Passive Marketing

Category: Tutorials

  • How To Fix The Google Keyword Tool

    How To Fix The Google Keyword Tool

    The last few weeks I have heard the cry of SEOs that their keyword planner from Google was completely broken. If you have been living under a rock, the results from the planner have become completely unusable for many people. It was reported weeks ago, and the results were looking like this:

    dog-training

    While I may have sighed with relief a week ago as my keyword planner was still working as expected, the other day I went to check some keywords for a new and upcoming authority site I am about to launch (case study coming soon!), I was shocked to see that it had happened to me as well.

    Word is you have to be spending a good chunk of money with adwords to be able to get exact data here. How much is enough? Who knows! They will not tell you!

    And… how would you know you should try and give adwords a try if these are the results you are getting when looking up different keywords? Beats me…

    All I know is that this tool was crucial to a big part of my business model and without it I was feeling lost. Now I could sit here and tell you sign up for any of the third party tools (and I still recommend you check out Semrush as I use it daily), that I see all the other blogs promoting. No one wants to use another tool dammit, they want GKP to work. So, I will tell you how to get it working again. Join me in raising a middle finger to Google.

    How To Fix The Google Keyword Planner

    This is a quick fix and should not take you very long. Lets get to it.

    Step 1: Sign Up For Google Adwords Manage Accounts

    The first step is to visit this link here, and sign up for an account. This is a place for you to monitor and manage all of your adwords accounts from a single dashboard.

    Step 2: Fill out the form

    You need to fill out the form after you click sign up for free. This is where the magic is about to happen. Look at the screenshot below:

    adwords1signup

    Make sure you are entering in a different email than is on your previous adwords account. This is the managing email. If you need to, simply make a new gmail account.

    IMPORTANT: When you get down to how it will be used, you must select “To manage other people’s accounts”. The reasoning for this is that if you are managing other peoples accounts and money, you need to have the proper keyword searches per month instead of the ranges to properly manage the account. This is super important if it is not your money and they will have no other choice but to give you the information you need.

    Step 3: Fill The New Account With Your Old Account Details

    When you first sign up with the above link and fill everything else out, you will be taken to a page that looks like this:

    empty-account

    Click on the big red button that says + Account and click “link existing account”. It will then ask you for a customer ID. The customer ID can be found on your OLD account (the one that is having the ranges displaying) in the top right hand corner of the screen when you log in. Click on continue. Give your account a name and click on Request Approval.

    Step 4: Go To The Old Account And Change Settings

    The next step is to go back to the account that is having the range issue, and go to account settings. This is the cog wheel in the upper right hand corner. From here, click on “Account access” in the left hand menu. You will then see on this page under client managers that your new account is requesting to see information from this account. You will need to hit on Accept Request.

    accept

    Step 5: Go to New Account

    You are now done with your old account that was having the range issue. Go to your new account and refresh the page. You should see the new account added to your dashboard.

    new-account

    Step 6: Grab Your Keywords

    Finally, you just want to click on the account name that you added to the new account. It should look very familiar to you. In the upper menu, click to go to keyword planner, enter in your search terms, and click search.

    dog-training-right-keywords

    And just like that, your Google Keyword planner works again.

    If this worked for you (and I know it did), hop on my email list where I will never bullshit you like all the others.

    Enter Your Name and Email Below and Click

    Wrapping It Up

    To quickly sum up the steps above:

    • Open up a new gmail account
    • Sign up for a Google MCC account
    • Make sure the MCC account is set to “manage other people’s accounts”
    • Add your old account information to Google MCC account
    • Access a working keyword tool

    That is really all there is too it. Google has come a long way since their “do no evil”. This is a slap in the face for all the small SEO’s and self employed people out there. Join me in raising one of these to Google for this backhanded decision.

    fuckyou

    Until next time!

     

  • Making It Rain On Prime Day! The Easiest $1,000+ Day I Know

    Making It Rain On Prime Day! The Easiest $1,000+ Day I Know

    throwing around moneyAmazon Holidays are some of the best days as an internet marketer. Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday to mention a few. Each one sees an insane uptick in traffic, increased conversion rate, and overall buyers party putting money into my pocket. This Prime Day I saw a 10X increase in organic earnings (without using this method), and a 300% increase in shirt sales through Merch (organic as well).

