Keith Baxter Interview

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Name: Keith Baxter

Industry: Online Marketing, Traffic Generation

Website: www.keithbaxter.net

Product: Affiliate Radio

Keith Baxter’s Bio: “The voice of truth in a sea of insanity”

In a world filled with lots of online marketing gurus, Keith Baxter has concrete skills behind all his hype. Rather than selling programs with vague advice, Baxter specializes in a technique that generates so much Internet traffic for websites that it often causes online “traffic jams.”

Baxter has been online since the BBS days. He has run his own businesses since he was 13 years old. From dating services to fuel boosters, Baxter has always had a knack for business. In 1998, Baxter realized the Internet was the most amazing marketing tool the world had ever seen. He immediately began to chase down his fortune online.

Baxter is the first to admit that not all the projects he’s touched have turned to gold. In fact, he estimates that only one in ten have had a decent amount of success. He estimates that only one in fifty have really taken flight. He states that the true measure of success in his life had nothing to do with business. It was the day his baby was born.

Despite his modesty, Baxter is a self-made millionaire. His main focus has been in search engine optimization techniques. He found years ago that making even the slightest of changes to his websites made a dramatic impact on the daily traffic that would visit his sites. So, he decided to devote himself to researching the art and science of search engine optimization. Once he developed a decent amount of insight, he started writing and selling his knowledge to other Internet marketers.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from the SEO Method, welcome to another call. I’m very excited today because I’ve got one of my mentors when it comes to internet marketing. I’ve been following his stuff for a very long time. He’s been online for as long as I can remember. Way back in the early days, he was doing a lot of black hat, very aggressive marketing stuff: cloaking, doorway pages. He got his start very early on, before pop ups became annoying and people started hating them and people really didn’t know what they were. He’s been around since back then. I’ve followed his stuff with the Stealth Traffic Secrets. He talks about a whole variety of different traffic methods in that.

He’s always ahead of the curve. He’s sort of evolved a lot of CPA stuff through his website Modern Click. Really he spotted that out before CPA really started to take off in the internet marketing niche. Now it has evolved into what it is now. I’m very excited to have him on the line and find out some of the methods that he’s applying now, because no doubt again they’re a little bit further down the curve. I’d like to welcome you to the call, Keith Baxter.

Keith Baxter: David, thank you for having me and let me say just a few things really quickly that you and your listeners may not know. Modern Click was sold off about a month ago. I’ve now sold three businesses in the last eleven years, Modern Click being the last one. The reason is, and I think this is a big lesson. I know it’s not really SEO related, but it is a big lesson none the less. Modern Click, or any business that started at the beginning of a trend and then sold while that trend is hot, often gets a lot of money for the seller of that business.

We started Modern Click back in 2004-2005. Back then, people thought CPA meant Certified Public Accountants here in the United States. So there was a huge amount of retraining at least in the internet marketing business opportunity markets to educate people as to what CPA was and basically teach them what a hybrid affiliate network was. So we began launching a lot of special reports and joint ventures with brilliant marketers.

This is funny, and I’ll admit this on digital recording for the first time, the whole AdSense is dead. We fabricated that entire scheme in order to educate people away from AdSense and over to CPA in an effort to drive people into Modern Click. I know that’s a bit of a bombshell to drop right here but it’s interesting. If we look at how this began, it started with a report Ryan Dice and I did back in 2005 called Beyond AdSense. It talked about moving beyond and creating the evolution beyond just getting AdSense clicks.

David Jenyns: It was more about building a business, wasn’t it, that particular one? AdSense is just like one small part.

Keith Baxter: Exactly. And the interesting thing is, that report really went into how to use AdSense at that time as a market research tool. So it was really interesting. In 2007, I worked with another gentleman, probably one of the smartest guys I know and he wrote a report called AdSense is Dead. We had a joint venture. We were co owners of a product called Click Flipping at the time. Click Flipping actually started the whole trend of keyword tracking or tracking pay per click at the keyword level in Google AdWords.

That launched Click Flipping with the back end being, since you’re a customer of Click Flipping, come into Modern Click as a benefit of being a customer. It really established Modern Click as a pay per click as a CPA network. Now, this is funny, because here we are two or three years later, ppc to CPA is what everybody’s talking about. I know that’s not quite the whole SEO bit but nonetheless there are some interesting little facts there.

David Jenyns: With your past, and like I said, always being on the cutting edge and I know you really don’t like to talk about it too much, but if we do go back to 19999 when we were talking about the pop ups, and I know you were doing some stuff in the porn industry. That really is a cutting edge industry. I suppose because it is the most aggressive, because the most amount of money can be made online there, there are so many different techniques that have evolved out of there, having multiple memberships that all lead into one.

That was way back when Spyware got started. At least it was mildly legitimate back then. Dropping icons and trying to reduce the sales clicks to get through to making a purchase. A lot of this came out of that.

