The Affiliate Review 1-13 02/22/08

February 22nd, 2008 Len Thurmond Posted in The Affiliate Review Archives |

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IN THIS WEEK’S REVIEW

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• Just Something to Think About

• This Week’s Editorial: It’s the Content!

• Now That’s Funny!

• Food For Thought: The Case for Good Content

• The Androgynous Stone: Chapter 4

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JUST SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT

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Vision is perhaps our greatest strength.. it has kept us alive to the power and continuity of thought through the centuries, it makes us peer into the future and lends shape to the unknown.

Li Ka Shing
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THIS WEEK’S EDITORIAL

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Hi Affiliate Review readers!

If you’re like me, you find that it is so easy to spend a “whole lotta time” on the web. Sometimes even several hours at a time. And what is it that is so fascinating about it?

Is it the technology? The thousands of web servers used to host pages? The code that makes everything run? Or maybe because I just like to sit for hours in a desk chair until my rear end is numb?

NOPE! It is the CONTENT!

Content is the “stuff” that makes the web so compelling. The interesting stories, the pretty pictures, the useful information that I need. When I go on the web, I want to find out the answers to my questions, get the latest news and weather, or perhaps just be entertained by a story or watch a video. Content is what your visitors hope to find when they log on to your website. Content is what the search engines deliver when someone types a keyword into the search box. You can spend a lot of effort getting people to come to your website, but if there is nothing compelling to see once they get there…POOF. They are gone and most likely will never return.

Be honest. Have you ever typed something into a search engine, looked over the results and clicked on a promising link only to get a message similar to this one: “We’ll be putting something here soon so bookmark us and come back later!” Do you ever really bookmark the page and make a note in your calendar to come back “later”? Not likely? Didn’t think so. The visitors go where the good stuff is.

Over the next five weeks Len and I are going to actually SHOW you how to get the good stuff and then what to do with it once you’ve got it. And while we are at it, we are also going to be introducing you to one of Len’s products that was a big hit in the past. Len has made so many improvements that it has a new name.

Presenting…Article Innovator.

I’ve put together a five minute preview video of the program showing just a little bit of what it can do.

Over a year ago when I made some training videos for some of Len’s other products I fell in love with this one and I continued to use it on a regular basis because it was just so darned handy. Finding “stuff” is not hard, in fact we are overloaded with information every day. The tricky part is finding the information that is exactly what you are looking for, has the right number of keywords, etc. Narrowing this content down quickly is just one of the things that Article Innovator does so well. Get on the announcement list to be notified when the product comes out.

Don’t miss Len’s article this week,”A Case for Good Content”, for tips on giving the search engines what they are looking for. AND speaking of interesting stories…I hope you are enjoying Len’s novel “The Androgynous Stone”! This week is chapter four–the most challenging one so far for me as the narrator because of the different character voices. Let us know what you think of it so far!

Until the next ‘review,
Sandy Swain

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NOW THAT’S FUNNY!

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The Worst Day of My Life

There’s this little guy just sitting in a bar,
looking at his drink.

He stays like that for about half-an-hour.

Then, this big trouble-making truck driver steps next to
him, takes the drink from the guy, and just drinks it all
down.

The poor man starts crying.

The truck driver says: “Come on man, I was just joking.
Here, I’ll buy you another drink. I just can’t stand to
see a man crying.”

“No, it’s not that. Today is the worst day of my life.

First, I overslept and was late to an important meeting.
My boss, outraged, fired me.

When I left the building for my car, I found out it was
stolen. The police said they could do nothing.

I got a cab to return home, and after I paid the cab
driver and the cab had gone, I found that I left my
wallet in the cab.

Then I got home only to find my wife was in bed with the
gardener.

I left home and came to this bar. And when I was thinking
about putting an end to my life, you show up and drink the
darn poison…”

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FOOD FOR THOUGHT: THE CASE FOR GOOD CONTENT

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By Len Thurmond

A Case For Good Content…

Let’s talk about what “Good Content” is and why should you care?

First we have to look at what the Internet really is.

Why do people USE the internet? To find information about virtually everything under the sun!

So doesn’t it make sense that if you offer informative and relative information on your sites, that your sites will be popular?

Of course it does!

But there’s another factor as well, isn’t there?

You have to make the Search engines happy to GAIN that popularity. So the question becomes …

How do you make the search engines happy?

First let’s look at the Internet in a slightly different way.

If you think about it, the internet as a whole is just one BIG database of information. Information about anything and everything you can think of.

