I don’t get the appeal of Facebook. I really don’t. It looks crappy (like something designed by a teenager) and it’s got the most gawd-awful user interface I’ve come across in a long, long time.

Yet people love it. Go figure.

And people love it so much, they love it more than Google. Yes, folks, it’s official, Facebook gets more traffic than Google. It’s been acknowledged by Google (who are now fighting back with Google+) and Facebook now has a PageRank of 10, equal to that of the almighty Google itself.

Despite hating the whole Facebook “thing”, as an affiliate marketer I can’t ignore. I’ve tried but it just won’t go away.

Providing more free traffic than Google can shake a stick at means Facebook now has to be factored into the affiliate marketing equation and than means building fanpages (yuck!).

Facebook used to use something called FBML. Haven’t got a clue what it stands for (Flippin’ Bloody Marvellous Language?) but it was dropped in favour of iframes. Whoop-de-do. All that happened while I was looking the other way hoping Facebook would be just another flash-in-the-pan fad.

But no, iframes and Facebook are here to stay. Now I couldn’t be arsed spending time building crappy fanpages with Facebook’s tools and their crappy interface. I want a tool that’s going to take the pain out of it so I won’t end up slitting my wrists at the end of the day.

Well, one such tool trundled into my Inbox today.

There’s lots of emails going out about it – it’s called the Income Hybrid 3in1 Software Suite (catchy title, huh?). It’s 47 bucks and you can click the link to get it if you want.

I found there’s a 1-hour webinar on a special page that only a select few are supposed to see but I’m in a crappy mood what with all the Facebook crappiness I’ve been dealing with today that even though I shouldn’t give you the link…
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I’ve added a new page to this site called Domain Names & Blogs For Sale where I’ll be selling aged domain names and pre-built WordPress blogs. Stats for each (PageRank, Alexa traffic, pages indexed and no of backlinks) are available from the page.

If there’s a niche or topic you’d be interested in seeing a blog created for, drop me an email. I can’t promise that I have the content available to build such a blog but there’s a good chance that I do.

Check the page fairly frequently (about once a week) to see what new domains and/or blogs are on offer.

At the end of my review of the Autoblog Blueprint course earlier this month, I mentioned that I might do a case study on one of the blogs I build using the techniques and methodologies laid out in the course. So that’s what I’m beginning here.

[Save $70 (47%) on the Auto Blog Blueprint with this coupon code: 72FC4A8B84]

Here’s what I did in the first week of setting up a new blog:

Week 1:

1. Pick a niche: I have some interest in the Green Energy / Alternative Energy / Renewable Energy niche so I did some keyword research using Market Samurai to see how competitive the niche is and if it would be worth devoting some time to.

2. Keyword Research Part: I don’t just build a single large list of all the keywords I find for a niche. I use Market Samurai to check the competition for different keywords. That competition is measured by the PageRank of a site, how many backlinks it has, where those backlinks come from and how good a job the site’s webmaster has done with SEO. While the niche is somewhat competitive, using Market Samurai’s keyword competition tools showed that I could probably shoehorn a domain into the Google page 1 results for several keywords given a bit of time. If a large enough list of keywords comes out of this selection process, then I proceed to Step 2 of keyword research. With the green energy niche, there were enough keywords.
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The Terms of Service (TOS) for Google Analytics basically say that they can do whatever they want with the data they collect from your sites and this includes using that information to determine search engine rankings.

By installing the Google Analytics code on your site, you are giving Google a back door window into your traffic patterns and they will quickly determine that your (affiliate) site is not the kind of site they want in their index. You see, Google doesn’t really like affiliate sites. Perhaps I should qualify that assertion a bit more. Google doesn’t like little-guy affiliate sites; they don’t seem to have a problem with the big guys and large corporations running affiliate ads on their sites.

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