Affiliate Scams Revealed 2011

How To Write 1000 Pages of Content

2011-08-29T21:22:00.001-07:00

In my last post (Does Google penalize affiliate websites?) I mentioned content rich versus content poor websites. Having a website that's rich in useful content is going to be a long term, smart strategy for getting traffic to your affiliate website via search engine optimization. (If I wrote the post well at all, then I made that point, among other things.) I don't think a website is "real" until it reaches 100 pages anyway.

Here are some reasons why having lots of content is an effective content and traffic strategy:

Sites with multiple pages of real content are more useful to a single visitor.
Sites with multiple pages cover multiple subjects and are more useful to a wider range of visitors.
Sites that are useful to lots of people are the kinds of websites search engines must rank in order to stay in business.
Internal links matter toward your SEO. So the more pages you write, the more links you have pointing at your other pages. (A 1000 page website which links to your homepage from every page has created 1000 links. There is no better link building strategy than writing content for your site.)
Multiple pages of content give you the opportunity to present different kinds of advertising and see which types of content make you the most money.

Webmasters who want to know how to write 1000 pages of content are concerned about two things:

How do I come up with 1000 topics about this subject to write about?
How do I actually get those 1000 pages written?

How to come up with 1000 topics on any given subject
1000 football pages

I like to boil the subject of any website I write down to a single word if I can. For example, I launched a website about football last year. Then I take that single word or phrase and add modifiers to it in order to create subtopics. One example of three no-brainer subtopics related to football is how the teams are set up:

Football offense
Football defense
Foot special teams

That leaves 996 pages of content needed. Two more big subcategories I can think of really quickly are professional football and college football. (And if I wanted to, I could also use high school football as a subcategory.) But that still leaves me with 994 pages of content needed.

That's easy though, because I can subcategorize the category of professional football into 32 teams and give each team its own page. That only leaves me needing 962 more pages of content. (So I have a page about the Dallas Cowboys, a page about the Washington Redskins, a page about the Miami Dolphins, and so on.)

But I can also create a page of content about every college football team in the country. I haven't even started that list yet, but there are 119 college football teams I could write about too. (And finding a list of college football teams was as easy as doing a Google search for "how many college football teams in the USA".)

But that still leaves 843 pages of content needed. It seems like I haven't even scratched the surface.

But each of those subtopics have subtopics of their own. For example, I like to promote posters. So I've also created 32 pages (one for each NFL football team) for the posters that are available for each team. So I've got a hub page for NFL posters, and then pages for Baltimore Ravens posters, Chicago Bears posters, and Detroit Lions posters. Now we're down to 811 pages of content needed.

Another no-brainer subtopic for NFL teams is individual football players. We haven't gotten around to adding that content either, but each NFL team has 53 players on its roster. 53 X 32 teams = 1696 players. Bingo. Now we've got enough content ideas to build a 1000 page site (1885 pages actually). And we never once had to use a keyword research tool to come up with ideas for the pages. Those are all just topics and subtopics.

And a site about football could be expanded beyond that even. We could also write profiles of famous retired football players (likeTroy Aikman or Tony Dorsett). We could write about fantasy football. In fact, a lot of those subtopics might even generate 1000 page content sites all their own.

Finding affiliate programs to promote on a website about a particular sport is simplicity itself too. I already pointed out posters as one possibly applicable revenue stream. Here are some more ideas, off the top of my head:

Google Adsense
Ticket broker affiliate programs
Travel affiliate programs (Hotel rooms during the Superbowl are insanely priced - I'll take 5% of that action any day.)
Sports memorabilia affiliate programs

But what if you don't want to write about a sport? What if you want to launch a real moneymaker of a site? Suppose you want to focus on products?

1000 pages about satellite tv

Heck, that's even easier. Take the satellite tv dish niche as an example. How do you get 1000 pages of content out of that?

As far as I'm concerned, that one is even easier. Two words.

Go local.

Build pages that focus around the names of locations + "cable tv" or "satellite tv". There are 50 states in the USA. That leaves you with 950 pages to come up with.

Luckily each state has at least 19 cities in it you could write about. (There are actually a lot more than that.) Now you've got your 1000 pages.

But you can't write quality unique content about satellite dishes in 1000 different locations? Actually, I think you probably can with a little bit of effort. First of all, you provide directory listings with the names and addresses of the local cable companies in the area. Then you provide a price and feature comparison that you've researched for each location. Sometimes the cable company might be providing a better deal than the satellite dish people, but at least you're driving traffic. And if you use a combination of Google Adsense and affiliate advertising, you'll still make money. Finally, provide some insight into what kind of local television programming is available in a particular area. The top 20 or so cities in each state surely offer programming aimed directly at the viewers in their area.

What are you interested in?

If you're one of those blessed souls who wants to create a website about a subject just because you're interested in it, you can still come up with 1000 pages. Suppose you're a huge fan of the tv show Lost. Can you come up with 1000 pages of content about that show? I can.

A page about every character ever featured on the show.
A page about every actor who ever appeared on the show.
A page about every writer who ever wrote for the show.
A page about every episode of the show.
A page about every novel based on the show.
A page about the video game based on the tv show.
Reviews of other sites about Lost.
Pages about the special features and commentaries on the DVD.

Like Conan the Barbarian? Use the same thing - write a page about everything related to it. Harry Potter? Go for it. Buffy? It's been done, but maybe you can do it better.

Movies

Writing 1000 pages of content for a website about movies would be so easy that it would be almost painful. Just review every movie you've ever seen. Write profiles of directors and screenwriters you like. Build a directory of movie theaters organized by location. Visit them and write unique reviews. Ask your readers to submit their reviews of movie theaters they've visited.

You can monetize your movie site with Amazon links, eBay links, Netflix links, Blockbuster links, and AllPosters links.

How to find the time to write 1000 pages of content

Finding the time to write 1000 pages of content is the easiest part of the whole exercise. All you need is one of two things:

A year
Help

If you're willing to work on a site for a year, then you only need to write 4 pages of content 5 days a week for 50 weeks in order to have 1000 pages of content on your site. If you plan on having about 500 words per page, that's an achievable goal.

The other option is to get help writing your site content. You can do that by paying a writer. College students work cheap, and they produce better writing than the folks at Elance. Or you can get people to help write your content free by launching a forum. Every page of content on a forum counts too.

Whether or not your site needs 1000 pages of content is for you to decide. None of my sites have 1000 pages yet. But I think that 1000 pages is a worthwhile goal. I know it's a profitable goal, although it's more profitable in some niches than in others.

6 Directories Worth Submitting To

2011-08-29T21:19:00.001-07:00

I saw a post today on a forum about whether a person's time would be better spent submitting their site to a list of 500 directories or building 10 pages of content. I think setting a goal of either/or in this situation is a little lacking in ambition, but I also think that most directories aren't worth submitting to. In my experience, here are some directories that ARE worth submitting to:

1-DMOZ - Lots of Internet pundits and SEO's saying that DMOZ is dead. They're dead wrong. A DMOZ listing is still a great ingredient to add to your optimization and backlink strategy. I've never seen so much hatred and nonsense written about a single website before. But at the end of the day, get the DMOZ listing if you can.

2- Yahoo - You'll occasionally see people who claim a Yahoo directory listing isn't worth $299 either. These people are also wrong. You definitely want to get yourself a Yahoo listing. In fact, that should usually be the 1st directory you submit to.

3- Aviva Directory - This directory just plain rocks, and that's all you can say about it. Unlike most directories, Aviva has a lot of genuine and well-written content available on their site too.

4- JoeAnt - This is a good directory with volunteer editing opportunities available. Worth checking out.

5- GoGuides - Another good, older directory. A submissions specialist there can add several sites per month, but there's a fee to become a specialist. Depends on whether you plan to do a lot of sites on a regular basis or not as to whether or not it's worth the fee.

6- Best of the Web - These guys have done a nice job, although I think they're overly restrictive with their blog directory requirements. I have a cerealshotbread blog which they won't list because it's not 6 months old. But my cerealshotbread blog has over 500 posts, and they're not mini posts either, but substantial, quality posts.

Most people are too link obsessed anyway. Build lots of quality content and you'll get links.

I'll post later about the insanity of the legions of webmasters who are now terrified of doing normal, old-fashioned link exchanges.

An Affiliate Success Formula

2011-08-29T21:14:00.000-07:00

Some people aren't going to like this affiliate success formula. That's because it requires work, and it's not a get-rich-quick scheme. But this is the simplest formula for affiliate website success that I know of.

Content + Links = Affiliate Success

First, find a big niche. Lots of get rich quick guys tell you that you should tackle a small niche that you can dominate. That's nonsense. You can be an average player in a huge niche pretty easily still. (Big niches include stuff like dating, travel, credit cards, mortgages, etc.)