There are literally Hundreds of Billions of bits of information in this Database, and in order for anyone to find what they are looking for, there has to be VERY powerful programs to sort through the billions of pages and deliver to the people what they are looking for.

That’s what the Search Engines are for. And since the beginning of the Internet era, the many Search Engine Companies have been fighting over the “Top Spot” in the Search Engine Hierarchy, because there are BIG BUCKS in being Numero Uno!

You might ask yourself “How can they make money from a service that is FREE to the world?”

But believe me … They DO make money! LOTS OF MONEY!!!

See, the Search engines make money by selling advertising, and they have been VERY ingenious at figuring out ways to get that advertising in front of people. Much like the Television companies discovered that they can very effectively advertise products on shows that are popular. The search engines very early on, figured out that THEY can very effectively sell advertising n “SITES” that have a lot of traffic!

So the name of their game is to isolate High Traffic Sites and get them to display ads for them!

But think a minute about what constitutes the making of a High Traffic Site.

We already discussed the fact that if you offer “Quality”, Original”, “Relevant” information on your site, you will be popular.

So doesn’t it make sense that the Search Engines spend ALL their energies looking for just such sites, so they can give the best results possible to their clientele, when they do a search for a specific subject?

OF COURSE IT DOES!

So the name of the game is “Give The Search Engines What They Are Looking For!”

THAT means …

VALUABLE, TARGETED, ORIGINAL CONTENT!

And I guess here we need to talk a little bit about the dreaded “DUPLICATE CONTENT”, and what that really means.

Now that we understand what the search engines are looking for and why, it just makes sense that if your site has nothing original to make it stand out in the crowd, the search engines will be reluctant to show your pages over someone else’s.

I mean think about it.

One of the worst things they can do is to dish up 10 sites on a Results page that ALL have identical content!

Their clients would go to a different Search Engine and they would then lose their market share.

So the Search Engines spend MOST of their time and resources categorizing the billions of sites and pages into what they see as the best, and most original sites on each and every subject that people could possibly be searching on.

And to do this in such an immense sea of pages, they use what are called Algorithms, which are coding scripts that constantly search the web for the different specific criteria they are designed for.

They then compile the data that the algorithms return, to come up with a system that can know with great certainty what any given page is about, what percentage of it is original, and how targeted it is towards the subject it is being optimized for (supposed to be about).

So you can understand that if too much of your page has the exact same information on it as other sites, you will NOT rank nearly as highly as those who have completely “DIFFERENT” information on them, giving the searchers a different point of view on the subject at hand.

The good news is that since the Algorithms are Scripts, and not human, they can not tell (and therefore do not CARE) what the page says. They CAN tell however what the page is about, and how targeted it is by use of a fairly new Algorithm called the LSI algorithm (Latent Semantic Indexing).

This Algorithm can compare the words on the page to lists of synonyms to come up with a score of how targeted the page is towards the subject it is optimized for.

It used to be that you could score highly by “STUFFING” your content with the main keyword phrase you were after ranking for, but as that became a black hat technique and was therefore badly abused, the Search engines started looking at just how many times your key phrase was on the page, and penalizing you if it was there what they considered too much.

But LSI can give a much better score for percentage of synonyms, since in real life, that is closer to the way we would talk.

So … The Bottom line is that you need to write Original content for your pages that is tightly targeted to the subject you want to rank for, but by using language you would use in real life!

And if you do this, your pages will receive the traffic you are looking for.

It IS a bit of work, but that’s what it takes to rank above the rest!

But there ARE ways to make your workload lighter without sacrificing your goal.

And we will talk a LOT more about some of those tools and techniques in the upcoming issues of The Affiliate Review

Till Next Week,

Here’s to YOUR Success,
Len
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THE ANDROGYNOUS STONE: CHAPTER FOUR

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Is it time at last for Sam to get some answers about this mysterious place and what it all has to do with her? Go here to read the fourth chapter of The Androgynous Stone, a novel written by Len Thurmond.

The Androgynous Stone
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A FINAL WORD

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A Few Last Notes…

The Affiliate Review presents opinions of many of the thousands of online programs available on the net today. We emphasize the word opinion for obvious legal reasons. And that is just what the content of The Affiliate Review is…Our Opinion. Nothing More…Nothing Less !

If you have comments or suggestions, Please feel free to post them here on our blog

Here’s To Your Success,

Len Thurmond, Founder of The Affiliate Review
Len@TheAffiliateReview.com

and

Sandy Swain, Editor of The Affiliate Review
Sandy@TheAffiliateReview.com

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