Today’s post is a very special one, because it is the first in a series of interviews with Internet marketing experts from many different fields of expertise like SEO, PPC, social media etc.

My first guest is Gary Gregory from Google Sniper Keywords. He is probably the most experienced Google Sniper out there, with over 100 sniper sites under his belt. In the interview, we talk about some of the most common difficulties people have when they start out with online marketing, find out what Gary’s manual and training is all about and learn why it pays off to be stubborn, in this business.

Below, you can find the download link as well as the straming player for listening to the interview. Enjoy!

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Download Link

In my recent review of Google Sniper, I mentioned that there were a few minor (and one major) flaws in this otherwise solid “make-money-online” course. In this article I’m calling “Google Sniper Extended”, I share some simple little tips and tweaks that take care of most of the minor flaws in Google Sniper. If you own this product, you definitely want to take a look in here and learn how to save some time and effort and avoid a mistake or two.

Finding a Product

The chapter on selecting a product to promote is a real blunder in Google Sniper and it seems like not much thought was put into it.

Let’s fix that.

First of all, let me say that there is a big, wide world of products you can promote as an affiliate outside of ClickBank. So, if you can’t find the kind of thing you’re looking for on CB, hop on over to Amazon or Commission Junction to name just two out of the countless possibilities out there. That’s not to say ClickBank is a bad place to start. It offers a good range of products that often pay handsome commissions. But just browsing through the marketplace (directly or using CBengine, as suggested in GSniper) won’t get you very far towards finding your ideal product.

Both the marketplace and CBengine just don’t offer that much information about the products on offer. To dig a little deeper and get valuable information about products on CB, head on over to CBtrends.

Watch this video to see how you can best make use of CBtrends:

Link Cloaking

In Google Sniper, it is suggested you cloak your affiliate links by creating a .php command for those links. I found the method described overly complicated, to be honest.

Truth is, you can do redirects for link cloaking much more easily by setting up a simple .htaccess file or using your host’s cpanel. However, since you’ll be using WordPress for the Sniper Sites anyway, there’s an even easier and more elegant solution. Watch this video to see it implemented:

Final Post

This is another very minor “glitch” I saw in the Google Sniper course: Basically, you are setting up a WordPress blog and you want the page where you are promoting your product (your product review or whatever) to show up on the homepage. Now, on a blog, it’s always your newest post that shows up right on top of the homepage. In GSniper it’s suggested that you create your promotional post last and then leave the blog as it is.

But what if you want to add some new info or make a few more posts but keep your main sales post on the first page? Or what if it turns out that one of your other posts (not the one you used as the final post) is generating more sales than the final post? How can you bump that post up ahead of the top one?

Well, luckily, all of this is very easily done with a WordPress feature called “sticky posts”.

Just go to your WordPress admin area and select the post you want to edit. In the upper right hand corner of the window, you’ll see this tab titled “Publish”. Click on the Edit link highlighted in this picture:

Now, you’ll see a box saying “make this post stick to the first page”. Tick that and confirm by clicking “OK”. And that’s it, now you can add as many posts as you want and the one you just modified will always stay on top of all the others (until you deselect the sticky feature again).

I hope these tips were helpful for you. Use ‘em and get even more out of your Sniper Sites in less time.

Cheers,

Here it finally is: My extensive Google Sniper review. If you are already involved in Internet marketing, then you have very likely heard of Google Sniper. There is a lot of hype surrounding this program and it was promoted and discussed by many in the make money online business. I have been testing this system for about two months now and in this review, you will get the complete run-down of every feature, every strength and every weakness in Google Sniper.

Overview

The Google Sniper package consists of one main, 99 page manual, eight training videos as well as a document with process maps laid out for you, so you can easily follow the system step-by-step. There’s also a short introduction ebooklet, but it’s pure fluff. You can just ignore it and get started with the manual right away.

The premise of the system is as follows: George Brown says he can teach you how to build simple, small WordPress websites in just a few hours and get them ranked on page one in Google without having to build any backlinks.

So, the idea is that you can do some keyword research, build a site like this in a very short time and then move right on to the next site because you don’t need to do any article writing, backlink building, social bookmarking or anything else like that, once the site is built. A pretty bold claim, to say the least. Of course, these sites ranking on page one for their keywords can then be easily monetized by promoting some kind of affiliate program.

