoreviewssite.com, EMDinfo.com, EMDX (flipvideoreviewsX.com – I have personally not used this type of domain. But do a search for tinnitus miracle on Google and you will see EMDV, EMDZ and EMDJ on the first page – EMDV ranks above EMD; EMDbonus and EMDreview rank above EMDZ and EMDJ; I did not spend time to look at their on page or off page optimization)

The big question is OK but what’s the easiest? I’m sorry I don’t know a concrete answer. But what I do know is that it doesn’t matter a lot. What matters is you pick one and get on with it! Since we are going to optimize other factors as much as possible and we have immaculately researched our keywords with in depth competition analysis, we should be able to make up for an non-perfect domain name.


That’s it for today guys. If and when I remember more things, I will be sure to update.


Thank you everybody for the encouraging words.

Update - March 21st

I just answered a question and I think it's a little important

• I have already talked about the kw density, distribution of kw, LSI etc. I’ll talk about the post body under the following aspects: subheadings (H tags); hyperlinks; text decoration; images; tags/meta tags; sticky post; scheduling posts
  • • 1 heading at the top with H1 tags – should contain/or start with the 1ry kw e.g. Kids Karaoke Machine Reviews – Different types of Kids Karaoke Machines available
    • 1 H2 heading with theme kw
    • 1-2 H2/H3 headings with 1ry/2ry kw

One in the first sentence with the 1ry kw pointing to the same post
One with the theme kw pointing to the same post (the way I see it, you’re telling Google “this post is about the 1ry kw, but it is also about the theme kw”)
One with the theme kw pointing to the main domain/homepage and/or different post (again you’re telling Google “that post is about the 2ry kw, but it is also about the theme kw”)
One with a 2ry kw pointing to the relevant post
This way at least 3-4 posts will have an outgoing link and an incoming link with the anchor text as ‘theme kw’
– make the 1ry kw bold once; and italicized or underlined once

I download royalty free images from the web (morgueFile free photos for creatives by creatives and stock.xchng - the leading free stock photography site are good examples) or purchase them from stock image sites and name them with 1ry kw e.g. kids-karaoke-machine-reviews.jpg
Then I insert the relevant image to each post and put the 1ry kw as the ALT tag

I use 2 – one is the 1ry kw and the 2nd is the theme kw – again, I think this tells Google that the whole theme is about our theme kw. However, the general belief is that SEs nowadays don’t give a lot of significance to these tags. But you’re not losing anything by doing this. Some people like to add more tags thinking you will rank for all those kw but another school of thought is that you should keep them focused.
– I set the post optimized for the theme kw as the sticky post. You can do this under Publish --> Visibility --> Public --> Stick the post to the front page
- I schedule the 5 posts to be posted at like day 1, day 2, day 6, day 12, and day 21 or something. I just do whatever comes to my mind at that time, no concrete rules here.

• I nofollow the link to my RSS/subscribe on the homepage. Thesis gives an option in its dashboard for you to nofollow this. There may be plugins to do this for generic WP themes or you can manually add the rel="nofollow" attribute to the code if you can find the place.

• A kw relevant page doesn’t only get links from other relevant websites but also link out to other relevant websites
• So link out to authority sites/pages relevant to your theme – Wikipedia, About.com, CNN etc.
• I usually have this in my footer and make sure I no follow them
• Some people also have a separate page listing these relevant pages

If you haven’t written different meta descriptions for each post, this is the time to do it.
I check everything again and if everything looks good, I then go to Settings Privacy settings and ‘unblock the search engines’.
Affiliate links – I only add my affy links after the SEs have indexed my sites. I would also go and do my product review or whatever also after that.

A lot of people talk about kw research, On Page SEO and Off Page SEO. But not many address the ‘social interactions’ that should take place inside your site. Now the internet is all about interaction right? And you should facilitate this interaction inside your website also by all means. Google recognizes this using bounce rate and retention rate (as far as I know).

gives an idea about how many pages of your site does the typical visitor look at before he/she leaves it? The more the better. But instead, what we do is we give an affy link right on the home page and facilitate his/her leaving our site immediately. What I do is I send them to a 2nd page and that’s where my review is. I say something attention grabbing and ask them to go to this page to read a review of the most popular 3 products or whatever.

is how long they spend on your site. There are two methods that I employ to increase their retention. One is ask them to watch a video the other is asking them to make a comment. This is why I asked you to leave the commenting open during configuring WP. But you have to moderate them and manually approve the comments so that spammers will be kept out. I also respond to the comments and try and get a 2 way communication going. Here is something a little grey hat that I do to get the ball rolling. To encourage people to make comments, I make a controversial comment to begin with. Then I’d wait a couple of day and see if anybody responds. If nobody does, I go in there with another fake identity and responds to the first comment igniting more fire. Usually after that there are plenty of people making comments and the cycle goes on. Not only does this increase the retention rate but I think Google also recognizes that there is a dialogue going on and rewards it by giving higher rankings. I have a couple of sites at the top that outrank huge relevant authority sites with tons of backlinks etc. etc. The only way I can explain how I beat them is the comments on my site. This is a HUGE on page SEO tip. This might even be the most important SEO tip of this whole thread. How many people will use it? I don’t know! But if you do, you are bound to see the rewards.

Another thing you can do is encourage people to retweet, like on FB and Digg your posts. I have tried a couple of WP plugins for this in the past. I'll be honest here. Nobody retweeted, liked or dugg my content I was heart broken. Don't ask me why. May be it's the kind of crowd my niches attract! I was only left with the Tweets that I did myself. That's part of Off Page SEO, I'll talk about it there (hopefully I'll remember to do so).

It's important that you learn some of these basics, but it is also equally important that you don't spend too much time analyzing things leading to analysis paralysis. At one point, just say enough and just do it.