Let’s face it. Network marketing isn’t the easiest industry in the world. Like anything else, there are skills you need to learn and apply for you to succeed. But without focused attention you are going to have a hard time of it.

In this article I highlight some of the problems faced by network marketers and the solutions to those problems.

Problem: As you know, I choose to build my business online. I love the leverage it brings, plus the fact you can connect with people and build your business from anywhere that there is an internet connection. But the biggest problem with it is that there are endless distractions on the internet. Email, Skype, youtube, ads popping up, the temptation to check the bid you made on ebay or the reviews for the latest movie.

Solution: When you have something you need to get done, turn off all unecessary distractions. Turn off your phone, log out of Skype and other social media platforms, stop checking your emails and surfing the internet aimlessly. You’ll get far more done this way, and the quality is likely to be better as well.

Problem: Another kind of distraction which is also easy to succumb to on the internet, is information overload. Every week you get an email about the latest and greatest informational product. Not only that, but they make it seem that you NEED it or you are missing out big time. The problem is you can only take in so much at a time.

If you take on every new piece of information that you hear about, it won’t be long before you become overwhelmed which is one of the worst feelings in the world when you are trying to get things done. When you are overwhelmed, you get stressed and are unable to think clearly. You end up just looking aimlessly at the computer screen trying to figure out what your supposed to be doing.

Solution: Learn one thing at a time. Once you have learned the theory, put it into practice straight away and don’t move on to learning the next piece of information until you have implemented what you have learned. There is absolutely no point in learning something and then doing nothing with it. At the end of the day, it is your actions that get you results.

Problem: This is related to the previous point. There is such a thing as taking on too much at once. If you are trying to implement 5 strategies at once you are going to become overwhelmed. Not only that but you will struggle to master any of those strategies as your focus is dispersed.

Solution: Instead, focus on 1 or 2 strategies at time and then MASTER those strategies. Jack of all trades, master of none will not cut it. It is much better to be extremely good at 1 strategy than to be average or poor at 5. Once you have a strategy mastered, then you can take on another one if you feel you can.

I also recommend outsourcing what you can. It will alleviate your work load and enable you to focus on what’s most important to your business.

There is no denying that staying focused both on your goals and at the tasks at hand is a huge part of the puzzle. Once you get it right though, you will be filled with drive and enthusiams and will be amazed at how much you can get done.

Damien Willis

As discussed in the previous Creating Backlinks article, learning how to create backlinks is very important for the ranking of your website or blog. You want to get backlinks that are diverse, high quality and yet get a lot of them over time. But how exactly do you get these backlinks. Here are 6 ways of creating backlinks:

Publish/Distribute Your Content to Other Sites

There’s no point creating content if no one is going to see it. So distribute your content to other sites, preferably with high PR. The most common way of doing this is by submitting articles to Article Directories with a link or 2 back to your site.

Some of these sites get a ton of traffic and by submitting your content you can harness some of that traffic. Good places to submit your content to include Ezine Articles, Hub Pages, Squidoo, Go Articles as well as Better Networker.

Article Submitters

This is like the previous one but on steroids and is how you get a large quantity of backlinks. Basically you submit content to the article submitter and it will automatically submit it to hundreds or sometimes thousands of article directories and other sites. Not only can you submit to tons of sites, but you can usually have 2 backlinks in your resource box (double the backlinks!).

You have to be a bit careful with this one though. If you have a new site and it suddenly gets hundreds or thousands of backlinks from article sites in a short space of time, google might get suspicious. Fortunately many of these article submitters are able to limit the submissions to a certain amount per day.

To maximise this strategy you can also “spin” the articles which increases uniqueness, getting more of your articles accepted and indexed and therefore getting more backlinks to your site.

Distributing Videos

Do you upload videos to your site? Just like with your articles, you should distribute the videos to other sites such as Youtube & Viddler. Include a link in the description and you’ve got yourself another backlink (+ the extra traffic from people clicking on the link). Like with articles, there are submission services that will submit your videos to a number of different video sites.

To get even more value from this, you could turn your video into a podcast (or create unique podcasts) and then submit these podcasts to different podcast directories.

Blog Commenting

Yes you can get backlinks by commenting on blogs but you need to find the right blogs. Why? Most blogs are “nofollow” which basically tells the search engines to disreguard the link making it not count as a backlink. The type of blogs we are after are “dofollow” blogs because it will count as a backlink. You can search for these blogs on google.

Once you have found a suitable “dofollow” blog, leave a good, relevant comment (NO SPAM!). You will be asked to fill in your name (which will count as anchor text), your email address and a website (your actual backlink).

