Cause and Effect

The asset I’m talking about could be called “motivation”. It could also be called “discipline” or “tenacity”. Whatever the thing is that some people have, that keeps them going until they have a revenue-generating empire of AdSense sites, and other miss and therefore never see great results.

If you look back at the past weeks, think about how you felt about this new project when you joined the AdSense Challenge. And compare that to how you feel now.

My hope is that there’s not much difference, for you. My hope is that you are getting some good clicks already and are watching your site(s) rise in the search results. And I know that this is the case for some of you, on the Challenge.

But I’m pretty sure that some are also struggling to stick with it and aren’t seeing great results yet. The question is: If you aren’t seeing results, is it because “it’s not working” despite your efforts, or is it because you’re lacking motivation/discipline/tenacity?

All of that is only part of the equation, though. The other part is that you look for cause and effect, in all this.

If the Challenge is going well for you, look for the cause of that. What is it, exactly, that keeps you going? Whatever that is, remember it and try to replicate it for future projects.

And if it’s not going well, what is it that makes it difficult for you? Look for the cause and ask yourself how you can eliminate or change it. The biggest mistake you can make is to just blame yourself. “I’m just lazy” or “I’ll never make it” are not causes. There’s always an external cause that leads to lack of motivation. Find it and see what you can do about it.

This is not only important for what you are doing now, on the AdSense Challenge, but for anything you attempt to do from now on.

Reading Material

As you probably know, the AdSense Challenge started thanks to the AdSense 100K Blueprint guide. If, for some reason, you have not read that guide yet, then here’s a very good resource for you, that you can see for free:

Vita Vee’s AdSense Thread

It’s extremely detailed and likely to be the best summarization of everything you need to know about AdSense, without having to pay for it.

1 Cause and Effect
As discussed above, finding the causes for your motivation or lack of motivation is hugely valuable, even though it doesn’t have anything to do with AdSense directly. Grab a pen and paper and take a few minutes to write down what is keeping you going (and what you’ll do to get more of that) and what’s keeping you down (and what you’ll do to get rid of that).

2 “Must-Have” Backlink, Number 1
For a truly effective backlinking strategy, you need to have a certain “bulk” of backlinks, simply to signal to Google “hey, there’s something going on over here!”. I’m not talking about thousands upon thousands of backlinks (although those can definitely help) – just a good number of links coming in from many different sources. Examples of such links are links from RSS feeds, social bookmarks, blog comments (even if they’re no-follow and don’t have your target anchor text), no-follow links in general and non-reinforced forum profile links.

Where to get them:

The easiest ways to get some bulk backlinks going are:

• Use OnlyWire to submit a bunch of bookmarks automatically (it’s free if you place an OnlyWire button on some random blog of yours.)
• Grab your site’s RSS feed (your URL followed by /feed for any WordPress site) and submit it to a few RSS directories (warning: that list is old. not all directories will work anymore).
• Hook up a ping.fm account with a bunch of micro-blogging services, free blogs etc. and submit a few updates with links through ping.fm.

3 “Must-Have” Backlink, Number 2
The next type of backlink you need is perhaps the backbone of most off-page SEO projects: links that aren’t low-quality, but aren’t great either. This means that they are links with your target anchor text and without a no-follow tag, but they may not sit on very authoritative sites. The reason these links are often the backbone is that they can usually be had in vast quantities, without too much work.

Where to get them:

Blog networks. I personally don’t know any better source for these medium-quality links than blog networks. My favourites are ArticleRanks and Authority Link Network.

4 “Must-Have” Backlink, Number 3
Finally, to really top off your backlink portfolio and give your competition a run for their money, add a few really high quality links to the mix. You don’t need a ton of these, since even just a handful of followed, anchor-text backlinks on pages with PageRank can make a huge difference. Unfortunately, links like this are pretty hard to come by.