I think you talked about just then, the idea of CPA and selling it at the top of the curve. From a business point of view, if you’re going to build up a nightclub, you build it up, you get the crowd, you get everybody in there and then you sell your nightclub right at the top because that trend can change quickly. With all that said and done and showing you’re at the head of the curve, I’m interested to know, if you don’t mind me asking, where you’re heading to now?

Keith Baxter: Yes, absolutely. It’s funny because everything is cyclic. Speaking about the pop up days, and I’ll get to what I’m doing now in just a second, we were doing the kind of pop ups where you would visit a website and the pop up would pop up five minutes after you left the site. We were dropping icons, you mentioned that. I haven’t heard that in years from anyone. We were doing that back then too.

Another funny, interesting fact is we were one of the first sites to successfully use instant play audio on a website. So much so, that Alex Mandossian, a couple of years after that with Armand Moran came out with Teleseminar Secrets and Alex actually used my site as a case study for how to successfully do that. I was a student of Alex at the time and I just told him nicely, that site that you’re doing the case study on is one that I had for years. It was interesting.

Let’s talk about what is working now, why I’m doing it the way I’m doing it, just how I got there. As you said I have a black hat background which means that was my mindset, when it comes to content generation, when it comes to site development. Site development’s always been big and fast, the more domains the better. The content development’s always been keyword rich but yet spammy, often duplicate content. If it wasn’t duplicate content, it would have been machine generated.

And that was fine and well for years and years. I’ll make the caveat that we still make that work today. But I will say that what I am doing now on more of a mass scale is much different. It has a lot more sustainability built into it because, quite frankly, I’m tired of registering 2,000 and 3,000 domains spending $15,000-$20,000 on domains only to have all of them not renewed the next year because they were all blacklisted by all the search engines, not just Google.

So here’s what I’m doing today. I’ll give you the exact formula and then we can talk a little about that formula. Let’s paint the picture. A good friend of mine lives in the country. I live in Houston, Texas. Everyone associates Texas with wide open spaces for the most part. One of my best friends lives in the country and he does extremely well online and doesn’t work much. We just gravitated to each other over the years and developed a really good friendship.

One day sitting out on his back patio, smoking a cigar, watching his pond and just enjoying life a little bit and I said, tell me exactly how you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s working very well for you. We both have very different business models but we both end up at the same place.

He laid it out for me and for two years after he laid it out for me, I didn’t take action on it. I just said, that’s not the way I do things and I’m really not going to listen. Then one day, I said, just give his message a try and see if it works out. The kicker to his message is, it’s very labour intensive and I’m not a labour kind of guy. I want to have as few employees as humanly possible doing just enough to make the most amount of money. That’s my mindset.

There really is a magic button because there is that sweet spot and I found it a long time ago. But the problem is, as things change, either you change with it or you get left behind. That also means that the magic button shifts a little bit on the scale. Sometimes you have to bring in a few more people or you just have to work a little bit more to either make the same amount of money, make more money or just produce.

What ended up happening, I set aside a couple of days to do his entire process by myself just once, just to see. Basically it worked out to developing a five to ten page well written mini site. No big thing there. The whole key to the mini site is to provide value and answer the questions the market really does have. Not just questions that you assume they have, but questions that they really do have. You want to be looked at as, and I hate using the word authority because I believe a lot of people misconstrue the meaning of an authority site, but for the sake of this conversation, I want to say that you do want to be looked at as an authority. You want to be looked at as someone who is really answering some questions.

It’s rather like a mini Yahoo! Answers. It’s a little opinionated but yet you’re answering questions. Basically it’s a very small mini site and it’s promoted exactly the way I’m about to tell you.

I start off with some Link Vana links. I do about a 2:1 ratio of those Link Vana links, twice as many links to the home page as deep linked within the site. If I have a ten page mini site, and I’m going to do one link to each page, then I’m going to double that amount and point that to the home page. You have ten links going deep within the site and then twenty links go to the home page.

That’s critical. The home page always needs to have more links than your internal links within the site. Always. Here’s a big mistake too which I made for a very long time. My money page, the page that generated the action that I wanted a visitor to take, was always an internal page within the site and I would funnel links to that page. After a lot of testing, my money page is now my home page because that’s the page getting twice as many links. Why not make that the most authoritative page on my site? That’s big lesson number two.

Big lesson number three is article marketing. Let me tell you how I do article marketing. This is how my writer and my account creator do it, this is their process. Once the site is built, I have automated tools that will build the site. That site goes off to my writer with a list of keywords and questions that she needs to answer for the site. She begins writing those questions based on the keywords and on the questions she begins writing articles. She submits those articles at a rate of one per day to the site. In ten days the site is going to be done.

