Search Engine Optimization: A Growing Trend in the Middle East and Northern Africa?

In the Western world, SEO is one of the most popular buzz words for internet marketers. If your goal is to establish an online presence, you have to use SEO as one of your main marketing strategies. But where does that leave the rest of the world? We all know SEO is growing in Asian countries, but until recently the Middle East and Northern Africa, or MENA collectively, has stayed well under the radar.

One of the inherent issues with implementing SEO in foreign countries is the language barrier. Typical Alphanumeric based languages are a simpler hurdle – the words are different, but the letters are the same. In Middle Eastern PPC management, the biggest problem is getting passed that change in language dynamics. There are over 221 million Arabic speakers in the world, but Arabic still constitutes less than 1% of all online content.

Google is working hard to remedy this with Arabic-centric domains such as google.ae, but the change is slow and it’s difficult to find a Middle Eastern search engine marketing firm. With up to 80% of online searches coming out of Saudi Arabia and Egypt being performed in Arabic, it’s about time we saw some improvements in the MENA SEO front.

Luckily, it seems like the Arabic trends are definitely on the rise. In a part of the world with one of the historically lowest percentage of internet users, we’re starting to see numbers like 100 million Youtube videos watched (out of a global 2.5 billion) and 60% of internet users in Saudi Arabia using the Arabic extension of Facebook, now’s the time to get a jump on SEO in the Middle East. With the right Middle Eastern search engine optimization firm, the sky is the limit.

Why Should You Build an Email List? Free Excerpt | Introduction

As you may know, I have my very own list building ebook for sale on Amazon right now. Actually, you probably didn’t know that, but, hey, now you do! I have it up for $0.99 because I want people to be able to get this info without spending an arm and a leg.

 

Luckily Amazon no longer accepts human flesh as payment, but nevertheless I think beginners, amateurs, part-timers, and anybody without a lot of spending money should have access to all the tools they need to get started. What you do with it after that is up to you.

 

What I’ve decided to do then is publish parts of the ebook for free right here on my blog. I have no idea how this will turn out, or who cares about a freelance writer’s internet marketing tips, so what I want is some feedback from you guys.

 

If this post gets either 10 comments or 20 Facebook shares, I’ll publish the next chapter of the book. Same goes for that post, and so on until the entire book is available right here on the blog.

 

This is an excerpt from How to Build an Unstoppable Email List. If you want to go ahead and buy the whole thing, you can find the link on the right.

 

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Introduction

 

 

If there’s one thing that you’re going to hear from an internet marketer these days, it’s that you absolutely need to build a list if you want to increase your conversion rate and see a steady income from your business. If you have an eCommerce website, a product, or an idea that you want to market, a list will give you the opportunity to connect with thousands of people who actually want to hear about it.

 

Now, it may seem like an incredible amount of work to find interested people, get them to open your emails once you have them, and figure out new and interesting things to send them either weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly.

 

I’m not going to lie, it is a lot of work. If there’s one thing you can bank on though it’s that this is work that actually pays off in the end. You’ll need to invest a large amount of your time, but if you can do it right and follow all the steps, you’re going to be three steps ahead of most other internet marketers out there.

 

The brutal truth is that only the people who have a solid, unstoppable email list are successful. Go ask any marketer or salesman you know. If they’re making money consistently, they have a list. I always have the same piece of advice for budding marketers: Work on building a reputable list, and then worry about your sales.

 

Want some more proof? Consider these 4 reasons why a subscriber list can help your sales and marketing approach.

 

1. A list will let you squeeze the maximum amount of profit out of each and every customer.
2. You can use your subscribers as your very own test audience. If you have copy that you plan to launch on a large scale, test it on your subscriber list first to see the kind of responses you get, BEFORE you spend money on the launch.
3. Your cost for each new customer will decrease. It’s more efficient (and cheaper) to pitch a single person several times until they buy than it is to try to pitch multiple people into buying the first time.
4. If there’s a large launch from one of your affiliate providers, let thousands of people on your list know about it first, before they buy the product from somewhere else.

 

 

This ebook is meant to guide you through the process of building your first SUCCESSFUL list. Maybe it’s your first list altogether, or maybe you’ve attempted to build a list in the past with only a margin of success. Maybe you even got 500 subscribers on one list and felt good about it.

 

A successful list is one with thousands of subscribers, not hundreds.

 

If you want to learn these tried and true methods to building your unstoppable, unassailable, bulletproof list, please, continue reading.