    So how much money did you make on Prime Day? $100? $500? Did you break at least $1,000? If not, why not?

    Perhaps you might be in shock, “But Neil, my site is still small! It is just 10 pages. How could I possibly break $1k in a single day?”. To those of you thinking this, stop for a second and ask yourself if you prepared for this day. Should you have?

    If you did or didn’t, I am about to share with you how myself, and a few friends make extra money on these Amazon holidays. I stumbled into this when I had a 20 page site a few years ago and was desperate for some extra money to invest. Let’s get to the setup and then the out of the box thinking!

    The Set Up

    Remember all those times that people have told you that content is king? Or the times that it was drilled in your head that you need to provide value to your readers? NOT TODAY! Today, we are throwing all that out the window. To get this to work, you need to keep it simple and to the point. Lets Do it.

    Step One

    The first thing you want to do is research what type of deals are going to be out on the Amazon Holiday you are preparing for. Amazon will typically send you emails telling you what will be on sale, or allow you as an Amazon associate to see the deals before they are released. If this is the case, make a list of EVERYTHING about to be on sale. Not just the products in your niche, but every little thing. When it comes to Prime day were thousands of products were for sale, you can simply pick a list of 100 items.

    Step Two

    Order your list of items for sale based on how close they resemble your niche. Lets say that you have a site in the Baby niche. The first items in your list would be baby items that are being discounted. After you have all the baby items listed, you need to start listing the next most relevant items. If I had a baby niche site, my next few items after baby would probably be Women’s clothing (because people who have babies are usually changing sizes). After that I might add some fitness deals (because mothers are often times trying to get back into shape). Then from there I may go into kitchen deals so on and so forth down the line.

    Step Three

    Open up your WordPress site and start a new post. Pop your list in there and make it look nice. I usually add a very small picture or perhaps an intro paragraph on top. Keep this as brief as possible as you want as many of your items above the fold as possible. Once your list is laid out properly with headings separating the niches, add all your affiliate links. Your page should have the similar set up to the image below. Notice how all there is to look at is affiliate links? No “great” content anywhere on the page.

    prime deals

    Step Four

    If you have created this page a few days before the Amazon holiday goes live, do NOT publish it yet. Save it as a draft. However, if you are extremely lazy, create this page as soon as you get up on the Amazon Holiday and you can publish it immediately. Keep in mind that this page will only be up for the single day that Amazon is running a promotion. You will not be ranking for it and you will be deleting the post. The post should ONLY go live the day that Amazon runs the deal.

    Time To Make Money! Here We Go!

    Obama Money

    So you have your page set up and ready to go. All your affiliate links added, and if you have gotten this far, and probably asking yourself what the hell you just did and why?

    You are going to leverage a specific social network. Can you guess which one? If you have read this blog at all, you know that I enjoy Reddit and have been there long enough to know how it works and how the users behave.

    You see, the thing with Reddit traffic is that almost everyone who has tried to “game” their users before has been shot down in a ball of flames and cried that the traffic is terrrible, doesn’t convert, and is overall a waste of time. This is true on some respects, but is completely and utterly false on Amazon holidays. Why? Because most redditors are in the age demographic that does most of their shopping online and when Amazon runs these huge promotions, they are all over them. Think of a kid in a candy store, this is exactly what they are. All you need to do is get them over to Amazon and they will shop and shop. What normally would be downvoted into oblivion is suddenly upvoted to the top with ease.

    Step One

    If you are familiar with Reddit at all, you know that it is broken down into sub communities called subreddits. Each one of these is based on a certain topic or hobby. Take our baby niche for example above. You could check out reddit.com/r/babies but notice that there is only around 2000 readers there. Instead, lets take a look at reddit.com/r/mommit. This one has almost 22.5k users and this is certainly enough to make some really good money with. Find about 3-5 different subreddits that relate to your niche and write them down and keep them handy for the morning.