Then buy a domain name and build a website. Fill it with hundreds of pages of brilliant, useful, keyword-rich content. Update the site often. Add content constantly. Some of your pages will rank as long as you do basic search engine optimization stuff like:

making sure your keyword phrases are in your pages' title tags
using your keyword phrases in your pages' body copy
emphasizing your keyword phrases by repeating them in the copy, header
emphasizing your keyword phrases with bold text, italics, quotation marks
using your keyword phrase in the URL string of each page

The big SEO secret is that there are no secrets. Just make it clear to the search engine what your page is about.

Then get links from appropriate websites. This will keep the search engines visiting your website. As a general rule, the more links you have pointing at your website, the more important it is. And important sites rank higher.

Don't do stupid stuff like exchanging links with 1500 websites, none of which have useful information. Or spam blogs. You don't need thousands of links to compete; you need some good links.

Then add advertisements for appropriate affiliate programs.

It really is that easy, but it takes work. Most people launch lame content and get lame links and wonder why they fail. Write good content, or hire a good writer. Then get good links. Don't worry if you don't have hundreds and hundreds of links right away.

Do the work and make money. Don't be lazy. Don't take shortcuts.

Google, SEO and One Page Results

2011-08-22T10:30:00.000-07:00

Google, SEO and One Page Results

The title is rather interesting isn't it. And with anything that is Google and one page results everyone is listening or should be if you utilize SEO.

It seems that Google is testing a new design model with the search results page, it's called infinite scrolling. Within the result pages, you will still see the top search box and navigation bar, as well as, the left panel, but the result pages will be a little more user friendly. If you want to see a sample of infinite scrolling, you just need to take a look at Google Images.

Improvement for the User:

1. Infinite scrolling could improve the user's experience, by speeding up the search process.

2. For those that do research, this will give them a wider search option to explore what is out there on the Internet.

Improvement for Websites

The infinite scroll could improve chances for websites that are sitting on page two or three, a greater opportunity of being seen.

Okay, so how is this going to affect SEO?

SEO and Infinite Scrolling

Many fear that SEO may become irrelevant because of the improved scrolling opportunities by Google. I do not believe infinite scrolling will make SEO go away. Remember, the search engines still need to know how to
categorize web pages and that is still through SEO and keywords. However, it will make people who have sites that have content that is short on quality, a need for quick improvements. Why? There is a greater opportunity with this feature for users to scan and skip to sites that actually give them the content they want.

Bottom line, Google has, and is making improvements that emphasize user experience. This has been seen with all of the Panda Updates. What has Panda Updates done? It has forced website owners to improve their sites or risk being loss in the Internet abyss. You can complain, but remember, change is constant on the Internet.

All About Google Panda Updates

2011-08-15T09:22:00.000-07:00

All About Google Panda Updates

More countries are being included in the Google Panda Update. But some sites are fighting their way back. Learn how.

Current News
Google announced on August 12 that the Panda update will begin hitting different languages around the world. these changes will be launched in all languages except Chinese, Japanese and Korean, of which, they are continuing to test for improvements.

According to Google's evaluation of the data, the change should improve search quality across the board.

How Some Sites Are Trying To Fix the Problem

Some of the hardest hit sites are the sites that offer authors an avenue to write content and earn a little money with their writing. However, the Panda Update was not merciful in it's dealing between the author writing quality articles versus those authors who were writing substandard articles. Which meant, if Google found substandard articles on the site, it penalized all, in one weekend sweep. Which meant, those authors that did conform to the "quality" criteria saw their earning decrease dramatically, and along with it, their positioning of the articles within the search engines were buried in the abyss.

So what could such a site do to remedy the situation? HubPages, have decided to divide the site into sub-domains in the hope that it will help it's authors to regain position in the search engines. And it might work. Why?

Let me explain. Since a sub-domain works like a domain in the eyes of Google, each author will be more responsible for the success or failure of it's content. Thus, the author that does have quality content, will rise in the search engines, while the content of an author that has substandard quality, will see his/her articles fall in the search engines. Has this worked? According to the CEO of HubPages, his own articles on the site have seen a dramatic improvement.

Will subdomains work for every site? Maybe, maybe not. Bottom line, time will be the determining factor in how subdomains will work for HubPages, or any other site. Just keep this one thing in the back of your mind, with anything that is associated with the Google algorithm, you should always be cautiously optimistic, and ever vigilant. And most importantly, write quality, original content.

Article Spinners-Do They Really Work?

2011-08-08T08:57:00.000-07:00

Article Spinners-Do They Really Work?

Writing articles should mean writing quality content. However, some people feel that they can write one quality article and spin it into many with article creation software. But what do you get with this type of software?

If the individual does not manually go over the content that has just been spun they will literally see a mass of words that make little or no sense. I've read, or tried to read a spun article. Yes, the title was enticing, but the content was senseless and frustrating to read. Is it that noticeable?

Yes, it is extremely noticeable. The article(s) that I have read had language that was disjointed and meaningless. And, there was no white space between the words. In my opinion, this is a great way for your article to be denied. So, what can you do?

If you decide to use an article spinner, read the spun copy, correct the spacing, the words for meaning and manually place the articles in a few article directories. Why? You will be more apt to retain your online creditability and have your article accepted. Are you saving time? No, but in this case, you'll be saving your creditability and your potential for traffic.

However, if you choose to use an article spinner and do not heed my warning. In most cases you will find that:

1) Google will most certainly place your article in the abyss of the Internet for no one to see because it doesn't offer quality content.

2) Readers will not read your article. They will click away after trying to read the first paragraph of unreadable, and beyond incomprehensible text.

3) Article Directories will not accept your article, if there is human intervention.

To conclude, with the last slap that Google has given the Internet regarding content, you need to be concerned about quality of content. If you're not concerned, then anticipate losing your place in the search engines and along with it, a loss of traffic.

MLM and Surveys-Can You Really Make Money

2011-08-01T07:46:00.000-07:00

MLM and Surveys-Can You Really Make Money?

I thought that I would take the time to revisit these two types of programs. Why? Because both these programs promise you a way to make money with little effort and no experience. By the way, these four words "little effort" and "no experience" should be red flags for those new to the Internet.

I've written an article called "MLM, Surveys and Quick Money, Really?" This article will explain how both programs work, and include my own experience with these type of programs. As you will find out, I'm not an avid fan of either.

Is Your Cell Phone Vulnerable?

2011-07-27T08:50:00.000-07:00

The majority of us use a cell phone everyday, and more times than not, we do not think about the possible vulnerability others can have on our communications devices. Yes, just like our computer, your mobile device is also open to would-be scammers looking for a way to access your personal information for their own personal gain.

The two most relevant schemes are vishing and smishing. To learn more about vishing and smishing and how you can protect yourself, check out my article, Mobile Devices-Vishing and Smishing Vulnerability on my website.

As always, knowledge is the key to protecting yourself and your personal data.

Is Google To Retire Blogger?

2011-07-21T07:53:00.000-07:00

Is Google To Retire Blogger

Rumor has it that is Google retiring the Blogger name. Google is planning on retiring the name, and renaming it as a Google product.

This move is an effort to unify its brand in relation to it's new product Google+. Don't worry Blogger is not going to go away, just its name. In the rumor mill, "Google Blogs" will be Blogger new name. The rebranding is said to be in about 4 to 6 weeks.

As to how this transition will take place, only Google knows.

Note: Picasa is also getting a new name, "Google Photos".

How To Become A Super Affiliate In Niche Markets

2011-07-12T21:54:00.002-07:00

How To Become A Super Affiliate In Niche Markets

Over the past years, web hosting has grown bigger than it used to be. With more companies getting into this business and finding the many benefits it can give them, the demand for web hosting has never been higher. These seem to be the trend of today.

38 million people have put up their very first websites online this year 2005 alone. It is estimated that by 2008, the internet sales industry will top then dollar bank. And to think, majority of those sites will be offering different affiliate programs for people to choose and participate into.

This only means one thing. It is easier now to find the right web host for your application. The possibility of quality web hosting companies separating themselves from the rest of the industry is anticipated. If this is done, the unprofessional and incompetent ones will suffer.

Support will be the number one consideration for people when choosing a web host. It will be obvious that traditional advertising will become less and less effective. Most people would rather opt for the web host based on things that they see and hear. Also based on the recommendations by those who have tried them and have proved to be a successful.

This is a great opportunity for web hosting affiliates and resellers alike. There would hundreds of web hosting and programs to choose from that the difficulty in finding the right one for them is not a problem anymore.

How does one become a successful affiliate in the niche markets using web hosting?

If you think about it, everyone who needs a website needs a web hosting company to host it for them. As of now, there is really no leading hosting industry so most people choose hosts based from recommendations. Usually, they get it from the ones that have already availed of a web hosting services.

With the many hosts offering affiliate programs, there is the tendency to find the one which you think will work best for you. Think of the product you will be promoting. Pattern them to the site and see if they are catering to the same things as you are.