Where to get them:

• Guest posting is a favourite for these kinds of links. If you can find an authority blog in your niche and get to contribute a guest-post with your backlink, that’s potentially a lot of link-juice and a lot of traffic coming your way. The downside is that if you have a markedly mediocre AdSense site, that might be a problem for getting a guest-post accepted.
• High-profile article marketing is a variation of guest blogging. In many niches, there are some high-quality sites that accept articles on a regular basis, even though they aren’t labeled as blogs or article directories. Do a search for “write for us” or “submit an article” plus your keyword to see if you can find some sites like this in your niche.
• BuildMyRank is another favourite of mine, although the links are only barely high-quality links. I’d say they fall somewhere between mid and high quality. However you want to classify them, they definitely work.
• Finally, you can “make your own” high quality backlinks by building a ton of backlinks to a page containing your backlink. We discussed that earlier in the AdSense Challenge and called it link reinforcement.

Your task is simply to take a look at your current backlink profile and make sure it contains a good dose of each of the three types of “must-have” backlinks. Then, go build more of the ones that are under-represented, so far.

All the best,

If you’re new to affiliate marketing and have been looking around for some information and guidance, it’s quite likely you’ve come across some promotions and recommendations for Wealthy Affiliate, sometimes also referred to as the Wealthy Affiliate University (WA or WAU). WA is a membership site that aims to be a launching platform for Internet marketing, offering lots of learning material, an active community as well as research tools and more.

Does Wealthy Affiliate deliver or is it just a newbie trap? Read this complete review to find out.

Overview

There are three main components to Wealthy Affiliate:

• Training Material
  Lots and lots of information about affiliate marketing, setting up websites and monetizing them, Pay-Per-Click advertising etc.
• Tools
  Applications that help you in doing keyword research, finding good products to promote, writing articles etc.
• Community
  A forum as well as personal blogs every member can create and some facebook-esque community features like adding friends.

Features

Let’s look at the main features in WA in a little more detail.

Training Material
In the so-called Training Centre of WA, you can find lots of articles, tutorials and videos about many different aspects of online marketing. And when I write “lots” I actually mean “tons and tons”.

Some of the material is made by the WA owners, Kyle and Carson. But every WA member can contribute their own training resources, so it’s not limited to “official” WA material.

The abundance of resources can be a blessing and a curse. While information is invaluable and it’s great to have access to so much of it, I found the training to be unstructured and somewhat chaotic.

As far as I can tell, there used to be an “Eight-Week Action Plan” that people were encouraged to go through, to start out with online marketing. This has been replaced with a more modular training setup and I guess that was a bit of a step back. The greatest problem I see is in the interlinking of training material. If you start out with the official first lesson in Wealthy Affiliate, you’ll find “learn more about X” links all over the documents. So, you’ll be reading along and every time you come across something unfamiliar, linking to a more detailed explanation, you get side-tracked.

If you don’t have good discipline to keep yourself on track, you’ll probably end up confused about what to do (PPC? Article Marketing? Building a List? Squidoo/Blogger/Hubpages?).

Tools
The tools available to Wealthy Affiliate are the following:

• Keyword Research Tool
  Actually a collection of several KW research applications that pull data from Google, let you sort through them and arrange them by traffic volume, let you expand keywords and search related terms and check on who’s paying for advertising for any given keyword.
  Something I really dislike about the research tool is that it displays competition strength, PPC competition and article marketing competition on arbitrary number-scales. The problem is that this teaches you nothing about how competition strength is determined and relying on the tool’s data becomes a crutch. Apart from that, the KW research tools are solid and useful.

• Site Rubix
  Site Rubix is a website building tool with an easy to use drag-and-drop interface. You start out with a template, upload images you want to have displayed and then add menu-items, links, text and images in an intuitive interface. Site Rubix is a pretty easy way to create html-websites without programming knowledge, however, I find it to be nowhere as easy or as flexible as using WordPress (but maybe that’s a question of what I’m used to).
• NicheQ
  NicheQ is a collection of pre-set data and content for a series of niches. You can pick a (broad) niche like dating or weight-loss and you’ll receive a list of keywords, PLR articles, a report on what kind of content and promotion works in that niche, some pre-written promotional e-mails and some website templates.
  I have to say that I’m not sure about this component of WA. I’m skeptical of anything pre-made and I’ve never worked with PLR or pre-written mails. On the other hand, I see the usefulness in having something put together, just to see what kind of content an experienced marketer puts together for a niche.
• WA Web Hosting
  Wealthy Affiliate offer free web hosting does what it says: You get to host your sites on their servers for free.
  Once again, I’m going to be a bit mean here: I’d be wary of making use of this service before I was entirely sure that I wanted to stay with WA on the long run. Also: Hosting isn’t very expensive.
• My-Linker
  Neat little tool for cloaking and tracking all your affiliate links. Using this, you can keep an overview of all your campaigns from one central location.
• Clickbank Research Tool
  