Forum Signatures

Are you part of a forum? Did you know you can have a link in your signature? Yup this also counts as a backlink. Join forums in your niche and like above only post good, relevant posts and comments or the administrators will catch onto you and ban your account.

Purchasing Packets or Backlinks

Another thing you can do is purchase “packets” of backlinks from certain websites. I’m talking like 20 – 50 high PR backlinks per packet not these shady deals where you get thousands of backlinks for $10. These are usually linkfarms which are bad and make google angry >:( .

If you decide to buy one of these packets of 20 – 50 backlinks, make sure you do some research on google to make sure they’re legit. One i’ve used recently is http://angelasdiscountmarket.com which appears to be pretty good. Once you get the packet there is some manual work involved but will be worth it, or you can just outsource the work.

Anchor Text

Just a quick point on anchor text for newbies. Anchor text is the text that you see and can click on in a hyperlink. For example, at the very start of this article I’ve got a link. The anchor text for that link is “Creating Backlinks”

Whenever you are creating backlinks make sure to include the keyword you want your website or particular webpage to rank for in the anchor text like I have done.

There are of course more ways of creating backlinks, but these 6 are some of the best and most popular ways of creating backlinks and are more than enough for you to start getting your site. So pick some or all of these strategies and get cracking and create backlinks for your site!

Creating backlinks is very import for your site if you want to get ranked in the search engines. In a previous article I addressed how to Optimize Blog for wordpress SEO.

Now that you have your blog’s on page SEO sorted out it’s time to take care of the off-page factors – the backlinks. Backlinks are basically like votes for your websites and you need votes to get ranked. Here are things to keep in mind when backlinks for your site:

#1. Variety

If you get backlinks from the same sources time and time again without any change, google is going to notice and are going to rank you lower than a website that is getting their backlinks from a wide variety of sources. So instead you should try to get links from unique domains. Aim for 100+ unique backlinks(not all at once).

#2. Quality

The quality of the backlinks you are getting definitely matters in the eyes of google. You might not get penalized if you are getting low quality backlinks but you won’t get much benefit either. So make sure that you are using at least some high PR sites when creating backlinks.

The quality of a site is measured in PR (Page Rank) on a scale of 0 – 10, 10 being the highest. A PR of 5 or above is considered high page rank, so if you get backlinks from sites with PR5+, it is going to greatly help your site to rank.

#3. Quantity

Having said that, you do still need to have a certain amount of backlinks for Google to deem your site as important. However, you also want your backlinks to build naturally over time, so once your site is established, you can start fleshing out your backlinking to increase volume.

As long as you increase the quantity of links naturally, you will only benefit from this because its not like you are replacing your quality backlinks, you are just adding to them. Generally the newer the site the more conservative you want to be in terms of the quantity of backlinks.

Caution: Keep away from link farms or packages where you get 1000’s of backlinks for $10 – this is the kind of backlinking that can hurt your site.

Conclusion

All of this won’t mean much if you’re not creating quality content, so make sure you have unique, quality content on your website because Quality is King!

In future articles I will go into more details and show you how to get backlinks, this article was just to show you what you need to keep in mind when creating backlinks.

Damien Willis

So you’ve got a wordpress blog, have made some posts but are hungry for more traffic. I’ll assume you are putting out unique, quality content.

There are many things you can do to get more traffic, but one of the first things you need to do is optimize your blog for the search engines. If the search engines don’t notice your blog, you’re not going to get a lot of traffic, at least not the free kind. Here are 8 tips to optimize your wordpress blog for seo.

Keyword Research

Your Main Keyword

As you will see in the rest of this article it is important to have a primary keyword that you are going after. This is the keyword that you want the homepage of your blog to rank for.

It should be related to your niche, have decent traffic but not be overly competitive so that you can rank for it realistically in the long term. For example, I’ve recently decided to go after “Network Marketing Online” which has decent traffic but over time can realistically be ranked towards the top.

Once you have decided on your keyword, put it in your title tag, heading and the anchor text of backlinks. As a general rule of thumb, the sooner the keyword appears in a title, permalink or body copy the better.

Sub Keywords

You should also do keyword research for each new blog post and page that you create, though you will generally want to go after less competitive keywords than your blog’s main keyword.

Make sure the keyword appears in each blog title, permalink and 2 or 3 times in the body of the post particularly in the first and last paragraph or even sentence if possible. Again the sooner you can have the keyword in the title, permalink and body the better.

Title Tags

The title tag is probably the most important onsite factor and if you don’t get this right, you are leaving a lot of traffic on the table. Best practice for title tags is to include your brand name + 1 or 2 of your sites MAIN keywords.

Hopefully you know what keywords you want your blog to rank for. If not go and find some good keywords for your niche now! (I actually did a video on Free SEO Keyword research in an earlier blog post that you can check out).