When you have been with one host for quite some time and seem not to be making much despite all your effort, leave that one and look for another. There is no use in trying to stick to one when you would be before off in another one. Things will only have to get better from there because you already have been in worst situations.

Try this out. If you are quite happy and satisfied with your web host, try to see if they are offering an affiliate program you can participate on. Instead of you paying them, why not make it the other way around; them paying you. The process can be as easy as putting a small “powered by” or “hosted by” link at the bottom of your page and you are already in an affiliate business.

Why choose paying for your for your web hosting when you do not have to? Try to get paid by letting people know you like your web host.

Always remember that when choosing a web host, choose the one that is known for its fantastic customer support. There are also many hosting affiliate programs. Residual affiliate program is also being hosted. This is the program wherein you get paid a percentage every month for a client that you refer. This can allow you to have a steady source of income. With perseverance, you can even be quite successful in this field.

There are a lot of niche markets out there just waiting for the right affiliate to penetrate to them and make that dollars dream come true. Knowing which one to get into is being confident enough of your potentials and the good results you will be getting.

Web hosting is just one affiliate market you could try out and make some good and continuous income. Just remember that to be successful on your endeavor also means that time, effort and patience is needed.

Nobody has invented the perfect affiliate market yet. But some people do know how to make it big in this kind of market. It is just knowing your kind of market and making the earnings there.

Using Camtasia Can Increase Your Affiliate Checks

2011-07-12T21:54:00.000-07:00

Using Camtasia Can Increase Your Affiliate Checks

Since there are already lots of people getting into affiliate marketing, it is no wonder that the competition is getting stiff. The challenge is to try and outdo other affiliates and think of ways to be able to attain this.

There are also many tips and techniques being taught to these affiliate in order to best plan their strategy for their program to work effectively so that more earnings will be achieved.

What better way to wow your prospects and customers than to record and publish top notch, full motion and streaming screen-captured videos. Nothing like feeling your hard work getting paid by having your customers jumping up excitedly in great anticipation to buy your product right there and then.

This is Camtasia in action. It is a proven fact; giving your customers something they can actually see can explode your online sales instantly.

You do not need to have training and education to be able to know how this system can work for your affiliate program. Anyone can create stunning videos, from multimedia tutorials and step-by-step presentations available online. The process is like having your customers seated next to you and looking at your desktop, as you show them the things they need to see and hear. All this done step by step.

For those who does not know it yet, how does Camtasia works?

1. It can record your desktop activity in a single click. No need to have to save and compile all your files because it is recorded right there and then.

2. Can easily convert your videos into web pages. Once converted you can have your customers visiting that certain page. Videos are easier to understand and take in unlike reading texts which oftentimes is a trying thing to do.

3. Upload your pages. Publish them through blogs, RSS feed and podcasts. You may want your Camtasis videos to get around and reach out to other people that may be potential customers in the future. Nothing like being visible in many sites and pages to advertise yourself and get your message through.

There are other things you can do with your affiliate program using Camtasia. You can…

Create stunning multimedia presentations that are proven to increase sales because all the senses are engaged. This also has the tendency to reduce skepticism among hard-to-please customers.

Reduce refunds and other customer issues by demonstrating visually how to use your product and how to do it properly. Complaints will also be minimized because all the facts and the presentation are there for the customers to just see and hear about.

Promote affiliate products and services using visual presentations. This is an effective way of redirecting your viewers straight to your affiliate website after they are finished with the video. Make the most of the presentation by putting your site location in the end and make them go there directly if they want more information.

Multiple your online auction bids exponentially when you give your readers a feel of what you have to offer. Based from reports, auctions that includes pictures increases bidding percentage by 400%. Imagine how much higher it will be if it were videos.

Publish valuable infoproducts that you can sell for a much higher price. It will be all worth the price because of the full colored graphics menu and templates that you will be using.

Minimize miscommunication with your customers. Instantly showing them what you want they wanted in the first place is making them understand clearly the essence of your affiliate program. The good thing about multimedia is, nothing much can go wrong. It is there already.

These are just some of the things you can do with Camtasia that can be very helpful in your chosen affiliate program.

Note that the main purpose of using Camtasia is to boost the income that is generated from your affiliate program. Although it can be used for entertainment and enjoyment purposes, which is not really a valid reason why you choose to get all through that trouble.

Try to focus on the goal that you have set upon yourself to and achieve that with the use of the things that may be quite a lot of help in increasing your earnings.

Easy Profits Using PPC In Your Affiliate Marketing Business

2011-07-12T21:53:00.001-07:00

Easy Profits Using PPC In Your Affiliate Marketing Business

PPC is one of the four basic types of Search Engines. PPC is also one of the most cost-effective ways of targeted internet advertising. According to Forbes magazine, PPC or Pay Per Click, accounts to 2 billion dollars a year and is expected to increase to around 8 billion dollars by the year 2008.

Let us take a quick look at how PPC Search Engines work.

These engines create listings and rate them based on a bid amount the website owner is willing to pay for each click from that search engine. Advertisers bid against each other to receive higher ranking for a specific keyword or phrase.

The highest bidder for a certain keyword or phrase will then have the site ranked as number 1 in the PPC Search Engines followed by the second and third highest bidder, up to the last number that have placed a bid on the same keyword or phrase. Your ads then will appear prominently on the results pages based on the dollar amount bid you will agree to pay per click.

How do you make money by using PPC into your affiliate marketing business?

Most affiliate programs only pay when a sale is made or a lead delivered after a visitor has clickthrough your site. Your earnings will not always be the same as they will be dependent on the web site content and the traffic market.

The reason why you should incorporate PPC into your affiliate marketing program is that earnings are easier to make than in any other kind of affiliate program not using PPC. This way, you will be making profit based from the clickthroughs that your visitor will make on the advertiser’s site. Unlike some programs, you are not paid per sale or action.

PPC can be very resourceful of your website. With PPC Search Engines incorporated into your affiliate program, you will be able to profit from the visitor’s who are not interested in your products or services. The same ones who leave your site and never comes back.

You will not only get commissions not only from those who are just searching the web and finding the products and services that they wanted but you will be able to build your site’s recognition as a valuable resource. The visitors who have found what they needed from you site are likely to come back and review what you are offering more closely. Then they will eventually come back to search the web for other products.

This kind of affiliate program is also an easy way for you to generate some more additional revenues. For example, when a visitor on your site does a search in the PPC Search Engine and clicks on the advertiser bided listings, the advertisers’ account will then be deducted because of that click. With this, you will be compensated 30% to 80% of the advertisers’ bid amount.

PPC is not only a source of generating easy profits; it can also help you promote your own site. Most of the programs allow the commissions received to be spent for advertising with them instantly and with no minimum earning requirement. This is one of the more effective ways to exchange your raw visitors for targeted surfers who has more tendencies to purchase your products and services.

What will happen if you when you integrate PPC into your affiliate program?

PPC usually have ready-to-use affiliate tools that can be easily integrated into your website. The most common tools are search boxes, banners, text links and some 404-error pages. Most search engines utilize custom solutions and can provide you with a white-label affiliate program. This enables you, using only a few lines of code, to integrate remotely-hosted co-branded search engine into your website.

The key benefits? Not only more money generated but also some extra money on the side. Plus a lifetime commissions once you have referred some webmaster friends to the engine.

Think about it. Where can you get all these benefits while already generating some income for your site? Knowing some of the more useful tools you can use for your affiliate program is not a waste of time. They are rather a means of earning within an earning.

Best know more about how you can use PPC search engines into your affiliate program than miss out on a great opportunity to earn more profits.

Using Affiliate Product Recommendations To Increase Your Bottom Line

2011-07-12T21:52:00.003-07:00

Using Product Recommendations To Increase Your Bottom Line

In affiliate marketing, there are many ways in which you can increase your earnings and maintain the account that you have worked so hard for already. Most of the techniques and tactics can be learned easily. No need to go anywhere and any further. They are available online, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

One of the more important ways of increasing affiliate marketing bottom line and sale is through the use of product recommendations. Many marketers know that this is one of the most effective ways in promoting a certain product.

If the customers or visitors trust you enough, then they will definitely trust your recommendations. Be very careful in using this approach, though. If you start promoting everything by recommendation, your credibility will actually wear thin.

This is seen especially when recommendations are seemingly exaggerated and without much merit.
Do not be afraid to mention things that you do not like about a given product or service. Rather than lose any points for you, this will make your recommendation more realistic and will tend to increase your credibility.

Furthermore, if your visitors are really interested in what you are offering, they will be more than delighted to learn what is good about the product, what is not so good, and how the product will benefit them.

When you are recommending a certain product, there are some things to remember on how to make it work effectively and for your advantage.

Sound like the true and leading expert in your field.

Remember this simple equation: Price resistance diminishes in direct proportion to trust. If your visitors feel and believe that you are an expert in your niche, they are more inclined to making that purchase. On the other hand, if you are not exuding any confidence and self-assurance in endorsing your products, they will probably feel that same way and will go in search of another product or service which is more believable.

