2009 February Archive at Antigua Web Solutions Blog

I’ve been meaning to post some info on keyword sniping for some time so my apologies for taking a while to do this.

There are a lot of things you need to know about other aspects of internet marketing in addition to the keyword sniping (KS) technique and I can’t address everything in one post so I’ll concentrate on the techniques I use and skip over some of the other stuff.

Choose Your Niche

Choose your niche - this is vital to the success of KS. Then choose at least 2 good keywords. For keyword research I use Google Adwords Keyword Tool. If you intend to make money from Google Adsense then click on the show/hide columns and choose Show Estimated Avg. CPC You will need to pick keywords with a reasonable high CPC. If you are new to IM choose keywords that have more than 5,000 searches a month and less than 30,000 competing sites.

Set Up Your Site

The whole point of keyword sniping is that your whole site is optimised for 1 or 2 keywords. The keywords should to be in the domain name, and must be in the title, the description and in the content on the home page. You will need to add at least 10 pages of good content to the site all about your keywords. If you’re using WordPress you can remove the dates from the posts to make them all look like pages rather than posts. On each of the pages make a link with your keyword as the anchor back to the homepage. Pages should be at least 300 words long.

Some Points about the Site Structure

You need the title tag on every page. If you are using WordPress you can use the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin it do this.
A link in the footer to point to your homepage using the keywords as anchor text.
On the home page keywords should be included about seven times. This will be okay if you have a least 1000 words of text so you could set your home page to have four posts appearing all with your keywords in them.

Back Links to Your Site

Most importantly you need to get links to your site using your keywords. Vary the anchor text, don’t have all of the anchor text exactly the same. Use your keywords that mix them up a bit with different words.
You need to get links that are on relevant pages. The best way to do this is to submit articles you have written yourself. I’ve been using Article Marketer to submit articles recently. Although it is a paid service I’m finding that it is much faster than ISnare which I was using and they also look at your article and check that they are formatted correctly for the article directories. Most articles have been approved and submitted within 1 working day. ISnare lately has been taking more than 2 weeks. For some of the sites I have made I only needed 2 articles distributed to a range of article directories to rank high in SERPS. Of course it depends on the competition so you will need to add more if you don’t get the ranking.

How Long Does it Take?

It won’t hapopen overnight so don’t despair! It took a minimum of two months to begin to rank well and some sites took much longer. Submit another article if you don’t see results within about 2 months.

On Dec 14th I received an email part of which is below:

“During a recent review, we found that your account is related to a previously banned account. Your account has been terminated and 100% of your pending commissions will be reversed.”

I have never has another account with EBPN and certainly have not been banned for any reason. I had over $2000 in that account that I earned honestly and with a lot of hard work. My earnings had really started to increase and I had high quality traffic for every period.

For those who don’t know eBay gives you a quality score based on ‘who knows what parameters’ and has dumped affiliates in the past for sending too low quality traffic.

I am not the only one who has received this email and all say that they do not have any other accounts. Today looking at eBay’s forum I see another round of bannings for the same spurious reason. I find it very suspicious that people are being dumped just before pay day. See the thread “your account is related to a previously banned account”

In the email it said “If you believe you have been linked to a banned account in error, please reply to eBayPartnerNetwork-Quality@ebay.com with your account information and a detailed description of how you are driving traffic to the eBay site. ”
Despite 4 emails to this address giving them the details they asked for I have had NO reply. Not even a form letter to say they have received them. This is how they treat honest, hard working affiliates that have been sending them, traffic for over a year?
I can no longer recommend either using BANS or being an affiliate of eBay as there is just too much likelihood of perfectly honest, hardworking affiliates being dumped and losing hard earned money through no fault of theirs.