  Clickbank’s own search function is quite tedious and uninformative, so it’s great that there’s a better solution within WA. It lets you search for trending products (see screenshot above) or do custom searches through the entire Clickbank catalogue.
• Rapid Writer
  This is an article writing program that integrates with some keyword research and lets you check keyword densities. There’s also an article spinning/rewriting functionality that I found to be incredibly clumsy compared to something like CRewriter or even manually using spinning syntax.
• Website Templates
  A collection of html/CSS templates you can download and use. The templates are okay, in general and some might be useful for creating simple squeeze-pages. As an avid WordPress user, I once again have to state that I didn’t even consider trying the templates.
• STF Marketing Blueprint
  ”Blueprint” of a marketing campaign that was apparently very successfully run for a weight-loss product a while back. I’m not sure how useful this is, since there’s already almost too much information in the Training Centre and the NicheQ tool.

Community
As already mentioned, there are several community features inside Wealthy Affiliate. The most frequently used one is perhaps the members forum. You’ll find quite a lot of activity going on in the forum and while it can’t quite hold up to the best Internet marketing forums in terms of expert members and variety of topics and posts, it does have one huge quality: The Wealthy Affiliate forum is the newbie-friendliest forum I’ve ever seen.

There are some extremely helpful members in the WA forums and you’ll find lots and lots of basic questions asked and answered.

Apart from that, you can keep up to date with other’s via their WA blog entries, add people to your buddy-network and send private messages as well as public messages to each other. Another interesting feature is the WA Gold: At the beginning of each month you receive a certain amount of WA Gold, that you can give out to other members, much like “Thanks” or “Rep” in some forums. You can give gold for helpful forum posts, good training resources or any other reason you like. WA Gold can even be traded in for actual money (though you’ll need a lot of it for that to be worthwhile).

The Gold exchange is another interesting feature that helps strengthen the community and I think it’s a nice way of showing appreciation.

Further Thoughts

The training material in Wealthy Affiliate is focused mainly on article markteing, PPC and e-mail marketing. That covers the basics quite well, so no complaints there.

However, I found that the emphasis among users and in the forum is mostly on article marketing and more specifically, the use of Squidoo. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it just seems to me that there’s almost too much weight put on those two options. It might just be a personal impression, though.

Ratings

Fluff-o-Meter

There’s a lot of good, solid and useful information to be found on WA, no doubt about that. However, the information is currently too loosely structured, it’s too easy to get sidetracked while going through the training material and since every member can contribute training resources, it’s quite likely that you’ll come across material that is not useful for you, not very well put together and just distracting overall. For this reason, I can only rate WA as medium on the Fluff-o-Meter scale.

Lots of info, good info, but not enough structure.

Spam-Factor

The spam-factor is minimal when joining WA. You will get occasional e-mails, but they are very rarely pushing product.

Inbox mostly spared.

Scam-Scale

Again, no problem at all. There are no hidden fees, no false promises and no agressive upsells. While there are some upsells within WA, they are not pushed on the members at all. Respect to Kyle and Carson for not trying to exploit the WA members a bit more.

No annoying upsales and no member exploitation = very good!

Overall Rating

Wealthy Affiliate is not a bad place to start, if you want to learn about Internet marketing. It’s greatest strengths are the community features and the overall beginner-friendliness. There are two things I think WA could do a lot better, though. For one, the information should be more clearly structured. Secondly, I think some of the tools could be vastly improved. The keyword research tools pale in comparison to what something like Market Samurai or Keyword Elite offers and the Rapid Writer could very easily be made a lot easier to use and much more powerful, to name just two examples.