 

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Well, not a whole lot of information there, huh? If you want to see more about how to build an email list, leave a comment or share this post on Facebook using the Share option below. Alternatively, you can just buy the whole ebook for only $0.99.

4 Easily Avoidable Mistakes Made by Article Marketers

It doesn’t matter if you’re a wet-behind-the-ears beginner or a long time veteran at internet marketing, article marketing is always going to play a vital role in your overall promotional campaign. Article marketing is the technique of using article directories and user submitted content sites to promote a business, website, or product. It’s one of the best ways to make money online writing articles. Article marketers typically put up dozens of articles each week, and with that kind of volume it’s easy to make mistakes. Here are four common mistakes made by article marketers that you can avoid with a little common sense.

Mistake #1 – Failing to Proofread

There has never been a perfect writer on this planet. Everybody makes mistakes from time to time, and in the world of internet marketing you can lose a lot of reader trust if your articles are filled with surface errors, spelling mistakes, or grammar slip-ups. It only takes a minute or two extra to read back over each article, but a lot of article marketers can’t seem to find the time. Trust is crucial in internet marketing because in this virtual arena you have literally seconds to make an impression before your reader is gone. Internet marketers base their livelihoods on trust.

In addition to basic grammar and spelling errors, sometimes the words come together in your head but don’t sound quite right when you read back over the article. Sometimes it just plain doesn’t make any sense when you go back over it a second time. Spell check may be effective for typos, but you’re the only person who has control over the flow and readability of the article. If you can’t figure out the proper flow for your articles, you can always hire a freelance writer to handle the writing while you focus on submission and promotion.

Mistake #2 – Improper Backlinking

I’ve mentioned time and time again how important backlinks are to marketing, but it’s not enough to simply put them in their; you have to make sure it’s done properly. Backlinking is one of the basics of SEO that you learn your very first day of Googling internet marketing techniques, but I’m still surprised at how many people are doing it wrong.

Backlinks need to be placed in appropriate anchor text in order to be effective. The site on which you are placing your articles also has to allow do-follow links. I’ve known several people who spent a few weeks setting up backlinks through article marketing, only to find that the site they were using implemented a no-follow linking policy.

To check if your article directory uses do-follow links, type Ctrl+U and then Ctrl+F, then type in “nofollow” in the search field. If it doesn’t find any, you’re peachy. If it does, just save yourself some time and move on to the next site.

Mistake #3 – Skipping the Terms of Service

Every article directory and user submitted content site has a terms of service, and you may not know this but ALL OF THEM ARE DIFFERENT. A lot of these places have very strict rules about what you can and cannot post on their site. It’s becoming more and more common for a site to suspend or delete a user’s account for posting affiliate links, for example. For some article marketers, affiliate links are the whole reason they’re doing it in the first place. This is one of the biggest mistakes made by article marketers because, come on, who has time to read those things?

The worst part is that sometimes these sites won’t catch your TOS violations right away. You might spend weeks, even months working on building up your articles on that site only to wake up one morning and find all that hard work came to naught because you violated one of their policies.

Keep in mind that article directories are getting stricter by the day. They have to if they want to keep up with some of the new policies being implemented by Google’s continuing algorithm changes. The easiest way to avoid wasting your time is to take a few extra minutes and skim through the terms of service each time you sign up on a new article directory.

Mistake #4 – Poor Keyword Research

If you aren’t doing this right, you have to stop and question what exactly you are doing. Keywords are the heart, soul, backbone, kidneys, and kneecaps of article marketing. There are two reasons you might be using article marketing: to a) build up backlinks or to b) sell affiliate products. For both of these, the absolutely most important, crucial, imperative, pivotal step is proper keyword research.

If you aren’t taking the time to choose high demand, low competition keywords in the proper niche, you’re just wasting your time, my friend. Content is important, yes. The number of articles you put up is important, it’s true. But keywords are the only thing making all of that worth a damn. Without the proper keywords, nobody finds your articles, search engines don’t know you exist, and you’ll wake up every single morning wondering why your articles are only getting one or two views per day.

New Blog Design and New Page for Internet Marketing Articles

I’ve got a couple new updates happening with the blog right now that I wanted to talk about. First of all, as you’ve probably already noticed there’s a new design on the blog! Let me know if you like it or prefer the old one in the comments section below. I’m always open to feedback on how to best improve the user experience here at HandleyNation.