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Hard Selling

Let me get one thing right out of the way: GSniper is very sales-heavy. Right after the purchase, you’ll encounter two upsells, the first one for $97 and the second one for $77. As per my reviewing guidelines, I didn’t buy or test either, but especially the first one looks really scammy to me. The reason being that it’s a “niche marketing course” that will teach you how to make lots of money online. This begs the question: Isn’t that what the product I just bought is supposed to be?

In addition to this, you are signed up to a $37 monthly membership when you purchase GSniper. If you don’t want to be part of this membership site, you have to opt out of it after the fact. To be fair, the first month is free, which is a good thing. But I’d still rather opt in to something like this than have to opt out of it.
I was only a member for about six weeks, but in that time, I didn’t see anything in the membership section that warranted $37 a month.

Finally, the keyword research tool Keyword Elite 2 is promoted/recommended within the Google Sniper course and the membership and download areas contain advertisements and affiliate-promotions.

In short, there will be a lot of product pushed your way once you sign up for Google Sniper.

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What’s it About?

As already outlined above, the system will teach you how to build a WordPress powered site in a very specific manner. The final site will only consist of around 5 to 10 pages of content and all of it will be focused on one keyword that you pick beforehand. The site will be promoting one product and one product only (no Adsense ads or multiple products) and the goal is to get this site to rank on page one in the Google results for the targeted keyword and convince as many visitors as possible to buy the promoted product through your affiliate link.

The system covers a wide range of topics starting from how to set up the website and what kind of content to add, how to find the right kind of keywords to target and walking you all the way through the process until you have one completed GSniper site. The detail in the instructions is usually very good and easy to follow. The videos support what’s written in the manual quite well, although some of them are pretty redundant after having read the text.

I particularly liked how much emphasis was put on how to create content, how and where to place affiliate links within your site, and how to test for optimal conversions.

Something I noticed is that the manual often contains a piece of advice followed by something along the lines of “…this is only a guess” or “…not sure but it works for me”. It would have been nice of George Brown had actually run some tests instead of including a bit of guessing and unfounded claims in the ebook. On the other hand, I think it’s great that he is honest about the things he doesn’t know and didn’t test instead of just pretending like they’re all rock-solid facts.

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Pros and Cons

Google Sniper does many things right and gets some things wrong. Here, I want to lay it all out for you, so you can decide whether this product is worth your money or not.

One thing that needs to be mentioned is this: Yes, it really works.
You can get a simple little WordPress blog listed on page one, getting free traffic and making sales. So, fundamentally, the system works and you can and will make money if you follow through on it.

The greatest strength of the course lies in how the creation of the website is laid out. The manual and the videos give you a very clear idea of what the final website should look like and what it should contain. There’s also a lot of thought put into what kind of theme you should use and what kind of story you should tell about yourself on the website, all carefully tailored towards getting more sales.

One part where George completely drops the ball, however, is when it comes to choosing a product to promote. There is no really useful information about what criteria to choose products by and the video on this subject consist of George browsing CBengine, seemingly at random, and basically saying: Pick a ClickBank product with high gravity. I bet you couldn’t have guessed that by yourself.

Another little issues comes up with the keyword research component: Finding the right keyword is absolutely essential for making this system work. You have to find a very particular kind of keyword if you want to stand any chance at all of getting a page ranked for it without any backlinks.

Google Sniper contains detailed information on what kind of traffic volume, number of competing pages and criteria in the pages already ranking for the keyword to look for. You will also be presented with three suggestions for picking keywords:

1. Find a keyword using the free Google Keyword tool and spreadsheets.
   This method is free but requires quite a bit of work with copying data into spreadsheets and manually sorting and filtering it.
2. Find a keyword using Keyword Elite 2.
   Makes it a lot easier to find good keywords, filter them and analyze the competition for each one of them, but the program is quite costly.
3. Simply use the product name as your keyword.

The third method, using the product’s name as your keyword, is presented as the quickest and easiest way to pick a good keyword. It’s true that a product name is generally a good keyword since people who search of a product name already know what they want and are quite likely to buy.

But, and this is a big BUT, in combination with the product selection advice from before, this becomes absolutely terrible advice for Google Sniper sites. Why? Because you can bet that for any ClickBank product with a high gravity, there will be tons of marketers out there, targeting the product name and building search engine optimized sites, creating backlinks to them, bookmarking them and so on. In this kind of environment, a Sniper site with zero backlinks doesn’t stand a chance to get a permanent listing on page one.