PLEASE NOTE THE UPDATE BELOW!

In short: It’s good, but it could be better.

This is for you if:

• You are new to affiliate marketing
• You want all your resources and tools in one place
• You have enough discipline not to get overwhelmed and sidetracked by lots of information
• You appreciate being part of a community

This is not for you if:

• You are already experienced in Internet marketing
• You are prone to analysis-paralysis

In the first part of the RQR Internet marketing forum comparison, we had a look at some raw data – number of members, topics, posts, member activity, popularity etc. In this second part, we’ll see what kind of characteristics each of the forums bring to the table and what kind of members and content you can expect to find in each one.

I’ll summarize my (largely subjective but hopefully unbiased) impression of each of the forums, in alphabetical order:

5star Affiliate Programs Forums

The 5star Affiliate Programs Forums are part of the 5star Affiliate Programs review/blog site about affiliate networks. The forums are fairly active, considering the relatively low member-count. I noticed that almost every post receives at least one response from Linda, the 5star owner/admin/boss. Her answers are often very elaborate and detailed. Frankly, I’m amazed that she invests so much time taking care of the community.

The atmosphere in this forum seems very friendly and welcoming and I’m seeing a lot of good advice being handed out.

There’s also a wealth of good stickies that are worth having a closer look at.

5star Affiliate Programs Forums
Friendly place where you get detailed answers from the boss – even if your questions are stupid.

Abestweb

Perhaps the defining characteristic of the Abestweb forum is that it is very diversely categorized. What I mean by that is that there are loads and loads of sub-forums on all kinds of subjects to be found here. For example, there are sub-forums for discussions about affiliate tax issues and legal issues as well as separate sub-forums for every ad network and affiliate network you can think of. And there is also a good collection of off-topic forums about health and fitness, random funny stuff and forums for general chit-chat.

In practical terms, this means that for almost any Internet marketing related topic you might have a question about, there is probably a specific sub-forum on Abestweb that is perfectly suited for you.

The downside is that the whole forum is a bit confusing. There are just so many different threads in different sub-forums that you can easily get lost on you first few visits.

Abestweb
The place with the absolute most sub-forums possible inside the online marketing segment.

AffiliateBot

The AffiliateBot forums are actually just part of the AffiliateBot affiliate network. The forums are not limited exclusively to subjects related to the parent-company though, so they can be interesting for any Internet marketer. Apart from a few sub-forums about the AffiliateBot network, there is a good amount of other sub-forums – not too many and not too few.

When you’re browsing this forum, you do notice that it’s a relatively small one. That’s not always a bad thing, though, since this means that it’s calmer and less chaotic than some of the very popular forums. I also found quite a few very useful resources like this link-building thread, for example.

AffiliateBot Forum
Great if you are an AffiliateBot member. Good, even if you aren’t.

DreamTeamMoney

At first, I was very irritated with the DTM forum: Via a search, I was directed to a strange landing-page they have, that looks like a sales-page. They aren’t selling anything though, it’s just a “squeeze page” for signing up to the forum.

I still don’t know if this was meant as a joke or if they’re serious about this. Anyway, after signing up, I had a lot of trouble logging in, my password didn’t work and I sometimes arrived back at the squeeze page instead of the forums. After a while, I had these issues sorted out, but I wish they had just omitted that bloody landing page in the first place.

The forum itself features a large amount of sub-forums on many subjects, much like Abestweb. I found the categories on DTM easier to navigate, however.

As far as member activity and good content, there’s nothing to complain about on DTM. It’s a large, active and useful forum.

What’s slightly annoying about it is how much advertising is used in this forum. There are animated banners all over the place and text-link ads are also used in the posts. I realize that the forum-owners need to make money somehow, but DTM definitely suffers from advertisement overload.

DreamTeamMoney
Good content, ads, ads, text-ads, some more content, flashing banner, content, ads…

eWealth

eWealth is a relatively small forum and it’s noticeably “slower” than some of the others. You might not get an answer to your question for a day or two, but you usually do get a response eventually.

The good new is that this makes the forum less addictive. You won’t feel as compelled to check for answers every five minutes as with some other forums.