Now in that process, once the first articles are written, she passes it off to my linking guy. He’ll start the links with the first page and then at the end of the ten days he’ll initiate the links to the home page after one link has been submitted for each page to Link Vana. Then a second set of articles are written based on the same topic but nowhere in those articles is the keyword I’m focusing on listed. So they are relevant articles, just not keyword rich because, frankly, I don’t want those getting ranked, I just want the link juice. So a second set of articles is written.

But the key to this is, in the resource box of those articles there are two links and you can always have two links. Link number one, and I don’t really care how you write your resource box, for the sake of this exercise it really doesn’t matter. There are other artic le marketing experts that will tell you to lead into whatever you’re selling, affiliate program or what not. I don’t really care for the sake of this exercise.

So link number one, keyword rich anchor text is going to point to the page on the site with that link. If it’s an internal link within the site it’s going to be a second tier word/long tail key phrase or it’ll go to the home page. It doesn’t really matter it just needs to go to your site and go to the relevant article on your site that you’re aiming for.

The second link, and this is critical, is when that article is first published, it’s also going to be turned into a video. There is going to be an account created in YouTube based on the name of your domain. Then that video is going to be uploaded to the YouTube account. This is done manually. We get into the automation later. So manually the articles are uploaded and the second link in the resource box of the article then points to using one of the secondary key phrases that we initially found and targeted for this mini site points to that YouTube video.

Let’s recap. As an article is published to the site, that article is then turned into a video. That video is then uploaded manually to YouTube. Then a second article based on the same topic is written that is not keyword rich. Link number one points back to the article that was posted on the site. Link number two out of the resource box then points to the YouTube video. It’s pretty simple stuff to this point.

David Jenyns: Can I just dig down on one or two quick things? All of this is obviously is getting created manually. The way that you’re structuring it sounds like you’re probably using something like WordPress or something. Especially if you’re outsourcing it, that will make it easier for your assistant to do. Are these just little WordPress sites with content on it?

Keith Baxter: I am a WordPress nut. I am a WordPress freak. As a matter of fact my programmer, while he is very versatile and can develop just about anything, 90% of his time is spent right now on creating auto installers. Based on whatever target I have, he’ll create mass auto installers.

Since we talked about AdSense earlier, say I wanted to develop thirty AdSense sites based around ceiling fans. All of those domains are going to be keyword based domains. The way he has his auto installer set up, once I have the target set, I give him the target, he then uses the auto installer with our hosting and just uploads all of them. The auto installer uploads them, auto configures everything, creates to the point where then it’s sent over to the writer with the key terms that she needs to focus on and then she starts writing the articles after that.

It’s a very automated yet manual process.

David Jenyns: Yes, so from that point, you’ve written the content, got it on the website. You’re getting your ten articles on the site. Now are you going for real product specific stuff or are these mini sites based around a niche and those internal pages are longer tail keywords within that niche? Or are you going for specific product for these sites? It sounds like you’re doing quite a few.

Keith Baxter: We do all of the above. Surprisingly, we do Amazon single products and just focus an affiliate for Amazon. We do our own e commerce site so we’ll go out to China using Alibaba, find a product, import it. We do our own product sales. We’ll do products out of Commission Junction. We do AdSense, we do, of course, CPA. Whenever we find a good CPA offer ,we’ll promote that from other networks. That’s more for cost per click offers. Auto insurance, health insurance, dental insurance, anything that pays more than $2 or $4 per click, we’ll also build sites around those markets.

We don’t stick to one way to monetize it. Diversity for us is key. There is often, depending on whatever the trend is, let’s say schools starting up health insurance is a big topic. Our sites in the health insurance industry do extremely well. At the same time, our auto insurance while the auto insurance looks great in the summertime, it may decline at a certain point. So we like to diversify to keep the income levels high while mitigating any trend turn downs.

David Jenyns: So with the posting of the articles, we’re getting these new articles posted, are you doing just Ezine articles? Once that article is taken, is it published in multiple places?

Keith Baxter: Yes, it’s published multiple places. I said that these aren’t necessarily keyword rich articles being posted. We really like to use a service called Unique Article Wizard. It sends out a unique article to a couple of thousand places over a period of time. The links are slow coming in. You could set out how many links you want to post out daily through Unique Article Wizard. Using other article submission services, it’s like a one day blast for the most part. We set our links to around fifteen links per day where their default is around fifty. So we really do slow their system down quite a bit.

Unfortunately, the learning curve for Unique Article Wizard is a little high. But when you’re paying someone $500 a month for a job, who cares if they spend a week learning the system, as long as they learn to do it efficiently and correctly?

David Jenyns: I know with Unique Article Wizard, having chatted with some of the guys over there, they’ve literally come out in the last couple of weeks with a wizard that is supposed to make it a whole lot easier. We’re just testing it out at the moment. Hopefully that makes it easier for outsourcing purposes.