    Step Two

    You need to time when its best to submit your post to the subreddits of your choosing. Some of the subs will allow you to post direct links to your site, while others will force you to write text (and you include a link within the text). The secret here is to find out if you can submit it when the peak amounts of traffic will be hitting the site. I have found that mornings, lunch time, and right after work are the highest opportunities to cash in. If at all possible, you want to be submitting your post before people get in their car to go to work. This way, people will be reading it and upvoting it (so your post shows up at the top of the page). When your post is at the top, hopefully the upvotes will last long enough that both the lunch and after work crowd both get to see your post.

    Step Three

    Do the above for the subreddits you have found relating to your niche. Be careful to stagger them out or use different accounts than your main accounts. Sometimes, if you are submitting too much from the same site, you will get thrown into the spam filter. Slow and steady with submitting them on multiple subs. Remember, you are not spamming them, you are providing the easiest way for these users to find the best deals that pertain to them.

    Step Four

    Now that you know all the steps, lets discuss the one secret that you need to keep in mind to make all of this work properly. You need upvotes on your post to rank, and you need to rank to be at the top of the subreddit you pick, and you need to be at the top of the sub to make money right? Well, you need to get upvotes. You could submit and just hope that you get those initial upvotes that are so crucial. Or, you could make it happen. You want to make money right? Go find 5-10 friends (you do have some of those right?) that have accounts and ask them to upvote your post. ATTENTION: The only way to properly do this is to have them first navigate to the subreddit you submitted the post on, find it, and then upvote it. If you skip this step, each upvote will automatically be met with a downvote and your post will not move anywhere. This is a spam filter that Reddit has put in place that is not that hard to get around if you have done this a time or two before.

    Step Five

    Sit back and enjoy the insane traffic spike, the huge click through rate on your affiliate links, and the incredible conversion rates and people buy anything and everything that Amazon has on discount that day.

    counting-money

    Tip: Make sure your hosting is up for the task. If you pull this off correctly you will easily see, 10, 15, 30, even 50k visitors that day during the spike.

    Scaling The Method Up

    If you are wondering if there is any way to scale this up, you need to think harder. Of course there is. You already have a list of 100 links in order for your specific niche right? There are hundreds of thousands of people on social networks. Rework the order of your list for other niches and resubmit it to other subreddits.

    This really only works if you have multiple sites in different niches as well as multiple Reddit accounts to submit the content with. However, you could give it a try on the same site if you want to be really risky. I would not recommend it because you are not trying to spam, you are actually trying to be helpful here.

    Wrapping It Up

    This is hands down, without a doubt, the easiest ways to make a thousand dollars in a single day that I know. This can be done at any level, with any type of site. Even if you have a 5 pager and you just started your website, you can take advantage of this method the next time one of the Amazon holidays comes up. This is a great way to put some extra money aside, put some more money down on your mortgage, or simply gain a few more dollars to invest to grow your site.

    Until next time, keep pushing forward.

    Neil

  • One Extremely Overlooked Way To Find Guest Blogging Targets

    One Extremely Overlooked Way To Find Guest Blogging Targets

    As one of my bigger sites continue to grow month after month (even without working on it!), I have finally gotten enough time in my schedule to sit down and focus on some quality outreach. I will not bore you with ranting and raving about why guest blogging is great, or why you should be doing it. You have probably heard this from every other internet marketing blog on the internet over the past few years.

    Instead, I want to focus on a technique I have just started using that people seem to forget about and not use. This technique has gotten me a 53% response rate and I have already landed a few links without much work at all which is what I am all about here at Passive Marketing.

    What You Will Need

    The Basic Concept

    target

    There are a ton of ways to utilize tools you have in search of blogs that accept guest posts. One of my absolute favorites has been twitter. All you would need to do is search for your niche + guest post, used Twitter advance search to limit the search date range, and you were presented with tons of targets!

    The one glaring issue here is that if you have such easy access to sites that are accepting guest posts, so do your competitors. On top of this, coming up with this list of outreach targets took TIME, and a lot of it. There has to be a better way right?

    Well, there is! The entire method for this to work, is to accept guest posts yourself.