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What You Need to Know

I realize that I’ve been very critical of this product so far. It remains, however, that the system fundamentally works and that you can make money using it. I don’t mean to bash this product or George Brown in any way.

There are two things you absolutely need to know if you decide to try Google Sniper and these things are:

1. Finding the right keyword is the most important part.
   Needless to say, you won’t be able to rank for highly competitive keywords with a zero-backlink site. Therefore, it’s absolutely essential that you find the right kind of keyword: A keyword that gets a good amount of traffic, consisting of potential buyers, but that has the kind of profile that will still enable a Sniper site to be listed in the top spots in a Google search.
   Since using product names won’t work for very popular products, you either need a way to find ClickBank products (or other products) that can get good sales, but that you can still compete for, or you need to do the keyword research. And be warned: Finding a keyword that matches all the criteria outlined in the course can be very difficult. Even using a tool like Keyword Elite or Market Samurai, you can easily spend an afternoon sifting through results before you find a usable keyword.
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2. It’s a numbers-game.
   If you start with the GSniper system, plan to build at least five sites before drawing any conclusions. Some will work, some won’t and you can’t always tell beforehand whether a site will stick or not. Google moves in mysterious ways, after all.
   If you stick to the system and build five sites according to it, you will definitely have at least one or two winners in there. And for the sites that don’t quite make it to page one, it’s worth considering biting the bullet and building some good old-fashioned backlinks to them anyway.

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Conclusion

There is some fluff in Google Sniper, but it isn’t rampant. Apart from the completely useless introduction manual (clearly just padding to make the feature list a bit longer) and the almost non-existent advice about selecting products to promote, the course is quite action-oriented, though. The system is laid out quite well and the process maps are a good addition.

Two instant “one-time-only” upsells that seem to devalue the purchase just made and a thin, paid monthly membership that you are signed up for without any real choice and have to opt out of if you aren’t interested certainly get the scammy-and-crappy alarm ringing. That, plus the advertisement and promotions in the member section are really too much. Overall, the excessive product-pushing significantly devalues this product.

Overall, I can’t really recommend Google Sniper. The prodct isn’t downright bad, but it certainly lacks polish and the aforementioned product-pushing just leaves a bad taste. It could have been a lot better and more newbie-friendly if some blunders in regards to keyword research and product selection would have been avoided. I also feel that the content and delivery of the videos could and should be a lot better.

What’s more important for ranking in Google, on-page or off-page optimization? On-page optimization is concerned with header tags, page titles and keyword density. Off-page optimization is concerned mainly with links pointing to your site and their anchor-text. You’ve probably encountered many opinions about which is more important. In today’s post, I want to introduce Grizzly Brears, a strong proponent of off-page optimization and George Brown, who’s product called Google Sniper is focused almost entirely around on-page optimization. Let’s see what we can get out of this little showdown.

The Bear and the Furniture Mover

Let me start off with a quick introduction of the two proponents I selected. On the one hand, you have Grizzly Brears, a very well known yet elusive online marketer who lives out in Alaska or somewhere like that. Off the map for most people, anyways. He has a blog, where he writes about how to make money online for beginners, and it’s definitely worth checking out. Grizz often emphasises how important it is to get backlinks to your site with optimized anchor texts. What this means is that if you want your website to rank well for the search-term “red fox video”, you want to get a lot of good backlinks that read red fox video.

To give you an example of his stance on SEO, here’s a quote from his blog:

To me SEO means just one thing – keyword targeted backlinks. That’s it. You don’t need to know another thing to rank well in the search engines.

There you go.

On the other side, we have George Brown, an 18-year old who allegedly went from being a furniture-mover to making a very comfortable full-time income from Internet marketing in a very short time. If he has a personal blog, I sure can’t find it, so I’ll just link to Google Sniper, which is his latest product. Google Sniper is an immensely successful info-product detailing George’s own method of building websites and monetizing them.

Here’s a snippet from the introduction in the Google Sniper manual:

…it means you won’t have to do any of the usual tedious work that’s associated with building SEO based sites. That’s right. You don’t need to do any link-building or endless content updating.

As you can see, that’s a pretty stark contrast right there. One says it’s all about backlinks, the other says you don’t need backlinks.