From what I’ve seen, it seems that eWealth could do with slightly stricter moderation. I’ve encountered the occasional spammy post while browsing eWealth.

Apart from that, eWealth is a quality forum. There are quite a few experienced and helpful members and there’s good info to be found on eWealth.

eWealth
Not ashamed of being small.

Warrior Forum

This is the big one. As we’ve seen in my last post, the Warrior Forum dominates in terms of activity, number of users and visitors, posts and any other metric you can think of.

So what makes it so special? For one, the fact that it’s the most popular of it’s kind does have some benefits. Because of it’s sheer size, it attracts the most marketers and so you are most likely to find some brilliant marketing minds on the WF, even if just by pure chance.

The WF is also very, very active. This is great because it means there is a lot of info you can soak up on the WF and you’ll usually receive answers to your posts within minutes. On the other hand it can be problematic because the constant stream of interesting contributions and new threads popping up all over the place can keep you locked into the WF for hours on end.

One of the notable features of the WF is that the members can offer their own products as “Warrior Special Offers” or WSO. There is a thread where you can buy online marketing related ebooks and programs from the top members and the WSO also offers you the chance to publish and profit from a product of your own.

For pure, valuable information content, it’s quite frankly amazing how much the WF has to offer. Especially if you join the paid “War Room” section, where you’ll find more valuable marketing information than you could work through in your lifetime.

In short: Spend some time on the WF and you’ll soon realize why it’s the most popular online marketing forum by far.

Warrior Forum
Warning: This forum may eat up all of your free time! It may also make you seriously rich.

Why Do Work?

The whydowork forums are part of the whydowork website which is a resource site about work-at-home jobs. As such, the forum isn’t as squarely focused on affiliate marketing and online marketing as the other forums listed here. There is still a fair amount of activity in the online marketing subforums, however.

For information about legitimate work-at-home jobs, MLM, freelance writing and other subjects that are about making money online but only loosely related to the usual online marketing subjects, whydowork is the place to check first.

Whydowork.com
Should be called “Why do work somewhere else than at home?”

WickedFire

WickedFire has character. This is definitely the forum that leaves the most memorable impression among the ones listed.

Why?

I think these two quotes from the N00b’s guide to surviving WickedFire thread pretty much summarize it:

We swear…a LOT around here, so deal with it.

and

If you post a stupid question, you will be told so. However, you will probably still get a decent answer from someone. So, go ahead, ask dumb questions.

That’s what I found, browsing WickedFire: There’s a lot of swearing, sarcasm and joking around, but there’s still a lot of very useful information and the members are ultimately helpful. They might first take a stab at you, but they will then proceed to help you. If you have a sense of humour and aren’t easily offended, then you’ll feel right at home in this forum.

Also: I found some sticky posts that contain a ton of valuable information. Definitely worth looking into.

WickedFire
Online marketing forum with a distinct 4chan/cracked.com slant.

Final Verdict?

While each of the forums listed has it’s benefits and I do recommend giving at least a couple of them a closer look, there are two clear winners in this roundup:

• The Warrior Forum for being huge and filled to the brim with brilliant advice and resources.
• WickedFire for being fun and very informative.

I hope this post was useful to you. Make sure you join at least one online marketing community, otherwise, you’re simply missing out!

Here, you can find the first part of the RQR forum roundup.

A good forum offers great opportunities to connect with like-minded people and learn from others. If you are new to internet marketing, one of the best investments you can make is to invest your time (not money) to do some research in a good forum. And if you are a seasoned marketer and have not joined any forums yet, it’s probably high time you gave it a go. In this first article on Internet marketing forums, I introduce several candidates and have a look at the raw metrics: Number of visitors, members, posts etc. This will give us a good first idea of which forums are popular and which aren’t.

Affiliate Marketing Forums – The Numbers

Okay, I’ll be throwing a ton of metrics at you in just a minute. Let me first state very clearly that I’m not saying “the most popular forum is the best”. Popularity or visitor count is simply one of many factors to consider. In this post, it’s all about the data and in the next post, I will go into more detail on what topics are covered and give you some inside information on the forums.