Keith Baxter: That’s been the biggest issue with Unique Article Wizard, the learning curve. But once it’s down it’s down. So your article writer has to write thirty versions of the article. Who cares? The amount of links you’re getting coming in, and in some cases fairly quality links coming in, makes it well worth it.

Let’s move on in the system itself. By this time we’ve initiated our links campaign, we’ve initiated our manual upload to YouTube, we’ve initiated our article marketing strategy which gives power to the YouTube video as well as brings links internally and to the home page of the site. Next we take that article that we manually uploaded to YouTube and we blast that out on a four time submit through Traffic Geyser, eliminating YouTube from the mix. We don’t re upload it to YouTube, we’re just now distributing that video out to the other video directories.

The key there is how you set up your description. Our descriptions for that, one, our title is keyword rich, so we ensure the keyword’s in the title, two in the description. The very first part of the description we obviously have the url pointing either to the internal page or the home page whatever our target is after that particular submit. Then we have a keyword rich description. Frankly, within the tags, we usually use about six of the keywords that are primary and five of the secondary keywords. We mix up those secondary keywords based on whatever our guy feels like doing at that point in time.

That’s the next step, is the upload to Traffic Geyser. The next step after that is, once all the content has been posted then we seed out the RSS feed to the RSS directories. While that’s not a big deal, most people get this wrong and they make this the very first thing in their system. The problem is, and here’s the key to our system submissions, you need to have at least ten pieces of content in your RSS feed to really get the biggest bang for your buck. If you submit your RSS feed with one piece of content, you’re not really getting a whole lot of benefit from submitting that RSS feed.

That’s the next thing, once you have ten pieces of content up there, which is pretty much a mini site, you then submit your RSS feed. That is usually more than enough to get a site done well. We haven’t even talked about Web 2.0 spamming. We’re not talking about getting blog comments. We’re not talking about buying paid links which by the way, depending on how much search volume you’re getting from this, buying and paying for links, there’s a big misconception out there.

In many cases it’s better value to pay for your links than it is to use pay per click. That’s a bald statement. It’s a statement that if you were getting traction using the system I’ve just laid out for you and then you go to target a secondary or a second key term that gets a good amount of traffic for that site, it’s often more advantageous to simply pay for links to boost your link count on that term than it is to pay on a per click basis through AdWords, YouTube, Seven Search, Bing, all the engines we all use for our pay per click.

The key to this is, this is not spamming, it is built for long term use. The links coming in initially are fairly decent high quality. There’s nothing that we can be gamed here. We’re finding that the three month mark is really the sweet spot here for this whole thing. About the three month mark, we can gauge the value of the site.

If we want to keep the site in our portfolio we can do that. If we want to turn around and sell the site we can do that. If we want to add more content to the site and focus on additional terms we can do that. Unlike the spammy stuff that I’m so used to do doing, there is so much flexibility that it makes sense to systematize the process, hire two or three people, set yourself a goal of maybe one to two of these mini sites per week, focus on products initially and then go into the cost per click CPA and additional monetary methods. It just makes a lot of sense.

David Jenyns: I know you’re really big on the systems and getting them in place, and I think that’s one thing that has obviously enabled you to do everything at scale. Is that where a lot of your time is spent? Obviously initially you’ve got to map out these systems and procedures and you talked about the way that you documented it. Do you also do the Camstasias and pretty much create that system and then push that off to the side and your main focus is to identify niches?

Keith Baxter: Yes, and I’ll tell you exactly how I do all of the above. When it comes to systematizing my process, once I’ve proved to myself that this is a worthwhile system to follow, and it had already been proven by somebody else, I just had to prove it to myself manually first. That’s step one-do something by yourself first and prove to yourself that it can be done, otherwise you’re going to waste a lot of time systematizing something that is not even a proven method.

The first thing I do, I usually spend about half a day to a day, and I take a pen and a piece of paper, I’m not doing it on the computer and I write out the process. Then I look at the process and identify what are the key components to that and what are the most likely people to do whatever. On my staff right now, I have a few article writers, I have a graphic designer and I have a programmer, I have a personal assistant and I have a project manager. This is for everything that we’re doing in my company.

The project manager is often my second level person. So once I’ve designed something, the project manager looks at it. I tell them what I think we need and then she comes back and tells me what she thinks we need. We figure that piece out. For this particular situation, we started with one writer, and just to gauge not only the quality of the small scale, because if you hire too many people too fast ,you’re overwhelmed. Initially I want to be able to oversee everything. I want to see the quality. I want to see how much quality output is being generated.

The particular writer who spearheaded our writing staff, herself could efficiently produce four high quality articles per day. We’re talking research, writing and good quality articles. We’ve had other writer s who could do ten a day, but they weren’t as high quality. So for us in this situation, we wanted quality over quantity.