    Hear me out for a second here. Let’s step back to around 4 months ago where I found myself with a growing site in a lucrative niche, but paying for mass amounts of content each day was getting costly. “Why am I paying for all this writing”, I thought. Maybe I should be leveraging other people to get fresh content up on my site.

    I immediately set up a “write for us” page on my site, and ran some paid ads on Twitter as I outline in my starting a blog guide here to my page asking if they would like to write for me. I managed to snag a few writers and everything was right in the world.

    The real magic hit me months later. I had structured my “write for us” page in such a way that:

    1. The page was getting traffic organically by using the right keywords
    2. I asked potential guest posters to contact me via a web form and give 5 examples of previously published posts

    Just like that, I had people contacting me to guest post on my site. Even if I did not want to accept their guest post at that moment, they were doing the hard work for me! These people were literally handing me some of the best outreach targets that I would have never found via twitter!

    If you have 5 people contacting you a day to guest post, and each one is giving you 5 previous guest posts they have done, these add up quickly and before you know it, you will need to hire someone to outreach for you while you work on other things.

    If you would like to get other quick tips like this one, make sure to hop on my email list below.

    Enter Your Name and Email Below and Click

    One Quick Note

    Before we get into how to structure your “Write for Us” page, you need to understand the search modifiers that people typically use to search for guest posting opportunities. Luckily for you (and me), Brian Dean from Backlinko has done the majority of the work for us. For ease of writing this, I will paste the search modifiers below.

    • Your Keyword “guest post”
    • Your Keyword “write for us”
    • Your Keyword “guest article”
    • Your Keyword “guest post opportunities”
    • Your Keyword “this is a guest post by”
    • Your Keyword “contributing writer”
    • Your Keyword “want to write for”
    • Your Keyword “submit blog post”
    • Your Keyword “contribute to our site”
    • Your Keyword “guest column”
    • Your Keyword “submit content”
    • Your Keyword “submit your content”
    • Your Keyword “submit post”
    • Your Keyword “This post was written by”
    • Your Keyword “guest post courtesy of ”
    • Your Keyword “guest posting guidelines”
    • Your Keyword “suggest a post”
    • Your Keyword “submit an article”
    • Your Keyword “contributor guidelines”
    • Your Keyword “contributing writer”
    • Your Keyword “submit news”
    • Your Keyword “become a guest blogger”
    • Your Keyword “guest blogger”
    • Your Keyword “guest posts wanted”
    • Your Keyword “looking for guest posts”
    • Your Keyword “guest posts wanted”
    • Your Keyword “guest poster wanted”
    • Your Keyword “accepting guest posts”
    • Your Keyword “writers wanted”
    • Your Keyword “articles wanted”
    • Your Keyword “become an author”
    • Your Keyword “become guest writer”
    • Your Keyword “become a contributor”
    • Your Keyword “submit guest post”
    • Your Keyword “submit an article”
    • Your Keyword “submit article”
    • Your Keyword “guest author”
    • Your Keyword “send a tip”
    • Your Keyword inurl: “guest blogger”
    • Your Keyword inurl: “guest post”
    • allintitle: Your Keyword + guest post

    write for us pageFormatting The “Write For Us” Page

    The first thing you need to do to ensure that this works, is find out which one of the modifiers people are searching for in your niche. Simple head over to the Google Keyword Planner and enter in the phrases above. Rank them by how many searches a month they get, and save the top 5 to 10. We will use this while building out our page. When you are writing the text that I outline below, make sure to include these these top 5 or 10 terms somewhere within the paragraphs. Make it look natural and do not stuff them in there so it reads poorly.

    Now lets take a look at a sample page that you could put up on your site to get the same results that I was able to get.

    Example Page

    Title: Use the most searched modifier in the niche for your title. For sake or argument, lets assume it is “write for us”

    Intro: This is where you are going to signal to Google that your page is relevant to guest posts in your niche. Keep it short and sweet, but make sure to add in a few keywords in a sentence or two. If you were running a financial blog about stocks, you could say something along the lines of: “If you are an expert stock trader, or a beginner who has purchased a few mutual funds in the past and has some experiences they would like to share with a large audience, we want to hear from you!”