How do you establish this aura of expertise? By offering unique and new solutions they would not get anywhere else. Show proof that what you are promoting works as promised. Display prominent testimonials and endorsements from respected and known personalities, in related fields of course.

Avoid hype at all costs. It is better to sound low key and confident, than to scream and seek attention. Besides, you would not want to sound unprofessional and have that thinking stick to your potential customers and clients, now would you? Best to appear cool and self-assured at the same time.

And remember; prospects are not stupid. They are actually turning to experts and may already know the things that you know. If you back up your claims with hard facts and data, they would gladly put down hundreds, or even thousands worth of money to your promotions. But if you don’t, they are smart enough to try and look at your competitors and what they are offering.

While recommending a product, it is also important that you give out promotional freebies. People are already familiar with the concept of offering freebies to promoting your won products. But very few people do this to promote affiliate products. Try to offer freebies that can promote or even have some information about your products or services.

Before you add recommendations to you product, it is given that you should try and test the product and support.

Do not run the risk of promoting junk products and services. Just think how long it took you to build credibility and trust among your visitors. All that will take to destroy it is one big mistake on your part.

If possible, have recommendations of products that you have 100% confidence in. Test the product support before you begin to ensure that the people you are referring it to would not be left high and dry when a problem suddenly arouse.

Have a look at your affiliate market and look at the strategies you are using. You may not be focusing on the recommendations that your products need to have. You plan of action is sometimes not the only thing that is making your program works.

Try product recommendation and be among those few who have proven its worth.

Here's How To Avoid The 3 Most Common Affiliate Mistakes

2011-07-12T21:52:00.001-07:00

Here's How To Avoid The 3 Most Common Affiliate Mistakes

Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective and powerful ways of earning some money online. This program gives everybody a chance to make a profit through the Internet. Since these affiliate marketing programs are easy to join, implement and pays a commission on a regular basis, more an more people are now willing in this business.

However, like all businesses, there are lots of pitfalls in the affiliate marketing business. Committing some of the most common mistakes will cost the marketers a large portion taken from the profit they are making everyday. That is why it is better to avoid them than be regretful in the end.

Mistake number 1: Choosing the wrong affiliate.

Many people want to earn from affiliate marketing as fast as possible. In their rush to be part of one, they tend to choose a bandwagon product. This is the kind of products that the program thinks is “hot”. They choose the product that is in demand without actually considering if the product appeals to them. This is not a very wise move obviously.

Instead of jumping on the bandwagon, try top choose a product in which you are truly interested in. For any endeavor to succeed, you should take some time to plan and figure out your actions.

Pick a product that appeals to you. Then do some research about that product to see if they are in demand. Promoting a product you are more passionate about is easier than promoting one for the sake of the earnings only.

Mistake number 2: Joining too many affiliate programs.

Since affiliate programs are very easy to join, you might be tempted to join multiples of affiliate programs to try and maximize the earnings you will be getting. Besides you may think that there is nothing wrong and nothing to lose by being part of many affiliate programs.

True, that is a great way to have multiple sources of income. However, joining multiple programs and attempting to promote them all at the same time will prevent you from concentrating on each one of them.

The result? The maximum potential of your affiliate program is not realized and the income generated will not exactly be as huge as you were thinking initially it would. The best way to get excellent result is by joining just one program that pays a 40% commission at least. Then give it your best effort by promoting your products enthusiastically. As soon as you see that it is already making a reasonable profit, then maybe you can now join another affiliate program.

The technique is to do it slowly but surely. There is really no need to rush into things, especially with affiliate marketing. With the way things are going, the future is looking real bright and it seems affiliate marketing will be staying for a long time too.

Mistake number 3: Not buying the product or using the service.

As an affiliate, you main purpose is to effectively and convincingly promote a product or service and to find customers. For you to achieve this purpose, you must be able to relay to the customers that certain product and service. It is therefore difficult for you to do this when you yourself have not tried these things out. Thus, you will fail to promote and recommend them convincingly. You will also fail to create a desire in your customers to avail any of what you are offering.

Try the product or service personally first before you sign up as an affiliate to see if it is really delivering what it promises. If you have done so, then you are one of the credible and living testaments aware of its advantages and disadvantages. Your customers will then feel the sincerity and truthfulness in you and this will trigger them to try them out for themselves.

Many affiliate marketers makes these mistakes and are paying dearly for their actions. To not fall into the same situation they have been in, try to do everything to avoid making the same mistakes.

Time is the key. Take the time to analyze your marketing strategy and check if youa re in the right track. If done properly, you will be able to maximize your affiliate marketing program and earn higher profits.

So Many Affiliate Programs! Which One Do I Choose?

2011-07-12T21:51:00.002-07:00

So Many Affiliate Programs! Which One Do I Choose?

Ask questions first before you join an affiliate program. Do a little research about the choices of program that you intend to join into. Get some answers because they will be the deciding point of what you will be achieving later on.

Will it cost you anything to join? Most affiliate programs being offered today are absolutely free of charge. So why settle for those that charge you some dollars before joining.

When do they issue the commission checks? Every program is different. Some issue their checks once a month, every quarter, etc. Select the one that is suited to your payment time choice. Many affiliate programs are setting a minimum earned commission amount that an affiliate must meet or exceed in order for their checks to be issued.

What is the hit per sale ratio? This is the average number of hits to a banner or text link it takes to generate a sale based on all affiliate statistics. This factor is extremely important because this will tell you how much traffic you must generate before you can earn a commission from the sale.

How are referrals from an affiliate’s site tracked and for how long do they remain in the system? You need to be confident on the program enough to track those people you refer from your site. This is the only way that you can credit for a sale. The period of time that those people stay in the system is also important. This is because some visitors do not buy initially but may want to return later to make the purchase. Know if you will still get credit for the sale if it is done some months from a certain day.

What are the kinds of affiliate stats available? Your choice of affiliate program should be capable of offering detailed stats. They should be available online anytime you decide to check them out. Constantly checking your individual stats is important to know how many impressions, hits and sales are already generated from your site. Impressions are the number of times the banner or text link was viewed by a visitor of your site. A hit is the one clicking on the banner or text links.

Does the affiliate program also pay for the hits and impressions besides the commissions on sales? It is important that impressions and hits are also paid, as this will add to the earnings you get from the sales commission. This is especially important if the program you are in offers low sales to be able to hit ratio.

Who is the online retailer? Find out whom you are doing business with to know if it is really a solid company. Know the products they are selling and the average amount they are achieving. The more you know about the retailer offering you the affiliate program, the easier it will be for you to know if that program is really for you and your site.

Is the affiliate a one tier or two tier program? A single tier program pays you only for the business you yourself have generated. A two tier program pays you for the business, plus it also pays you a commission on the on the sales generated by any affiliate you sponsor in your program. Some two-tier programs are even paying small fees on each new affiliate you sponsor. More like a recruitment fee.

Lastly, what is the amount of commission paid? 5% - 20% is the commission paid by most programs. .01% - .05% is the amount paid for each hit. If you find a program that also pays for impressions, the amount paid is not much at all. As you can see from the figures, you will now understand why the average sales amount and hit to sale ratio is important.

These are just some of the questions that needed answering first before you enter into an affiliate program. You should be familiar with the many important aspects that your chosen program should have before incorporating them into your website. Try to ask your affiliate program choices these questions. These can help you select the right program for you site from among the many available.

Which Affiliate Networks To Look Out For When Promoting

2011-07-12T21:51:00.000-07:00

Which Affiliate Networks To Look Out For When Promoting

There are many horror stories about affiliate programs and networks. People have heard them over and over again, that some are even wary of joining one. The stories they may have heard are those related to illegal programs or pyramid schemes. Basically, this kind of market does not have real, worthy product.

You do not want to be associated with these schemes. It is obvious you want to be with a program that offers high quality product that you will readily endorse. The growing number of those who have joined already and are succeeding immensely is proof enough that there are reliable and quality affiliate programs out there.

Why participate in an affiliate program?

It allows you to work part-time. It gives you the opportunity to build a generous residual income. And it makes you an owner of a small business. Affiliate programs have already created lots of millionaires. They are the living testimony of how hard work; continuous prospecting, motivating and training others pay off.

If ever you are deciding to join one, you must take note that you are getting into something that is patterned to what you are capable of.

This will be an assurance that you are capable of doing anything to come out successful.

How do you choose a good affiliate program to promote? Here are some tips you may want to look over before choosing one:

1. A program that you like and have interest in. One of the best ways of knowing if that is the kind of program you wish to promote is if you are interested in purchasing the product yourself. If that is the case, chances are, there are many others who are also interested in the same program and products.

2. Look for a program that is of high quality. For instance, look for one that is associated with many experts in that particular industry. This way, you are assured that of the standard of the program you will be joining into.