You can choose to leave the brand or blog name out of the title tag. Leaving it out can boost your rankings slightly (as you’ve probably got the brand/blog name in the domain name) but leaving it in can help build your brand, so this one’s up to you.

Search engines have a character limit on title tags for what shows up in the search engines result page. Each search engine has a different limit but keeping your titla tag to less than 65 characters including spaces will be under the character limit of the main search engines.

Meta Tags & Keywords

Once upon a time, Meta Description and Keyword Tags were very important to your search engine rankings. Today however they don’t impact your ranking very much and Google has openly said that they don’t take the Meta Keywords into account at all.

However, the Meta Description is still important for another reason. When your blog shows up in the search engines, a snippet will be displayed which is your Meta Description. A well written Meta Description may not affect search engine rankings but it can definitely improve click through.

As for the Meta Keyword Tag, it doesn’t hurt to use it (unless you stuff it with keywords) and smaller search engines may still place some sort of importance to it.

Permalinks

A Permalink is the URL for a post. For example the permalink for this particular post is http://damienwillis.com/optimize-blog-for-wordpress-seo. Permalinks do help you in the search engine rankings and if they’re relevant to what the user is searching for, can also boost click through.

The default Wordpress permalinks don’t help you at all as they are usually http://damienwillis.com/?p=10 or something similar which isn’t at all sexy and won’t help you in the rankings or in the searcher’s eyes.

Instead change your permalink structure so that they display what the post is actually about, like mine.

To do this go to Settings >> Permalinks and then change the format to /%postname%/

Now whenever you do a new post, the title of your blog post will be used in the permalink. As you should have a keyword that you’re tring to rank for in the title, it will also appear in the permalink, thus increasing search engine ranking.

If the title is long, then make sure to shorten the permalink. For example http://damienwillis.com/what-should-i-have-for-dinner-tonight-i-feel-like-pasta-but-its-a-lot-of-carbs-maybe-i-should-just-have-a-salad which I concede is a very extreme example, wouldn’t make a very good permalink nor would http://……well, you get the idea.

ALT Atributes

ALT Atributes are used to display alternative text, usually for an image. This could be because an image isn’t showing, for a text browser or for visually impaired readers. But alt attributes can also help you in the search engine rankings, not just for the image section, but for the overall rankings as well.

Wordpress aplies alt atributes to images automatically based on the file name. E.g. if your image is named “the-stig.jpg” (and let’s be honest, who doesn’t like the stig?) the alternate text will become “the-stig”.

So whenever you upload an image to your blog, make sure name it something relative to the post or page (a keyword for example).

Interlinking

This is something admittedly that I haven’t been doing up until now. Basically interlinking is linking to another page or post within your blog. Only do this if what you’re linking to is relevant. I’ve given an instance of this above where I linked to a video I did on keyword research because it was relevant to what I was talking about.

Conclusion

Building a blog should be viewed as a long term process. There are many more SEO techniques that you can apply to your blog, but these 7 are some of the main ways to optimize your wordpress blog for SEO and will start you on your way to big search engine traffic.

Damien Willis

If you want to get ranked in the search engines, then you need to know SEO. But the very first step to SEO a website or particular webpage is to do the keyword research and find out the best keyword for your niche. There are many keyword tools out there but the best ones aren’t free. This video will show you how you can do free SEO keyword research and find those golden nuggets that you can get your site ranked for in the short to medium term.

Damien Willis

So you’ve created a facebook page for what you want to promote. Now what? One of the best ways to customize your facebook page is to add your own custom tab. Because this tab is completely customizable, you can create something completely unique to your Facebook Page. In this video I will show you how to add a Custom Facebook Page Tab.

Want to know why I know so much about Facebook Marketing? Then sign up to my free 7 Day Attraction Marketing Bootcamp.

Damien Willis

In yesterday’s video I showed one way of importing your blog to your Facebook Page. Here is the second way that I know of. It is quicker and easier but less valuable for the long term in my opinion.

Damien Willis

Sick of updating you facebook page manually with your latest blog post?

You no longer have to once you’ve Imported Your Blog to Your Facebook Page. Step-by-step video shows you how:

P.S. I also know of another way to import your blog which is actually a bit easier but probably less effective in the long run. I will upload a video of the second way tomorrow so stay tuned!

Damien Willis

Hey Fellow Facebooker,

Facebook Page Marketing is where you need to be if you are promoting something via Facebook. In this video I show you how to add a cool Youtube Channel to your page which will make your page look pro and increase interaction.

Damien Willis

Facebook Marketing is like the king of Social Media Marketing, and the Facebook Page is the best way to promote yourself or a brand on Facebook. In this Video, I show you how to create you own Facebook Page.

Damien Willis