Second, if you look to the right of this post you’ll see a brand new picture advertising my free list building e-book How to Build an Unstoppable Email List. Previously I had a post asking my readers to leave a comment and request the free e-book, but all you have to do now is subscribe. Just enter your email address and I’ll send the e-book straight to your inbox. You’ll also be notified every time I make a new post, so there’s nothing to lose!

Finally, I made one more addition to the blog in the form of a new page for articles. This page is an index of internet marketing articles, work from home articles, and motivational articles around the internet that hopefully you’ll find informative and educational. There’s 38 articles on the list right now, but I’ll be updating it constantly so check back often for some helpful guides and tips. You can click the link there on “internet marketing articles” or you can access the page in the “Articles” tab at the top of the blog.

Oh and one more thing! There’s now a Facebook like box on the right side of the blog. If you like the posts just take a second and show your appreciation by liking us on Facebook. I also post some discounts for my freelance writing services on my Facebook page from time to time, so if you’re in the market for exceptional content writing at affordable rates, go ahead and take a look at the page. You can also contact me through this blog or on my email at andrew@handleynation.com.

That’s it!

-Andrew Handley

November 2011 Earnings Report

November was an incredibly busy month. It’s finally starting to clear up down here in Costa Rica after a long rainy season, so with the sun shining I’ve been trying to spend more time outside while keeping up with all the work. I missed a good friend’s wedding due to the fact that I couldn’t get away for a few weeks, and I’m actually pretty regretful about that. If you can’t be around for friends, what kind of a friend are you?

 

Nevertheless, my spirits are higher than ever thanks to the weather change; we’re going into one of the most beautiful times of the year down here.

 

As far as earnings, November was a pretty good month. Earnings are down a little on Triond, but I’ve been pursuing other writing outlets so that’s understandable. A few months ago we got the HandleyNation Facebook page up and running thanks to the help of my lovely graphic designer.

 

I’ve been seeing a lot of traffic here on my blog from people interested in learning how to make money online, so thank you to everybody who’s been reading even when the posts were few and far between. I also have a free list building e-book available (link goes to the post)

 

Now let’s take a look at my November 2011 earnings report:

 

Triond: $8.69 (down from $16.19 last month)

 

Amazon Associates: $0.36

 

Helium: $5.26

 

Misc. Affiliates: $18.34

 

Textbroker: $10.08

 

Freelance Writing: $1,201

 

Total earned in the month of November: $1,243.73

 

Like I mentioned, I haven’t been posting much on Triond so those numbers are going down. I’m kind of getting tired of Triond’s lack of quality control, but so far it’s been a convenient outlet for anything I feel like writing at any time.

 

Helium is starting to replace Triond. Their PPV earnings are higher and it’s just a more friendly and inviting community in general. I’ll probably be doing more with them in the future.

 

Earnings are still trickling in on Amazon Associates, even though I haven’t done anything with The Twitter Experiment in awhile. It’s been months actually, so if you read those posts and wondered where the rest of the updates went, well, there you go! I’m still getting residual sales even though I haven’t touched it since about June.

 

Freelance earnings are also down, but that’s because I’ve been taking more days off. It’s Costa Rican summertime; there’s no way I’m staying inside all day!

 

Subscribe using the button at the top right of this page to get email updates whenever a new post goes up, and don’t forget to claim your FREE list building e-book.

-Andrew Handley

Hey, Want a Free List Building E-book?

**Note: I made some changes to this post and to the steps for getting the e-book. All I want you to do is put up a tweet or post a Facebook update about it.

Wow, I can’t believe it’s already December! It’s been a great year so far, and now that we’re in the month of giving I want to give all my faithful readers something in return for the support you’ve given me and my blog. I’ve written a full length e-book which I’m going to give out for free on an exclusive basis. The name of the e-book is How to Build an Unstoppable Email List, and it details all of the hardest hitting methods currently in use for creating a strong, targeted list of email subscribers.

If you have a business and you haven’t set up a subscriber list yet, now’s the time to start. This is a great guide for beginners and veterans alike, because it outlines the steps to not only bring in a ton of traffic and subscribers, but to monetize your list as well. A massive subscriber list lets you pitch your product to an audience of thousands.