Once we gauged her output, she was then passed and given a raise. She was then tasked to find other people like herself. We left that to her. Most people who are within an industry run with other people that are in that industry. I am an entrepreneur. I associate myself with other people who are entrepreneurs. Writers often associate themselves with other writers because that is their passion.

They can dip into that writing pool, find their friends who they want to work with and whatnot and bring them into the mix. We don’t really have titles, but she is the overseer. She brought in a couple more writers and it was her job to train those writers. Teach them what you do and do it just like you. That’s all we want.

The graphic designer, we have one and he does everything that we need him to do efficiently and with a high quality standard. My programmer, this guy can crank out a new program every single day if we want him to, he’s that good. Really the biggest expense we have is the writing staff. But for this particular project that I’m describing to you, that’s the key, it’s the content. We have a linking person. You can get a linking person from the Philippines for $300 a month. It is the simplest task of the entire process.

You can have your writers manage most of your linking campaign depending on how fast their output actually is and what your quota is. Other times you can have them double team the linking aspects of things. A lot of people get hung up and say, I’m doing all this myself. I can only output one of these mini sites with the proper linking campaign once every two weeks.

The problem with that thinking is, I have to ask, what is your time worth? Let’s say I say my time is worth $500 an hour. If my time is worth $500 an hour and I, by myself am producing a mini site and it takes forty hours a week for two weeks straight, that’s eighty hours at $500 an hour. So that site better be worth $40,000 the day it’s out the door.

That’s not realistic. Let’s say the typical American makes $20 an hour and you spend two weeks on it. That’s $3,200 for two weeks. If that site is worth $3,200, great. Is it profitable after two weeks and making that amount of time spent? You could have had a writer for $500 a month writing the content, freeing up, literally three quarters of that time. Where does it start to make sense that now out of eighty hours you can free up sixty of those hours which is worth $3000 to you out of your time and pay somebody $500 to do that task?

Then the big objection is, well I just don’t have any money to begin with. Let’s just talk about how you’re going to make this money fast. With sites like Site Flipper, you can build out a site relatively quickly, it doesn’t have to be anything monumental. You can often flip that for $500 fairly quickly. Ten pieces of content, nice decent site with a goal in mind, you can flip it for $500 and you take that $500. Sure it might have taken you a couple of days to build that out properly. We’re not talking about a two week project here, we’re talking about just slapping something together and reselling it.

You take that $500 and then you invest it in your writer. It’s tempting to take that $500 and pay the bills. But there are also things called business lines of credit. You could set yourself up with a simple corporation. Go to legalzoom.com and set yourself up a simple LLC. Go to your bank and set up a bank account. Get a small $5,000-$10,000 line of credit and work from that.

There is no business that’s ever been built from scratch with no investment capital whatsoever and made it. I have yet to know one company that started with absolutely nothing, not even $500 in seed capital, just zero. Everything started with some seed capital. So go get your $5000 line of credit and get it started.

David Jenyns: I think you just hit the nail on the head. You just need to make something happen. What you’ve outlined there, as far as the step by step method, that’s really very close to the system that we use and we’re getting really good results. You’re taking it to the next level in that you’re branching it out and really systematizing it and then getting it rolled out on these multiple steps.

We talked about the different traffic methods. It’s important that we get link diversity, but if you could say one particular link generation gave you the most bang for your buck, and if you had to pick just one, although I know it’s important to get that spread of links, where do you see, make sure you get this particular area right?

Keith Baxter: I hate saying this because I get sick of hearing it from other people, but really, the articles. The articles are a big deal. The problem and the reason I laid out the video strategy the way I did, with the linking from the articles is that, while I would love to say it’s our video marketing that gets the biggest bang for the buck, without having additional links coming into those videos, we find our videos drop after a week. They’re no longer listed at the top of Google.

But we’re able to maintain those top listings once we start getting some decent links coming into the videos. That tells me if it’s the article links that are giving power to the videos and keeping them up there, video links at a deeper level have to be more relevant or more powerful. They’re allowing our video marketing strategy to actually succeed.

A couple of things I didn’t mention. If you go to affiliateradio.com, just opt in and watch the video. I talked about some other things, some plug ins and the way that we structure our WordPress blog. They take advantage of a lot of the Web 2.0 stuff.

Also depending on how profitable it is and what the margins are, I know it sounded as if I was negative on pay per click, we do use pay per click on these sites if they’re profitable. So we’ll also throw in some pay per click campaigns. We’ll also do media buys depending on how profitable the pay per click campaigns are. By the media buys, that’s when we move our branch up into the CPV advertising. We branch up into the banner buys, we branch off into the email buys. Email buys are almost totally ineffective for us anymore.

