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Rae Hoffman

Never Mess with a Woman Who Can Pull Rank

There Are No Damn Silver Spoons (or Defining and Achieving Success Online)August 31

I did an interview recently with Lynn Terry, who is someone I’ve “known” for a long time on the Internet (and yes, have met in real life). Lynn is one of the most genuine people I’ve met on the net (she reminds me a lot of Christine Churchill) and she knows her shit and works hard. The chick makes good coin. Believe it.

I spent a few hours digging through some posts on her blog and came across a post she did called “The Lifestyle and Income of a Super Affiliate” and I thought it was kind of a neat peak into her life. Her readers know “she’s successful” but she was able to show a bit of what her success- Lynn Terry style success – looks like in that post.

I get a lot of email from people either asking for help or saying that I’ve helped them get further in making money online (and I’m glad for those emails the most) but I also see a lot of people mention having “fear” of me or folks who assume I’m this ranting, dominant force of nature in every aspect of my life.

People know I’m successful, they might get some insight into my personality from reading my twe

Creating a Small Niche Affiliate Site – Part 3August 24

If you missed part one or part two of this [insert unknown number here] part series, you’ll likely want to go back and read through them first. For those of you that are already up to speed, it’s time to get back to work.

The writer I hired in part two got me back the four articles I requested fairly quickly. So I uploaded them into WordPress and then spent some time optimizing their on page SEO for the chosen terms (titles, meta description, headings, keywords in content, internal cross linking within content, sprinkled in a few outbound links to quality non-competing sites, creating GoCodes for the affiliate links, etc).

Next up was adding the images… since the writer linked to each product page as instructed, this was fairly easy though it does take a bit of time mainly because I’m not good with images and was working without a second monitor when I did this task. I kept each article, though a bit long at fifteen hundred words a piece, to one page as I don’t want link pop split between them and would prefer one stronger page. The time spent optimizing each article was also a bit extended due to the length and the numerous product images and affiliate links.

Time spent on individual task: 3 hours, 20 minutes (total for all four)

Total time spent: 10 hours, 2

Creating a Small Niche Affiliate Site – Part 2August 11

Last week I mentioned the steps I’d taken so far in building a small niche affiliate site. I decided to do a bit more work on it this week, so I guess we’re now on to step two in the series. I’m building this site using tools/strategies that are available to anyone, on purpose.

With domain registration, hosting, installing WordPress, installing Thesis, creating affiliate relationships, keyword research, a general sitemap/URL structure and a range of site link to start the aging process out of the way, it’s time for the next steps.

Out of less than forty expected pages, I identified four keywords that I needed to do some cool [read - high quality] articles on in order to target said keywords. I went to one of the writers I work with on a regular basis and explained that I wanted four fifteen hundred word articles on each topic – and since they were commercial in nature – to limit where they found the products to talk about within the article to the five affiliate relationships I’d already created.

The writer is solely writing the content with a link to each product mentioned – I’ll pull pictures and link it up with affiliate links later. In my start-up days, I’d have written these articles myself, but at this point, it is cheaper for me to simply pay someone else t

Creating a Small Niche Affiliate Site – Part 1August 3

Not every site I personally build is in a big niche with goals to be the uber site of its industry. While all of the sites I make through MFE aim for that, every once in a while I get bored and spend some time creating a new small affiliate site in a small niche and do most of it myself to keep myself on my toes.

A few weeks ago while searching for something for myself personally, I stumbled across an industry which is mostly e-commerce dominated, but without a lot of truly skilled SEOs in the space (at least that I could see).

A quick look at some keyword research in Raven told me this arena of the web had quite a decent amount of traffic. A bit more searching told me it also had more than a handful of affiliate programs I could use to monetize a site and that there were a lovely herd of advertisers bidding on the keywords through Adwords (read, so I can also monetize with Adsense).

At that point, I decided to build a site for this niche as my newest small “anti boredom” project (when you start dealing with a lot of huge, branded sites, frankly, you miss “the game” and the “fully hands on” that smaller niches provide you with – or at least I do).

I have a lot of these types of sites going. I *like* still being on the front line. Sometimes they fail (usually because I get bored and stop wor

The Clueless, but “Whitehat”, SEOJuly 28

Almost three years ago I did a blog post as a response to Shari Thurow and a column she had written stating that Blackhats were worthless, shady criminals. In it she stated:

“Unfortunately, I have been an expert witness in legal cases involving SEO fraud. Clients were not fully informed about the SEO methodologies utilized to promote the site. One case in Europe involved the SEO firm stating (in writing) that they followed all of the terms and conditions set forth by the search engines.”

And I responded to that in my post – pointing out that hat color had nothing to do with talent and/or “bad” SEO:

Whoa there Shari. These are called crooks and criminals. Not blackhats. A blackhat is not defined as someone who lies to their clients or utilizes methodology without their knowledge and consent of a blackhat nature. Those are scumbag seo’s. And there are tons of them. There are plenty of talentless hacks charging companies shitloads of money for “pure whitehat” seo too.

Even further, there are talentless hacks being paid shitloads of money by clients in arenas where blackhat is rampant and they don’t even understand the techniques the competitors are using because they have no experience with them themselves, and no