3. Join in the ones that offer real and viable products. How do you know this? Do some initial research. If possible, track down some of the members and customers to give you testimonial on the credibility of the program.

4. The program that is catering to a growing target market. This will ensure you that there will be more and continuous demands for your referrals. Make inquiries. There are forums and discussions you can participate in to get good and reliable feedbacks.

5. A program with a compensation plan that pays out a residual income and a payout of 30% or more would be a great choice. There are some programs offering this kind of compensation. Look closely for one. Do not waste your time with programs that do not reward substantially for your efforts.

6. Be aware of the minimum quotas that you must fulfill or sales target that is too hard to achieve. Some affiliate programs imposes pre-requisites before you get your commissions. Just be sure that you are capable of attaining their requirements.

7. Select one that has plenty of tools and resources that can help you grow the business in the shortest possible time. Not all affiliate programs have these capacities. Make use you decide on one with lots of helpful tools you can use.

8. Check out if the program has a proven system that can allow you to check your networks and compensation. Also check if they have it available online for you to check anytime and anywhere.

9. The program that is offering strong incentives for members to renew their membership each time. The affiliate program that provides continuous help and upgrades for its products have the tendency to retain its members. These things can assure the growth of your networks.

10. Be aware of the things that members are not happy about in a program. Like with the ones mentioned above, you can do your checking at discussion forums. If you know someone in that same program, there is ho harm asking if there are many downsides involved.

Have a thorough and intensive knowledge about the affiliate program and network you will be promoting on.

Knowing the kind of program you are getting yourself into will make you anticipate and prevent any future problems you may encounter.

Top 3 Ways To Boost Your Affiliate Commissions Overnight

2011-07-12T21:50:00.001-07:00

Top 3 Ways To Boost Your Affiliate Commissions Overnight

The ideal world of affiliate marketing does not require having your won website, dealing with customers, refunds, product development and maintenance. This is one of the easiest ways of launching into an online business and earning more profits.

Assuming you are already into an affiliate program, what would be the next thing you would want to do? Double, or even triple, your commissions, right? How do you do that?

Here are some powerful tips on how to boost your affiliate program commissions overnight.

1. Know the best program and products to promote. Obviously, you would want to promote a program that will enable you to achieve the greatest profits in the shortest possible time.

There are several factors to consider in selecting such a program. Choose the ones that have a generous commission structure. Have products that fit in with your target audience. And that has a solid track record of paying their affiliate easily and on time. If you cannot seem to increase your investments, dump that program and keep looking for better ones.

There are thousands of affiliate programs online which gives you the reason to be picky. You may want to select the best to avoid losing your advertising dollars.

Write free reports or short ebooks to distribute from your site. There is a great possibility that you are competing with other affiliates that are promoting the same program. If you start writing short report related to the product you are promoting, you will be able to distinguish yourself from the other affiliates.

In the reports, provide some valuable information for free. If possible, add some recommendations about the products. With ebooks, you get credibility. Customers will see that in you and they will be enticed to try out what you are offering.

2. Collect and save the email addresses of those who download your free ebooks. It is a known fact that people do not make a purchase on the first solicitation. You may want to send out your message more than six times to make a sale.

This is the simple reason why you should collect the contact information of those who downloaded your reports and ebooks. You can make follow-ups on these contacts to remind them to make a purchase from you.

Get the contact information of a prospect before sending them to the vendor’s website. Keep in mind that you are providing free advertisement for the product owners. You get paid only when you make a sale. If you send prospects directly to the vendors, chances are they would be lost to you forever.

But when you get their names, you can always send other marketing messages to them to be able to earn an ongoing commission instead of a one-time sale only.

Publish an online newsletter or Ezine. It is always best to recommend a product to someone you know than to sell to a stranger. This is the purpose behind publishing your own newsletter. This also allows you to develop a relationship based on trust with your subscribers.

This strategy is a delicate balance between providing useful information with a sales pitch. If you continue to write informative editorials you will be able to build a sense of reciprocity in your readers that may lead them to support you by buying your products.

3. Ask for higher than normal commission from merchants. If you are already successful with a particular promotion, you should try and approach the merchant and negotiate a percentage commission for your sales.

If the merchant is smart, he or she will likely grant your request rather than lose a valuable asset in you. Keep in mind that you are a zero-risk investment to your merchant; so do not be shy about requesting for addition in your commissions. Just try to be reasonable about it.

Write strong pay Per Click ads. PPC search engine is the most effective means of advertising online. As an affiliate, you can make a small income just by managing PPC campaigns such as Google AdWords and Overture. Then you should try and monitor them to see which ads are more effective and which ones to dispose of.

Try out these strategies and see the difference it can make to your commission checks in the shortest of time.

3 Things All Affiliate Marketers Need To Survive Online

2011-07-12T21:49:00.000-07:00

3 Things All Affiliate Marketers Need To Survive Online

Every affiliate marketer is always looking for the successful market that gives the biggest paycheck. Sometimes they think it is a magic formula that is readily available for them. Actually, it is more complicated than that. It is just good marketing practices that have been proven over years of hard work and dedication.
There are tactics that have worked before with online marketing and is continuing to work in the online affiliate marketing world of today. With these top three marketing tips, you will be able to able to increase your sales and survive in the affiliate marketing online.

What are these three tactics?

1. Using unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. Do not lump all of it together just to save some money on web hosting. It is best to have a site focusing on each and every product and nothing more.

Always include product reviews on the website so visitors will have an initial understanding on what the product can do to those who buys them. Also include testimonials from users who have already tried the product.

Be sure that these customers are more than willing to allow you to use their names and photos on the site of the specific product you are marketing.

You can also write articles highlighting the uses of the product and include them on the website as an additional page. Make the pages attractive compelling and include calls to act on the information. Each headline should attract the readers to try and read more, even contact you. Highlight your special points. This will help your readers to learn what the page is about and will want to find out more.

2. Offer free reports to your readers. If possible position them at the very top side of your page so it they simply cannot be missed. Try to create autoresponder messages that will be mailed to those who input their personal information into your sign up box. According to research, a sale is closed usually on the seventh contact with a prospect.

Only two things can possibly happen with the web page alone: closed sale or the prospect leaving the page and never return again. By placing useful information into their inboxes at certain specified period, you will remind them of the product they thought they want later and will find out that the sale is closed. Be sure that the content is directed toward specific reasons to buy the product. Do not make it sound like a sales pitch.

Focus on important points like how your product can make life and things easier and more enjoyable. Include compelling subject lines in the email. As much as possible, avoid using the word “free” because there are still older spam filters that dumps those kind of contents into the junk before even anyone reading them first. Convince those who signed up for your free reports that they will be missing something big if they do not avail of your products and services.

3. Get the kind of traffic that is targeted to your product. Just think, if the person who visited your website has no interest whatsoever in what you are offering, they will be among those who move on and never come back. Write articles for publication in e-zines and e-reports. This way you can locate publications that is focusing on your target customers and what you have put up might just grab their interest.

Try to write a minimum of 2 articles per week, with at least 300-600 words in length.

By continuously writing and maintaining these articles you can generate as many as 100 targeted readers to your site in a day.
Always remember that only 1 out of 100 people are likely to buy your product or get your services. If you can generate as much as 1,000 targeted hits for your website in a day, that means you can made 10 sales based on the average statistic.

The tactics given above does not really sound very difficult to do, if you think about it. It just requires a little time and an action plan on your part.

Try to use these tips for several affiliate marketing programs. You can end maintaining a good source of income and surviving in this business that not all marketers can do.

Besides, think of the huge paychecks you will be receiving…

How do Backlinks Help with SEO

2011-07-12T21:38:00.001-07:00

How do Backlinks Help with SEO

A backlink is a link which directs others towards your site; they are also often referred to as inbound links (IBL’s). So, the number of backlinks that your site has is an indication of how popular or important it is according to your peers (other site owners). These are especially important for SEO, as search engines such as Google will give more credit to those sites with a good number of quality backlinks. So they will then consider these sites more relevant than others in the results pages of a search query.

Most search engines will want websites to have a level playing field, and so will more often than not look for natural links that have been built slowly over time. Although it can be fairly easy to manipulate the links on a web page in order to achieve a higher ranking, it is a lot harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from another site. This is why these feature so highly in a search engine’s algorithm. Today it has gotten even harder to achieve these inbound links because of unscrupulous webmasters. Such people try to achieve these links by deceptive or sneaky techniques (through either hidden links or through automatically generated pages). Such pages are known as link farms and they are generally disregarded by search engines. But if you are linked to such a link farm, then you may find your site being banned entirely from these search engines.

Another way of achieving quality backlinks to a site is to entice quality visitors to come to yours.

There are a number of ways in which back linking can be achieved.

1. Reciprocal Linking - this is where you link to another site that provides the same service or product as you and they in turn have a link to your site on theirs.