In the e-book, you’ll learn how to:

• Choose a foolproof domain
• Build a basic high conversion website
• Set up an autoresponder
• Design a squeeze page and enhance it with promotions and attention grabbing giveaways
• Create a high power opt in page
• Boost your number of subscribers into the thousands with my patented START traffic method
• Take advantage of 4 simple ways to monetize your subscriber list to maximize your online income

To get this book, you basically “pay with a tweet.” When you click the link right below this paragraph it will take you to the download page for How to Build an Unstoppable Email List and all you need to do in return is either tweet about it or make a post on Facebook. That’s it! You’re paying for a full list building guide with nothing but a tweet.

Pay With A Tweet And Get This Free List Building E-Book!

-Andrew Handley

March 2011 Earnings Report

It’s getting close to the middle of April now, and it’s time for me to post my earnings for March 2011.

March was a great month; I really got HandleyNation underway, we talked about getting more blog traffic, earning money with Linkshare, blog carnivals, earning money online, and I brought in my first guest blogger. Let’s not forget the Twitter Experiment either.

In addition to working on HandleyNation, I was also getting some content up at Triond and of course handling my own freelance writing business.

I want to thank everyone for coming here and reading my blog. I know it’s not the best blog about earning money online, but I really want to get my own experiences out there as I go through them, and hopefully someone else can learn from my mistakes as I go.

So let’s take a look at my March 2011 earnings report:

Triond: $0.79

Amazon Associates: $1.06 (thanks to the Twitter experiment)

Yahoo Associated Content: $4.00

Google Adsense: $7.95

Freelance writing: $1,525

Freelance writing made up a huge chunk of my earnings, as was to be expected. I worked 30 hours and 53 minutes for my clients throughout the month.

Triond earnings for April are already $0.77, so I’m expecting to make a bit more from that this month, but I don’t see Adsense doing too well.

I’m going to be refining my approach in the Twitter experiment, so hopefully I can start seeing some more conversions there. The clicks are high, but I’ve seen very few sales as of yet.

I also plan to be getting up a niche website by the end of this week. I’m recording the process step by step so keep a lookout for that series. Please subscribe by email or subscribe to my RSS feed to get updates from HandleyNation as I get all those delicious money making posts up.

The Twitter Experiment – Day 15 and First Sales

Ever Wonder How to Make Money on Twitter?

Today is March 29, 2011, day 15 of The Twitter Experiment, and I made my first affiliate sales on Amazon using nothing but Twitter. Two items were purchased and shipped yesterday the 28^th. After my recent doubts about the experiment, this came as a very welcome surprise, I’ll tell you that.

Here are earlier updates on the Twitter Experiment in case you missed them:

Day 1

Day 5

Day 11

And now, without further ado, let’s take a look at Day 15 of the Twitter Experiment:

Current Stats – Twitter

Following: 1,624

Followers: 1,115

Listed: 7 Lists

Tweets: 251

Current Stats – Amazon

Ordered Items: 2

Clicks: 1057

Conversion: 0.19%

Total Earnings: $1.06

And my Amazon earnings report

I’ve got to say I’m pretty excited about these 2 conversions. I know it’s only $1.06, but I really wasn’t expecting to see anything for the first month, and it’s definitely much more than I’m making over at Triond. Above all, it proves that you can make money with Twitter using just a few simple techniques.

Let’s talk about those techniques a little more. Futuretweets.com was a pain in the ass every time I used it. There was no way to set recurring tweets, which is half of what I’m trying to do. I went through and manually did it at the beginning, but my lazy nature caught up with me and I just wasn’t doing it as much as I needed to to really see any Twitter sales or profit.

That’s when I found the best free twitter tool I’ve ever seen: Twaitter.com. It’s easy to schedule one time or recurring tweets, whether you want them to recur by day, week, month, year, every 4 days, every week on Monday and Thursday, etc., etc. This has made my life 1000x easier.

You may have noticed that my follower stats haven’t changed at all; I still don’t know a good method of getting the follower to following ratio up. The Twitter follower ratio is still a mystery to me, so if you know what the exact ratio is I’d appreciate if you let me know.

So to wrap up this segment, if you’re wondering how make money on Twitter this method could very well pan out. It seems like it will take a little while to get the ball rolling and see some constant income, but the potential for Twitter sales seems very high at this point.

I’ll be updating whenever there’s a significant change from now on, such as when a sale is made, but in the meantime keep an eye out for my next post where I interview blogger Alaina Ellington of Living Simplistically about her use of blog carnivals to bring in free blog traffic.