CPV advertising, surprisingly Gauhur Chaudhry has come out with a PPV formula, which he calls pay per view, it’s actually called cost per view. Using his methods has allowed us to take our CPV campaigns to the next level. The beauty of our mini site foundation is, we don’t worry about quality scores, we don’t worry about gaming the search engines, iframing, we don’t worry about any of that stuff ,simply because our base infra structure is so solid.

I also want to mention this. You said this is very synergistic to what you’re doing. At some point in the evolution of this stuff, the minds that are really doing it and making the money with it inevitably all end up at the same place. You were doing this before I laid this out. I was doing this before I knew your system. We all find our way to the same place.

David Jenyns: You mentioned you’re not doing too much sneaky stuff. I am curious, where it is appropriate with the terms of service for certain affiliate programs. Are you doing any cheeky cookie stuffing or anything like that?

Keith Baxter: Yes, we were. There still are some wonderful stuffing programs out there. The issue with that is that when you lose a ClickBank account that had a lot of money in it, at some point you think is it really worth doing it? It’s just as easy not to fake the search engines or fake how your traffic is being driven as it is to just do it legitimately. You sleep a whole lot better at night not worrying whether or not your account’s going to be shut down for whatever you’re doing.

It’s a pain to get a new ebay account, it’s a pain to get a new AdSense account. It’s almost impossible to get a new Commission Junction account. Once you actually start making money from them, you have to treat them reverently. You want to put them up on a pedestal. I don’t want to mess them. I want to make sure they’re there three years from now, or five years from now.

David Jenyns: I love that. I deliberately threw that out there to get a feel for where you’re at now. You have shifted. We did a lot of similar stuff especially in the AdSense world where we got to a point where we were trying to keep our networks separated. I was going down to my local library to make sure I could log in on a different IP address so that they wouldn’t figure out it was the same person using different names, addresses, all that stuff. There is nothing worse than building a really good AdSense income and then having Google shut your entire network down.

Obviously they can link stuff together purely based on the fact you’re putting the same AdSense on different websites. It’s heartbreaking because you spend so much time doing that and then it disappears. They’re the judge, jury and executioner, and you say to Google how have I broken my terms of service, and they say, go read the terms of service. We’re not going to tell you what you’ve done wrong, we just tell you that you’ve done something wrong and three strikes and you’re out.

The idea of building these almost separate little businesses, it really does create a certain level of stability. I know you talked about all the different affiliate programs you go after as well. If one does fall over, or doesn’t quite work, you have got that rock solid thing. I am curious, linking different networks together, and if you’re building these out en masse with the method you outlined, once it gets to a certain point, you’re then further putting more energy into that website with Web 2.0, media buys and paid links. That happens after the website starts to prove itself.

What sort of tracking are you doing? Are you just putting Google Tracking Analytics on all these sites, now that you’re doing everything white hat?

Keith Baxter: Yes, Google Analytics. We’ve used Woopra. We’ve used several different tracking systems in the past. But we’re not doing anything sneaky.

As a matter of fact I do want to talk about this for a second, hosting. I know this is probably the least sexy subject we’re going to talk about today. But I will say that if you’re using a shared host and you’re getting any amount of traffic over a hundred visitors per day, you are going to lose money being on a shared host.

So our hosting for the most part is on dedicated servers. I also use SEO hosting, not that have separate IPs for doing any linking. We’re not doing any internal linking between sites, I just like it from a management perspective. There are newer servers coming on line and they’re fairly robust and we haven’t had any real down time from those.

But if you’re using a basic Hostgator $7 a day account and you’re getting more than a hundred visitors a day, I guarantee you’re losing cash. A t some point, once you’re profitable, at some point you have to make the decision to go to a dedicated server because that dedicated server has the uptime necessary. What’s going to happen? You have a high quality lead coming to your site. They’re visiting your site, they’ve hit three pages so they’re very interested. Your bounce rate is low on your site and then you notice that your sales are down.

You say, what’s the deal? This person saw three pages, they visited my money page, but I didn’t make any money. Probably it was because half the time when they hit that money page, the site went down. A lot of times people don’t look at that as a factor in the business. Any sizeable traffic numbers, especially if you’re on a server and a hundred of your sites on that shared server, that’s sharing it with two thousand other sites and all your sites are generating a hundred visitors per day and the server is down more than it is up. To me, that’s worse than black hat.

Now Google’s not going to index your sites well enough because half the time they visit, your server’s down, your load times are so slow that Google Bot is going to bounce after three seconds. So if it can’t load that page quickly or at all for that matter, what is going to happen? Your pages aren’t getting indexed, your visitors aren’t taking action, so hosting is a huge deal and I think that is something that nobody focuses on.

David Jenyns: Yes, I think having those right tools in place are very important, especially when you consider if your business is, I’m running websites, that’s your core business, then you should be happy to invest in infra structure, in terms of buying your own computer hardware and so on that you’re using at home. If this is your core business, you might as well spend the money and make sure you’re doing it right. You should treat it like a business.