2. Site Submissions. Submit links for your site to directories which allow free submissions, or if you can afford it, some paid directories. There are many sites around which offer a service where you can submit your site details to numerous sites. Plus, if you want, you can always create your own directory of similar websites.

3. Articles. This is another way of getting great backlinks. So if you have a reputable looking site that contains informative, well written reviews, then there is a good chance that your articles will receive high search engine rankings also. But it is vital that any articles you write are on the subject, informative and thorough in relation to your site. Also you could always write a few articles for submission to article sites such as EzineArticles.com or SearchWarp.com. This is another great way of getting even more backlinks to your site.

Below are a few tips you will need to consider in order to write good articles for your site.

a. Write in a way that your intended target audience will understand what you are trying to say. In other words, don’t write it like you were a teacher talking to a class of 10 year olds, but don’t be overly complicated.

b. Watch your spelling, grammar and punctuation. If in doubt, then use your spell checker.

c. Do not make your article too long. Usually a good article will consist of between 350 to 500 words.

d. Always include a resource box at the end, as this will include that all important backlink to your site. This resource box should also include a short biography regarding you and your site.

4. Blogging. This has now become an integral part of the internet, and is one of the most effective ways of linking. You either have the choice of placing a few words of comments on to someone else’s blog, or you may want to link to them from your own blog. In fact, you will find that most blogs will be happy to link back to you. However, it is important that you try to update your blog regularly and post interesting content to ensure that people will want to link back to you.

What is Search Engine Friendly Content

2011-07-12T21:37:00.007-07:00

What is Search Engine Friendly Content

In this chapter, we will look at just what search engine friendly content is. Although you may think it is about stuffing your website with target keywords, it isn’t. In fact, you may find that you could fall foul of the search if you do this. What you need to remember is that you need to write copy that not only spiders will look at, but also human beings will as well. What is the point of having a site that is highly ranked, yet none of your visitors can understand? So it is vital that your site is user friendly to both your visitors, as well as search engine spiders.

First of all you need to answer the following questions:-

1. What is your site for?
2. What does it do?
3. What do you want your visitors to do when they reach it?
4. Would you like them to spend money when they get to it?
5. Or are you just providing them with information?

So you need to remember these, as they will have an impact on the copy that you write for the content of your site.

So whenever possible, use short paragraphs or bullet points, as these are more likely to attract visitors, while more lengthy essays will only drive them away.

But if you are selling a service or product then you need to make your site look interesting. Provide as many calls to action as you can, and not just provide them with an online price list.

So remember that you are trying to attract the search engines, but your site should be designed first and foremost for human readers. As long as a site has been designed well with people in mind, then 9 times out of 10 you will find that it is search engine friendly also.

Just like a visitor to your site reads the copy on your page in order to figure out what you have to offer, so does a search engine. So when a search engine is looking at your page, they are looking for keyword phrases in your copy (Content).

Below are provided a number of tips which should help in your SEO using the content on your site.

1. You should have at least 200 words of copy on each page of your site. Although this may be difficult at times, search engines really like it, so it is important that you increase the amount of copy where you are able to. Generally speaking, once you surpass 1,000 words, the search engines will pretty much stop looking…so no need to get too long, unless the desired action you want from the visitor requires it.

This text, wherever possible, should include your most important keyword phrases, but should still remain logical and easy to read by visitors to the site.

2. Ensure that you use the phrases which you have used in the other tags on the pages during this part of the optimization process.

3. Add additional copy filled pages to the site, such as how to articles, tips or tutorials. Not only do these types of pages help with SEO, but you may find that other sites will link to yours.

These tips should not be ignored, as optimizing your page copy (content) is one of the most important things you could possibly do in order to improve your rankings in the Search Engines.

How to Determine the Keyword Selection for Your Site

2011-07-12T21:37:00.005-07:00

How to Determine the Keyword Selection for Your Site

Making a website attractive to search engines is a key factor for its success. One of the key ways in which to rank well with search engines is by optimizing the visible keywords on the pages. But in order to be successful in your keyword strategy campaign, you should use the following two steps.

Keyword Selection
You will need to determine what your pages are offering and also determine which words that your potential visitors might use in order to search for the pages of your site. You then need to create keywords which are based on those words.

For the full optimization of keywords on your site you should use between 3 to 5 keywords on the appropriate pages. It is vital that you start using them from the top left and then down. Many times you will find that this will be the first 200 words on each page of your site which will include the title tag, headings, abstract etc.

So the closer to the top left of your page the keywords are placed then the more weight they will be given by Google. Often, visitors will view your site in the same way that the search engine spider’s do, so emphasizing your keywords from the top left and down is a good way to design a site.

However, if your pages are already built, you may be thinking it is too late to select your keywords. But it’s not. It does not matter if you choose your keywords before or after the site has gone live (although it is better to do it before, as then you will not need to rewrite the text on the pages). But if it is live, then you may have the keywords, but they may not be the right ones. Yet they could be and you have not fully utilized their optimization value. So, if you wish, by using a thorough keyword selection process, you can make sure that they keywords you are using are optimized to their fullest extent.

Also, another issue where keyword selection is concerned is you need to determine whether the keyword is too popular or competitive. So if you find sites that are already competing for high rankings using particular keywords, then you may need to select more specific keywords instead. This can also be said for keywords which have several different meanings as well. Therefore it is important that you look how users will search for your pages, and which specific questions the content of your pages actually answers. So whenever possible, refine the keywords that you use in order to answer these questions.

But whenever you are refining your keywords, it is important that you keep in mind that a large portion of searches carried out on the net contain three words or more. So when people are searching for answers on the internet, they will often phrase their search term as a question. Therefore many people will not use search words that describe the solution to a question. So in order to optimize your pages to their full extent, it is best if you think like the person who is searching.

Check out the Competition
This is a great way of getting ideas, and you do this by carrying out a search using keywords that you already know, and that you would like to target. Then click through the top sites that come up as a result of this search. Then once on the site, view their source HTML code and view the keywords that they have in their Meta tags. But it is important that you remember to use those keywords which relate to your site or page. It is easy to view a sites HTML code, all you do is click on the “View” button at the top of your web browser page and then select “Source” or “Page Source”.

By developing a list of keyword phrases, you should be able to optimize each page of your site for the search engines.

Effective Use of Keywords for SEO

2011-07-12T21:37:00.001-07:00

Effective Use of Keywords for SEO

What you should remember is that Search Engine Optimization does not need to be complicated. What you should do is make sure that each and every page of your site is a unique entity, and needs to be treated in the appropriate manner where SEO is concerned. Below we provide you with some guidelines which should help you achieve your desired SEO results.

Get the Keywords Right
It is important that you make sure the selected words you use meet your marketing criteria. So do not pick words which are too general. Using words that are more specific will result in a higher ranking for your site. Also, it is important that you choose words which are suitable to your site. For example, you will find that “optimizing search engines” and “search engine optimization” have completely different rankings.

Include keywords in your Page Titles
Unfortunately, a lot of people will use either inappropriate names or their company name in the page’s titles. So it is important that you include the appropriate keywords in your title, as that is they way people carry out searches on the internet.

Inclusion of keywords in your Title Tags and Meta Tags
It is vital that, for each page of your site, you include the appropriate keywords within all the page’s tags. Also, take time to go over the Meta description that you use. You should make sure that any description you use is alluring and interesting to those who are visiting your site, and include keywords within it wherever possible. There are many search engines around today which use the Meta description as the thing that will be displayed in their search results.

Keywords in Content
It is important that you make sure you include keywords in the content of your site as well. But do not over do this, as too many will result in your page being discounted by the search engines.

Using these basic guidelines in relation to keywords in relation to search engine optimization and you will find that your site can not help but be affected in a positive way.

What is the Basic Link Structure within a Site

2011-07-12T21:36:00.001-07:00

What is the Basic Link Structure within a Site

This is probably the most obvious, but certainly one of the most overlooked aspects of search engine optimization. This helps to make sure that search engine spiders can actually find (crawl) all of your site’s pages. But if they can not find them, then they won’t get spidered, and this means that they won’t get indexed. In fact, no amount of search engine optimization you try will help.

Below are some points that should be taken note of in respect of link structure for your site.

Spiders can not see links which are accomplished by JavaScript. This is because, as far as search engines will be concerned, they do not exist. So if you want spiders to follow the links on your site, do not use JavaScript. In fact, you will find that Google will not spider any URL if it looks like it has a session ID in it. So any URL’s that have a longish number or odd characters (such as a question mark) in them should be avoided (these are often dynamic URL’s).

It is important that you make sure that all pages link to at least one other page. Pages which do not link out are known as “dangling links”. It is important that you structure the internal links so that targeted search terms are reinforced. So make sure that you organize your links so that your topic’s sub topic pages are linked to it (ensuring that you use the right link text that is specific to the page being linked to) and vice versa. See below for the different types of methods we mean.