The Candidates

Here is a list of all the online marketing forums I feature in this report:

• 5star Affiliate Programs Forums
• Abestweb
• AffiliateBot Forum
• DreamTeamMoney
• eWealth
• Warrior Forum
• Whydowork? Forums
• WickedFire

These are the forums I’ll be comparing. An honourable mention goes to NetAffiliateTalk, a small forum (too small to show any data in Quantcast and other analysis apps) that nonetheless ranked quite well for some search terms I entered to find these forums. So they must be doing something right.

Please note that all the data was gathered on the 3rd of November, 2009. The numbers are changing daily, so what you see below is simply a snapshot.

Number of Members

The Warrior Forum is clearly ahead of the pack with close to 160’000 registered members. That’s more than double the member count of the two closest competitors, DreamTeamMoney and Abestweb, with around 60’000 members each.

Number of Topics

Looking at the number of threads in each of the forums, the differences are less extreme. The Warrior Forum is still in the lead with just over 100’000 topics listed. Abestweb is a close follower and WickefFire as Well as DreamTeamMoney are also very topic-rich with over 70’000 threads each.

It could be that the Warrior Forum simply has more lurkers registered – people who browse the forums but don’t make posts or create threads of their own.

Number of Posts

The number of posts by itself isn’t really what I’m interested in – we’re seeing a similar distribution to that shown in the number of topics graph. It’s no wonder that those forums with the most members and most topics will also have the most posts. What’s more interesting to look at is the following:

Average Posts per Topic

Here, the playing field is even. A large forum doesn’t necessarily have an advantage when it comes to posts per topic.
For the above results, I simply divide the number of posts by the number of topics, to see how many answers each new thread gets on average. On DreamTeamMoney, the average number of answers per topic is just over 12. The Warrior Forum still gets a good 10 replies per topic, on average. eWealth does pretty well, here. It’s the only one of the smaller forums that is apparently seeing enough participation from it’s members to keep up with the big boys under this metric.

There are many factors that can influence this result of course, but we can still assume that on the forums ranking higher in this comparison, you are more likely to get several answers to your questions than on the lower ranking ones.

Alexa Stats

I found some interesting data comparing the forums in alexa. Unfortunately, alexa only lets you compare up to five sites at once, so I picked the five strongest forums, traffic-wise, for these measurements.

Looking at the reach stats for the past six months, we once again see the Warrior Forum dominating. We also see a very strong upwards trend for the Warrior Forum, as well as some serious dips. I personally can’t tell what caused those dips, it could be anything from frequent server maintenances during a certain time-frame to frequent promotions that lead to an concentration in traffic that then drops back down again, before being picked up by the next promo. Bottom line: I simply don’t know.

Here we see the amount of time the average user spends on each of the sites, per visit. As you can see, both the Warrior Forum and WickedFire are leading the pack, here. You get the same kind of picture when checking bouncerates and pageviews: WickedFire is right up there with the Warrior Forum. In short, this means that those two forums are the most “addictive”. They seem to have the kind of content and community that makes people stick around for a bit.

Backlinks

As one last comparison, let’s take a look at the holy grail of traffic ranking and one of the major quality indicators for any website: Backlinks. This data was also taken from alexa.com, which doesn’t count multiple links coming in from the same website. So these are the numbers of unique websites containing a backlink to the respective forum:

Once again, the Warrior Forum is clearly in the lead with over 1’800 backlinks counted. Note that the asterisked (*) sites have a homepage separate from the forum, for which the number of backlinks are also counted.

Conclusion

Just looking at the data, the strongest competitor is clearly the Warrior Forum. DreamTeamMoney, WickedFire and Abestweb are the other strong competitors. Of course, a forum being big and popular doesn’t automatically make it better, but it’s an indicator nonetheless.

In my next post, I will give a more subjective analysis of these forums. I’ll report on what sets these forums apart from each other and try to find out what makes the Warrior Forum and WickedFire such sticky sites. From this information, I hope to give everyone a good idea of which forums are the right ones for them and which ones are most likely to help them in their own Internet marketing success. So stay tuned!

That’s it for now,

Update: Check out part 2 of my forums roundup.