Keith Baxter: Yes, that is my rant for the day. Everybody laughs at me because I always have a rant on every call that I do. This is a business, treat it as such. So many people don’t, they just don’t take this stuff seriously.

David Jenyns: I think that’s one of the areas you’ll see people going wrong, is not taking it seriously. Like you talked about earlier, it’s important to just take action. Are there any other sorts of mistakes that you see people making? It doesn’t even have to be new people, just internet marketers, and you see they just keep on doing this?

Keith Baxter: Cookie stuffing is one, always looking for the shortcut. I’m probably the worst person to give that advice because for years that is exactly what I did. It took a long time to change that mindset. But once that mindset did start to shift, my income went up, my stress levels went down.

I’ve always preached this. The one big thing that you want is a saleable asset. Most of the time when you’re doing any sort of trickery and you’re going to a broker or an investment banker and listing your business for sale and a prospect comes in to look at your business and the due diligence phase begins and you don’t disclose that you’re doing some kind of trickery that inflates your numbers and then your business sells and it comes up that there was trickery being done, you’re open to lawsuits for not disclosing certain facts.

If you do disclose that you’re doing trickery, that is a total turn off to a legitimate business looking to make an investment. So by doing it this way, your saleable asset is actually saleable. One of my core philosophies is always start with the end in mind. So if I’m going to build a site, if I’m going into a niche, are there targets in that niche with money that would be interested in buying this business?

While I don’t spend a lot of time analyzing that, in some cases I do, depending on what is my immediate goal for that. But that is something to keep in the back of your mind. Program your subconscious mind to think that way where you build out a mini site. It’s produced $20,000 for you over a period of a year. Based on what some brokers can get, usually a four times yearly return. So now you’re looking at a possible $80,000 sale for a mini site that took a week or two and a little bit of energy to get some links to.

Often if you start off with a good, aged expiry domain that already has links, we’re not even going to get into that tactic, you can accelerate the process of selling that business drastically because now you’re able to throw in the fact that your ten year old domain that is not banned, it has links before it even got started, so you’re able to do a little bit more manipulation. It’s not manipulation, it’s just acceleration of the sale of the business.

David Jenyns: It’s funny, it feels as if this call is a little bit like AA, reformed black hat marketers anonymous.

Keith Baxter: It is. It’s just like AA, if you think about it like this. Just like AA, those that have hit the bottom, understand the beauty of life, now appreciate what life can bring them so much more than somebody who’s taken it for granted the entire time, hasn’t hit bottom and constantly repeats the same stupid actions over and over again.

But once they hit bottom, they hit AA, they go through the twelve steps, start understanding that life’s more about giving than it is about receiving. But it’s like that. Here we are, until we hit bottom, and bottom for me was losing a lot of money from some accounts that got shut down, realizing that that business model was flawed from the very beginning and realizing a lot of my successes had been lucky up to that point.

I know this is a kind of universal, rather hokey thing, but if you don’t give back either in terms of knowledge, money, physical assistance, or whatever it is, if you don’t give back to the universe by helping out somebody else with something, you’re doomed. That’s a lot of the reason on this call in particular, when I agreed to do this call. For me, I’m not holding anything back. I’m telling you how it is because I hope at some point it affects somebody’s life positively.

So many of these calls are based on a hidden agenda of selling something to you. And that’s not what this call is about. You could take everything out of this call and use it.

David Jenyns: It’s much appreciated, and I know anyone listening to this would find it helpful. It sounds a little bit motivational but there was also a slight undercurrent of, we hope you hit rock bottom because that’s when you’ll start to appreciate things.

The other thing I want to ask, looking back, now you’ve done a great deal of stuff from selling businesses to the early days of internet marketing as well. If you could look back, and if you’d known what you know now, where do you see the biggest leverage points? The points where you can say, once I did one or two of these key things I really started to see my business grow? One of them you already identified, which was, now I’m really going to go white hat. I’m going to provide value, I’m going to reduce my stress, sleep better at night and I’m going to watch my income go up by building something of value.

Are there any other key leverage points that you can look back on?

Keith Baxter: Yes. I’ve sold three companies and it’s always what assets the company has. When it comes to online properties, one of the assets is a buyers’ data base. That is gold. The larger the buyers’ data base, the more money you’re going to get for the sale because that is just like easy marketing for the new owner.

Cash flow is king too. So if you have any kind of recurring element coming in, that’s good. I love white hat sites. There are a couple of things you can do if your goal is to start a business that is for sale. One is to add a very low price form or whatnot, something relevant to the topic to the site add it to the site. Russell Brunson is big on the free DVD, give away one DVD a day, whatever it is.