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Examples (a.k.a. Proof)

Of course, there are examples that “prove” each of these standpoints. The one given by Griz is a great do-it-yourself one: Go to Google and type in “click here” as a search term. You’ll see that the number one ranked site for this keyword is Adobe (either the reader or the flash player download page). Now, go to that site and see if you can find any on-page optimization for the term “click here”.
You’ll see that it’s not in any title tags, it’s not in the page title and in fact, at the time of writing this, the words “click here” cannot be found anywhere at all on that page.

So clearly, those Adobe pages are not on-page optimized for the term “click here”. Yet they rank first out of millions of results. Why? Because from all around the web, people have links saying something like “if you can’t see this, click here to install the newest flash player”. Adobe’s pages are ranking number one and two in Google solely thanks to off-page factors.

What about the other philosophy, stating that on-page optimization matters a lot? Well, I can give you two examples showing how on-page optimization matters.

1. Another do-it-yourself one: Go to Google and type “hkcMjRm” as a search term. You’ll see the top spots pointing to the SEO 2.0 blog, or more specifically the post about using Google as a URL-shortener on that blog.
   This is an extreme example, of course, since the letter combination hkcMjRm was specifically designed to be unique so that Google would always point to that post featuring it. Since the post became quite popular and people tweeted and wrote about it a lot, the SEO 2.0 post is no longer the only result, but it remains the top result. Analytics show that there are zero backlinks with the anchor-text “hkcMjRm”, however. In other words, the only thing Google goes by to rank that page is what it finds on-page.
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   So much for “proving” that on-page elements matter. But what about ranking for a real search term?
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2. Let’s go back to that “click here” example and do a bit of a backlink analysis. Since I’m lazy, I had Keyword Elite 2 do the analysis for me. Here are the results:

First four positions (as of Dec. 12th 2009):

So far, so good. Obviously, the Adobe pages are completely dominating here, with millions of backlinks to each of them. And most of these are high-quality backlinks too, since many reputable and high-pr sites are pointing to those download pages. A million links from some crappy link-farms wouldn’t have the same effect, of course.

But let’s take a look at the next few results and we’ll see something rather interesting:

See what’s going on here? In positions three and four, we have two pages with a few thousand backlinks, while practically all the other page one entries have links in the millions or at least hudreds of thousands. How does a page with barely 3’000 backlinks outrank one with almost 9 Million backlinks? Again, this is an Adobe page with millions of links. Many of those are going to be coming in from very reputable sources and there’s no shady automated link-building or black hat business going on here. So, how is this possible?

Quite frankly, I don’t know, since I don’t work for Google’s algorithm programming team. What I do know is that www.clickhere.com does have some on-page optimization for the term “click here”. On the ranked page, it is featured in the page title, a couple of times in the text as well as in the meta keywords and meta description. No doubt this plays a part in where the page ends up in the results.

I’m not trying to make a case for either standpoint here, but I’m sure you can see that the above example could be used to make a strong case for on-page optimization. Just looking at the number of backlinks and on-page factors, one could argue that a little bit of on-page work has an equivalent effect to building millions of backlinks.

Don’t let anyone fool you with simple examples like this, however. It’s usually a bit more complicated than that.

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Now What?

Simply put, we can clearly see that both on-page and off-page factors matter. And to be clear: No one really denies this. Grizz knows and admits that on-page factors can help and George Brown knows and clearly states that you can only rank for certain types of relatively non-competitive keywords without any backlinking whatsoever.

The big debate is generally about how much weight these factors should be given. At the end of the day, the question comes down to: “Should I spend my time optimizing the on-page factors or should I spend it building backlinks?”

You can’t do 100% of everything, so you have to set priorities. The purpose of this post is simply to untangle some of the confusion that can arise when you see how different the opinions of some of the SEO experts are.

The good thing about on-page optimization is that you can set most of it up just once (configure proper header and title-tags). When that’s all set, you can concentrate on the off-page optimization and you should get the best of both worlds. Bottom line is that building good, keyword targeted backlinks works. And so does the GSniper method, when it’s done right (more on that in an upcoming review).

I hope you enjoyed this post. All the best,

P.S.: I have also seen Brad Gosse using the “click here” example. I don’t know where it originated from, but Brad and Grizz aren’t the only prominent proponents of off-page SEO, just like George isn’t the first to suggest targeting low-competition keywords with good on-page optimization. But I had to pick someone, right?

EDIT: I managed to find George’s personal blog. See George’s Internet marketing blog right here.