- Andrew Handley

The Twitter Experiment – Day 11 and Doubts

Today is March 25, the 11th day of The Twitter Experiment, and I know that judging results of a year-long experiment based on 11 days is completely the opposite of what I want to be doing, but I can’t help feeling discouraged already. It takes a long time to follow the right people, it takes a long time to research products to promote, and it takes a really long time to schedule tweets. I sat down for about two hours this morning and scheduled tweets on futuretweets.com, putting about a hundred quality posts in until next Monday, and then I realized that I had been logged into futuretweets as HandleyNation the ENTIRE TIME, meaning all those tweets went to the wrong account! Arrgh!

If you missed the first two installments, you can find them here:

Day 1 and Introduction

Day 5

Anyway, let’s take a look at the stats as of today:

Current Stats – Twitter

Following: 1,430

Followers: 1,117

Listed: 7 Lists

Tweets: 167

Current Stats – Amazon

Ordered Items: 0

Clicks: 536

Conversion: 0.00%

Total Earnings: $0.00

The limit that only allows you to follow 2,000 people before your ratio hits a certain point really set me back. The followers were only trickling in at that point, and it was time for action. Originally I may have been a little trigger happy with the follow button, so I began to methodically go through and unfollow people who weren’t at all related to health, bringing me down to the current level: 1,430. I expected my follower stats to take a beating, but they only dropped to a little under 1,000 before they started to climb again.

You may have noticed that on day 5 I had 102 tweets, and now, 6 days later, that has only risen by 65. This is my fault as at the beginning of the week I was hit with some urgent deadlines in my freelance business that had to be taken care of.  For some reason I’m still getting a few new followers every hour though, despite the lack of tweeting, and I suspect that it’s only because my picture is a very cute baby monkey.

As for the Amazon link clicks, I’m up 205 since the last update, and I’m guessing that I’ll be looking at approximately 1 purchase per thousand clicks, so I have a long ways to go before I get to that point. By the end of April my goal is to have 10,000 followers and 3 sales.

Again, I’m getting fairly discouraged with this experiment, even though it’s still in its infant stage. My office is in my home and still barely manage to find the time to focus on it as much as I need to, making it nearly an impossibility for anyone with a full time job to make this work for them. The whole point of this experiment is to provide you with an option for making some money online on the side.

Again, my experimental Twitter account is NaturalMonkey

and my normal account is HandleyNation

That’s all for day 11, thanks for coming by and reading.

- Andrew Handley

Check day 15 here where I make my first commissions on the Twitter Experiment:

Day 15 and First Sales

The Twitter Experiment – Day 5

Today is March 19, 2011, the 5^th day into the Twitter experiment and I do suppose it’s time for an update. If you missed the first installment, you can read it here.

Current Stats – Twitter

Following: 1,893

Followers: 1,031

Listed: 4 Lists

Tweets: 102

 

Such a cute monkey!

Current Stats – Amazon Associates (last updated March 18)

Ordered Items: 0

Clicks: 331

Conversion: 0.00%

Total Earnings: $0.00

Amazon stats

Basically my strategy over the past few days has been the same as I mentioned on day 1 – I’ve simply been trying to follow as many related tweeters (twitterers?) as I can, whenever I have time to take a break from work. It’s about as much fun as watching a log rot, but I can’t complain. A major part of my strategy is amassing as many health conscious followers as humanly possible, something I think will be necessary since I’m not making use of a landing page or any other literature to pique viewers’ interest before they get to the part where they need to buy. Here’s my setup for following:

Movies Make the Time Fly By

I learned something new today. Twitter allows you to follow up to 2,000 people with a certain ratio of followers. This is obviously to cut down on spam accounts, so I backed off on following until my number of followers catches up. Twitter doesn’t release the exact ratio, but it gives me a break anyway.

I have several hundred tweets scheduled through futuretweets.com at the moment. This includes about 2 dozen Amazon products as well as informational links to articles and health pages that people can use for education.

There isn’t much happening yet so I’m going to keep this short, but 331 clicks is very promising. My plan is to keep going with this strategy for a few weeks and try to think of some new ones in the meantime. Any suggestions would be helpful, so please feel free to leave comments down below, I’d be happy to hear from you. To keep up with the Twitter experiment subscribe to my RSS feed or email notifications.

Again, the experiment account is NaturalMonkey

My actual Twitter account is HandleyNation.

- Andrew Handley

Check out the latest updates here:

Day 11 and Doubts

Day 15 and First Sales