Link Text (<a href=”url”>some link text</a>
This is one of the 2 most important elements to ensure good rankings for a site. It can either be on pages within the site, or on other sites’ pages. But which ever way you do it, it is important that it is included. It is vital that you include the target page’s main search term in the link text. Also, whenever possible, do not use identical text for every link that links to a page. But if you can include the target page’s main search term in the link text instead.

In fact, links will carry more weight with search engines if the text around them is concerned with the target page’s topic and search term(s).

Title Tag <title>some title words</title>
This is probably second most important element in order to get good rankings for a site. It is important that you make sure the page’s search term is contained within this tag. So place it as near to the front as possible while ensuring that the title reads well. In fact, there is nothing wrong with you placing the search term up front on its own and then follow it with a period such as “Page Rank. Google Page Rank and how do I make the most of it?” As you can see, the target search term here is of course “Page Rank”. But what you should obviously do is make sure that each page’s title tag is different from the title tags on your site’s other pages.

Description Tag <meta name=”description” content=”a nice description”>
You will find that some search engines, such as Google no longer display the description like they use to. But no matter what, you should include this on each page for those search engines that do. There are even the odd times when Google will actually display them. So it is vital that you write a description that is appealing and incorporates the page’s search term into it at least once but preferably twice is better. So if you can, place one at the start or as near to the start of the description as possible.

Keywords Tag <meta=”keywords” content=”some keywords”>
It is important to remember that the keywords tag is never actually treated by search engines as keywords. They will be treated as text on a page. Although this tag is not effective as it used to be, there is no reason to leave it out. Instead, make sure that you put in plenty of relevant keywords and include the search term once at the front of the tag. Also, you do not need to separate keywords or key phrases with commas (as is often done) as search engines ignore these.

H Tag <Hn>some heading words</Hn>
The “n” in this tag represents a number from 1 to 6. The biggest heading is represented by 1. You will find that H tags are given more weight than ordinary text in a page, and so the bigger the H size, the more weight it will have. So it is important that you include your target search term in the H tags at least once on the page, but if possible two or three times is even better. Also place your first H Tag as near to the top of the site page as possible.

Bold Text
This gives more weight to a page than ordinary text, but not as much as an H Tag does. So where ever possible, enclose the search term in bold tags occasionally where it appears on the page.

Normal Text
Whenever possible, use the search term as often as you can on the pages of your site. But ensure that they do not detract from how the page actually reads. Ensure that you use the term once or twice in the very early pages of the body text, and then as often as possible throughout. If you need to, reword small parts and add sentences to ensure that the search term is well represented in the text for good search engine optimization.

But you will probably find that each word you have in your search term will be found separately on the page. So, if you need to, add a few of them throughout the page.

Alt Text <img src=”url” alt=”some alt text which is displayed or mouseover”>
Include your search term in the alt text of all images on your pages. It is important to remember that some systems, such as those used by Braille readers and speech synthesizers, use the alt text. So it may be advisable to make them usable while including the search term.

So in summary what you need to do is as follows:-

1.   Select the main search terms you wish to use.
2.   Allocate these search terms to a suitable existing page, and if you need to, split pages.
3.   Organize your internal links, and then link text, to suit the target search terms and their pages.
4.   If you can, organize those links from other pages to suit the target search terms and their pages also.
5.   Now organize all the on page elements in order that they suit each page’s target search term.
6.   Finally, now sit back and watch your site’s page rankings begin to improve.

Why Use Search Engine Optimization

2011-07-12T21:35:00.005-07:00

Why Use Search Engine Optimization

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), as already previously mentioned, is a sub section of search engine marketing.

Unfortunately, with SEO, there are no shortcuts, and if you are looking for a way to get quick and easy results, then this isn’t it. But instead, you will need to carry out some hard work, especially in relation to the actual content of your site.

Also, you will need to have plenty of patience, as results do not happen overnight. So if you are looking to improve the search engine position of your site, you should consider this very early on when looking at using SEO.

However, what are important are the following points:-

Good Content
This is probably the single most important point you should remember when doing SEO, especially if you want your site to be found on the web. Although your site may be technically perfect so that the search engine robots find it, you will find that it will not help if the actual content of your site is not good.

For the content of your site to be good, it should be factually, as well as grammatically correct. But this is not really necessary for every site that is on the web today. However, what is important is that whatever your site is about, the content actually needs to be unique and specific so that it will appeal to people. Moreover, it in fact needs to be particularly appealing to those people looking for information or who want to find your site.

By having good content on your site, visitors will return and eventually these visitors who return are more likely to link to your site. Having lots of inbound links is not only great for your site, but for search engine rankings also. It is even better if those links are from more highly ranked sites than your own.

Also, not only do you need to have good content on your site, you also need to have fresh content also. If you add new content to your site on a regular basis, you are giving your visitors more reasons for returning to it. Because of this, search engine robots will also visit your site more often as soon as they notice that you are updating it regularly. So what this means is that any new content you add, will then be indexed much quicker in the future.

Check your Spellings

If your site is written in English, then you are probably aware of the differences in spelling between American and British English. Where in the UK they will write “colour”, in the USA it is written as “color”, and the same can be said of “optimization” and “optimization”. So if you can, why not set up your machine so that the spell checker is set up as USA English rather than British English. Unfortunately, there are many words between these two languages that are often misspelled, and in fact, the same can be said for many other languages around the world.

Make sure your Page Titles are Descriptive

If you make your page titles as simple, descriptive and relevant as possible, it will make it easier for the search engines to know what each page of your site is about. This will then allow people to scan through the search results they get, and are able to quickly determine if your document contains what they are actually looking for. Also, it should be remembered that the page title is also what is used in order to link to your site from the results provided by the search engines.

As a result of this, it is important to ensure that the title on the page is one of your most important elements of your site. In fact, some people will argue that this the most important part of any site above all other things.

Use of Real Headings

This is where you need to use h1-h6 (header tags) elements for your headings. By using graphics for your headings you are able to use any typeface you want (but search engines will not pay much attention to this). Even if you do use the alt attribute to specify an alternate text for heading images, this is not anywhere near as important as using real text in a heading element.

But if you are unable to use real text, then look at the various image or flash replacement techniques that are available instead. However, be aware that there may be some risk involved in doing this. As image replacement involves hiding text, it is quite possible that you may be penalized by search engines for doing this. But at present, this kind of risk seems pretty slim.

Ensure that your URL’s are search engine friendly

It is important to use search engine friendly URL’s, as opposed to dynamically generated ones that have a query string (which lets the server know which data to fetch from a database). Unfortunately, there are many search engine robots which have difficulties with this kind of URL and they may well stop at the question mark, and so not actually look at the query string.

By using a search engine friendly URL; you are helping both your ranking and users of your site. Many sites have seen an incredible improvement just because they have changed the URL scheme on it. However, the modification and rewriting of a site’s URL can be a little tricky.

Getting Linked

There is no easy or sustainable way in order to solve this but for one. The really only good way to ensure that your site gets linked is to ensure that it contains good content. For any site on the web, incoming links are very important, especially for Search Engine Optimization. In fact, you may find that this is the hardest part of SEO for you to implement.

But many people have found that incoming links are less important, especially where you have more specific and unique content on your site.

Make it Accessible to All

This is as important as all things previously mentioned. It is important that you make your site accessible to those who are visually impaired, as this will help search engine robots find their way around it also. It is important to remember that Google is blind, so even if you are not bothered whether blind people use your site or not (which we all should be in today’s world); you still need for it to be accessible. What this means is that you should use real headings, paragraphs and lists, and avoid using anything which may interfere with the search engines spiders.

Be Careful when making a Submission

Although this is often overrated, submitting your site to directories and search engines can actually be useful. This is especially important if the site happens to be new and has not as yet been picked up by Google and many of the other search engines that are around.

But if you do want to look at submitting it to some directories, you may want to consider using Yahoo Directory and Open Directory Project and some directories specific to your topic (for example, if you have a blog, try submitting to http://www.blog-search.info). But you will need patience, as it can take several weeks for any submissions to be processed unless you pay for it to be listed.

Do not try to fool the Search Engines

Never use such methods as cloaking, link farms, keyword stuffing, alt text spamming or any other dubious ways. Although they may work for a short time, you not only risk getting your site penalized, but it could actually be banned from search engines altogether.

As search engines like their results to be accurate, they just do not take kindly to people trying to trick them.

Avoid the use of Frames

Although it is possible to provide workarounds that will allow a search engine robot to crawl frame based sites, these will still cause problems for any visitors who find that site through a search engine.

What happens is that when someone follows a link from a search result to a frame based site, they will end up on an orphaned document. This will, in most cases, create confusion for the user, as in many cases, vital parts of the site will be lost, such as navigational links.

Browser Detection – Be Careful

If you have to use some kind of browser detection, then make sure that it does not break when a search engine spider or any other unknown agent comes along. Unfortunately, if the spiders can not get in, then your site will not be found.