My big thing was, I created a lot of software applications and sold them for $1. The whole point of selling it for $1 is, I couldn’t care less if I made money. I didn’t make any money on those. After delivery costs it wasn’t a profitable thing but I was building a buyers’ list.

If I made a dollar, that is a buyer. If your goal is to sell the business, maybe invest in something that you could sell, give away and maybe even create the funnel earlier on, just build a list. I know a lot of people say build a list. But build a list with the intent of getting all the contact information and hopefully some kind of sale from somebody, 50c or $1, just to create the buyers’ data base.

Then when you do take this to a broker and they ask, list all your assets, you can say, I have a buyers’ list of 32,000 people who have all paid money to be there. There’s a lot more leverage in that than if you say, I have a cool site that is getting 32,000 visitors a month. Visitors per month can go away but your buyers’ list is a little more tangible.

David Jenyns: Even just the idea of selling the business, if you look back on some of the big capital events in your business career, do you look back and see the points where you sold businesses, where you got the most amount of cash?

Keith Baxter: Yes, not only did I get the most amount of cash. We made money every day. That’s not a big deal. But when you get a really large wire into your account, it’s almost like, I can’t describe the feeling, it’s almost surreal. It’s just a big deal. Realize there are a lot of strategies to selling a business that are not obvious. One is, cash offers are always going to be about half of what the actual offer is. I like to take cash offers. I just like the money right then and it’s still substantial for the most part.

In any major corporation the CEO’s job is for the most part fostering relationships, finding the opportunities to expand the business often through acquisition. That’s my role. A lot of people laugh, because if I were to list out all the businesses I’ve been a part owner of, within the internet marketing niche itself, a lot of people laugh.

John Jonas is an expert in outsourcing. He laughs at me, I mean we’re good friends, and he laughs at me all the time whenever we get together. He says, did you own that one, did you own that one? I‘ve owned a lot of businesses because I look at myself, I am a CEO. I’m a CEO of my business obviously, and how much reach can I have? How far can I take my business?

I’m not a household name, which is wonderful to me. I don’t have to be a household name because I’m not in the guru business per se, I’m in the business of business. This is what I do. I’m not a limelight seeker trying to speak at every seminar across the country to promote my business that way. That’s not how I see building a sustainable business. My approach is a little more tactful. It keeps me a little more under the radar. Through certain events a lot of people have heard of me. I shy away from attention. It embarrasses me and a lot of times it’s just odd. It just feels weird.

David Jenyns: To go for something a little bit cheesy, you’re a bit of a ‘do ru’ not a guru. To finish up on the tail end of this interview, one of the last things I like to find out a little bit about is, in the world of IM and SEO, who are some of the people you keep an eye on? You mentioned John Jonas.

Keith Baxter: Yes, John Jonas is a friend. I have a couple of little Mastermind groups and so, obviously, we all keep up with each other. I would say the smartest SEO guy in the world is a guy named Jerry West. Another guy I have a ton of respect for is called Nathan Anderson. When it comes to statistics about what is happening on a technical level, those guys are gold. There is no doubt about it. They’re numbers guys. They run numerous tests, look at the empirical data and say, this doesn’t make sense but the numbers say it does, so let’s run the test again. If the test comes back with the same results, ok.

Jerry is on my speed dial, so if I have a question, say my rankings are dropping and through my own knowledge I can’t quite figure out why, I call Jerry. Jerry is the man. That’s my opinion.

David Jenyns: Yes, anyone who gets out there and tests is great. That’s one of the things I really love about you is that you’re out there and testing it. It comes through in just the way you talk and the conversation we can have shows that you’re out there actually implementing it, you’re not just out there talking about it. If people want to find out more about you, and I definitely recommend that they do, you mentioned the affiliate radio website. What are some of the ways people can get in touch with you?

Keith Baxter: Right now, through affiliateradio.com. I’ve sold Modern Click, so I really don’t have that outlet. My vision for Affiliate Radio is interviews with experts, my own commentary, at some point an actual radio show with guys there talking throughout the day on various subjects. That’s my interest. Everything on there is for the most part free. At some point, I’ll have a back end built onto this thing. It’s all worked out, it’s just not the right time. So affiliateradio.com is a cool place. Come on, listen to some interviews, leave a comment, that’s it. It doesn’t cost you a penny to be there.

David Jenyns: Excellent. Well, I can’t thank you enough again Keith, I appreciate your time. I know you’re super busy and very much a family man and that is your number one priority, so any time we can get is very much appreciated.

Keith Baxter: I had a great time in this interview and thank you. You’re in Australia and I’m in Texas so it’s probably nine o’clock in the morning for you. It’s 5.30 pm my time, so I’m just wrapping up my day. You had to wake up early. So I have more respect for you.

David Jenyns: It was well worth it. Thanks again Keith.

Keith Baxter: Thank you. Talk to you soon.

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