    Heading 1 What We Are Looking For: You can use this heading first, or another variation. I do not want to waste peoples time, and right off the bat, I want to give them an idea of what the site is looking for so they know if their background is inline with what the site posts about.

    Paragraph: Here again, I like to use this space to reinforce what the site is about so far, and that we are looking for people excited in the topic. To go along with the financial blog example from above, you could simply state: “Website.com was launched in 2008 to share our experiences and expertise in the financial and securities trade with a wide audience. We are looking for experts of enthusiasts to write about:” See what we did there, we added a few more LSI keywords to the page that will give your page relevant to other guest blogging keywords so people will find your page from the SERPs.

    Bullet points: Since we left off the last paragraph about what types of articles we are looking for, we need to expand that.

    • Keyword 1: LSI Keyword 1, LSI Keyword 2, LSI Keyword 3
    • Keyword 2: LSI Keyword 1, LSI Keyword 2, LSI Keyword 3
    • Keyword 3: LSI Keyword 1, LSI Keyword 2, LSI Keyword 3
    • Keyword 4: LSI Keyword 1, LSI Keyword 2, LSI Keyword 3
    • Keyword 5: LSI Keyword 1, LSI Keyword 2, LSI Keyword 3

    This section is where you can pack in a bunch of topics you are interested in, but also topics that you want to guest post on other peoples websites. This works because someone will see that you are looking for Stock tips guest posts, and end up providing you examples in an email (we will get to that later), of where they have guest posted their own stock tips.

    Heading 2 Why Write For Website.com?: This is the section where I show off the amount of visitors the site gets, explain how and where you will link (even if you do not want to accept guest posts, you need to make people think that you do), and that they will build brand awareness. Show off the positives of guest posting. You should already know what these are!

    Rules: Since I originally put up this post to actually get people to guest post on my site, I wanted to make sure that I was getting quality content. I laid out in this section that I was not looking for commercial content, that I wanted original content, that links needed to provide value to readers, and that I wanted articles that went into depth and did not want readers to be left thinking “What about X..?”.

    Remember, a good page on why people should guest post for you can actually bring in some simply amazing content. The best part? It will be FREE!

    Heading 3 FAQs: Even after reading everything else you have written, you need to answer some common questions that you may run across. Here are a few ideas!

    • Will the guest poster be paid?
    • What should the guest poster write about (direct them above and take this paragraph to possibly enter some other keywords you are looking for).
    • Can the guest poster post their article on their own site after it is published on yours (Absolutely not! That being said, encourage them to share on social media and drive traffic!).
    • How often can/should the guest poster write. This is my absolute favorite section. I was interested in guest posters bringing in fresh content monthly for me, not just a one and done deal. You can use this section to explain that you are looking for weekly, biweekly, or monthly guest posts if you want. Like I keep mentioning, this entire method involves around FINDING guest posting targets, but you can actually pick up some great content and long term free writers. It really can add up.

    Heading 4: Get Started!: This is the end of your “Write for us” page. Now you need to provide a way for people to contact you EASILY. I cannot stress this enough. If you have a form where they need to fill a captcha or just an email where they should send the info, you might be passed over.

    Grab a nice contact form for your site. I prefer to use Contact Form 7. Set that up and add the shortcut to the bottom of your post and hit post. Below are the lines that I set up within that plugin.

    • Full Name
    • Email
    • What Subject Would You Like To Write About
    • Include Author Profile Text Below
    • Enter in 5 Published Writing Samples Below (Boom! Free outreach targets straight to your email)
    • Send Button

    Wrapping It Up

    There you have it. If you have done this correctly and used the correct search modifiers sprinkled throughout your post and included keywords that are related to your sites niche, your page accepting guest bloggers should begin to rank and you will slowly start to see that people contact you. You can either accept the good writers for 100% free content, or you can be a bit more devious and take advantage of the 5 guest posts that they did in the past that they just emailed you by doing your own outreach.

    If you try this out, let me know how it is working in your niche down in the comments below!