Do not waste your time with Meta Tags

You will find that most search engines do not place a great deal of value on the content contained within Meta Tags today. This is because they have been used too much by spammers. So instead, if you need to, use Meta description elements. Although keywords will not hurt, they don’t really help either, so generally it is not worth the effort to use them.

Often there are some search engine sites which will use the content of a Meta description element to describe a site in their search result listings. So whenever possible, make their contents unique and descriptive for every document or page.

As stated at the beginning of this chapter, we have provided a few basic guidelines in relation to SEO. But there is much more that can be done in order to increase your site’s visibility with search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Trends 2011

2011-07-12T21:34:00.001-07:00

In this blog, we will look at what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, and the ways in which it can be used. Through this book, we will provide you with the basics on using Search Engine Optimization in order to improve traffic flow to your site.

By many people, SEO is considered to be a part of search engine marketing. It is often used when people are describing a process for improving the amount of traffic that goes to a website from various different search engines. Many site owners will engage in using SEO in an attempt to obtain qualified visitors to their site. The quality of these visitors will often be measured by what specific keywords they are using in order to reach the desired result they want, such as making a purchase, or it could just viewing or downloading a particular page on that site. It may be that the visitor just requests some further information, or they sign up to a newsletter.

Search Engine Optimization is a marketing strategy which can often generate a good return for the site. But what must be remembered is that search engines are not actually paid for the traffic they send to a site from a natural (organic) search. Plus, they will regularly change the algorithms that they use for these searches to be carried in an effort to improve the results for people using their search engine. In fact, there is no guarantee that using this system is successful in either the long or short term for any website. Because of this, SEO is often compared to traditional forms of PR (Public Relations), while PPC (Pay per Click) advertising is more closely associated with traditional forms of advertising.

However, even if you do find you have increased traffic to your site because of SEO, if your site is unprepared for this increased traffic, it may in fact be detrimental to your site, as visitors will go away feeling dissatisfied and will not return.

But though SEO can be considered as a marketing tactic which is a law unto itself, it is often considered to part of the bigger picture by many industry experts.

Article Marketing For Your Business

2011-07-12T21:32:00.003-07:00

Article Marketing For Your Business

If you are not already using article marketing for your business, you are missing out on sales and signups that could be garnered from this time tested method of marketing a business online. Anyone who isn’t already marketing their business with articles should get started on it right away.

Remember, your article marketing efforts of today will continue to pay off for years to come. You can’t say that about any other type of marketing that exists. For the future of your business, this is an area of marketing that you need to learn – and you need to learn every aspect of it as soon as possible.

You may shy away from article marketing because you can’t write well, or because you don’t think that article marketing is right for your niche. These are valid reasons – but they are wrong. Even if you can’t write well, you can pay someone who does. Having articles written is surprisingly cheap. In fact, you can have one article written each and every week for less than ten dollars.

You can also take one of the many free writing courses online to learn how to write articles. Once you get the hang of writing articles, you will find that you can write a short article in less than half an hour. If you are slow at typing, or your article will require more research, you can knock one out in about an hour.

As for article marketing not being right for your niche – wrong again. Article marketing works for all niches. Have you been to a search engine lately? No matter what you think of to type in, you will find web pages on that topic. Where there are webpages, there are readers, and where there are readers, there is a need for articles.

Go ahead – try it. Visit your favorite search engine and try to think up something off the wall and type it in. Bet you find webpages that have content – aka articles – on them! Web content comes from articles – whether they are articles that were written specifically for that website, or articles that were found in the article banks.

You may not think you have time for article distribution. You can pay someone to do this, but the fact of the matter is that even if you just submitted your article to ten article banks each week, you will still benefit. You will benefit even more if you submit to more article banks, publishers, and forums – but just ten will work as well. Doing nothing at all, however, won’t get you anywhere at all. It takes less than one hour to submit to ten article directories.

So, if you have an article written for you, and you submit it to ten directories, you are looking at half an hour of work a week. If you write the article yourself and submit it, you are looking at about two hours per week. If you outsource all of it – writing and distribution, you are looking at ten minutes a week or less – and this includes sending an email to your writer and paying them once the work is done, once you find a ghostwriter that you want to work with on a continuing basis.

You have everything to gain from article marketing, and nothing to lose – as long as you are doing your article marketing in the right way. Even if you did it in the wrong way, the most you stand to lose is your time. Frankly, article marketing is something that is hard to fail at.

The process is incredibly simple: write an informative article, include a resource box that has a call to action, distribute the article, and reap the benefits for years to come. That’s all there is to it – and this is a marketing method that is available to everyone – even if they are new to Internet Business. You don’t have to be a guru to write articles. You become a guru by writing articles.

You don’t even have to own a business to start writing articles and profiting from them. Affiliate marketing, where you promote other peoples products and services for a percentage of each sale, can easily be done through article marketing – and this is where many gurus got their start.

If you aren’t article marketing, you are leaving money on the table. It is as simple as that – and you can start article marketing today. Right now. If you can write, write. If you can’t, hire a ghostwriter, pay eight to ten bucks for the article, and start distributing it. All of that can be done now – TODAY.

Don’t let another day go by that you are not benefiting from the uncontested and unrivaled effectiveness of article marketing! The future of your business, as well as your own financial future, could depend on it.

The Future of Article Marketing

2011-07-12T21:32:00.001-07:00

The Future of Article Marketing

As stated, article marketing is here to stay. It is a stable method of marketing that simply is not going away, no matter what changes may occur in the online world. Because article marketing is here to stay, it is something that will benefit you today and in the future.

The article marketing that you do today will still be benefiting you ten years from now. Article marketing is viral, and it’s a virus that can’t be killed. You see, when you take the time to write and distribute an article, other people, such as web publishers, bloggers, and ezine publishers, will use your articles on their websites, in their newsletters, and on their blogs.

People who read their websites, blogs, and newsletters will also use your articles on their websites, newsletters, and blogs, as will their visitors. The process just keeps going and going, for as long as the information in your article remains relevant to the current trends or the information does not change. Believe it or not, methods may change, information, however, rarely changes.

While many of the new article repositories may not be around in the future, there are those that have been around since the first article repository made it’s appearance. The longevity of an article repository depends on how well it is promoted, and how long the person who owns the article repository decides to stay in business.

When you submit to one of these article banks, your article will remain on that site for as long as that site exists. But even if the site doesn’t exist ten years from now, you still benefit from the article that you submitted there when it did exist – because other people visit, read your article, and use it elsewhere.

Even with the abundance of information on the Internet, and the information overload that exists, people still need and use articles – and people still read them every day. While personal computers are in millions of homes, each day, more and more people purchase their first computers and surf the Internet – looking for information about their interests, problems that they are experiencing, or things that they want to learn.

They find the information that they are seeking on websites, blogs, and in newsletters – all of which are publishing articles. The key to article marketing is to find your niche and to hone in on it. Often, people don’t pay attention when submitting articles.

For instance, an article that fits into the weight loss niche really has no place in an article repository that was set up solely for web design articles. While many repositories accept articles in a large variety of topics – some only accept articles that relate to a specific topic. Usually, the people who are submitting articles to the wrong directories are also the people who are writing sales letters, calling them articles, and then using automated software to distribute those sales letters.

As in the past, marketing methods will come and go. It’s getting harder to send email. It’s getting harder to get listed in the search engines. It’s getting harder to use Pay-Per-Click search engines. The rules are constantly changing – and they change so incredibly fast that most marketers can’t keep up with all of it.

But article marketing will remain. The changing rules that affect other methods of marketing will not affect article marketing, for the most part. There may come a time when it is no longer safe to email ezine publishers – but even if that happens, another method for getting your articles in the right hands will come along to replace that method.

Some people wonder about the influx of article writers, and what part that will play on the effectiveness of article marketing. For the most part, it won’t have any impact at all. You see, because we now have the Internet, and we live in a global society, we still crave information – and even with information overload, we still can’t seem to get enough!

We are a species that is capable of thought – intelligent thought – and therefore, we understand the importance of hearing or reading varying viewpoints on different topics. We thrive on it. Few people read articles within a specific niche that are written by just one author – we want to hear what other experts say as well – just as we get second opinions for medical diagnosis, and often third and fourth opinions as well.

This is why the influx of people who are using article marketing for their businesses won’t hurt the effectiveness of article marketing. As long as there are people in the world, information will be needed…even if it is information that has been published time and time again.

Again, article marketing may change – but it will only change in ways that make it better. There may be gimmicks that come and go that are designed to make article marketing better, faster, or easier – but anyway you look at it, what works today will work tomorrow where article marketing is concerned, and for all intents and purposes, the results that people see from article marketing will also remain just as they are today – and just as they were in the past.

Article Marketing Today

2011-07-12T21:31:00.007-07:00

Article Marketing Today

Again, article marketing hasn’t changed much. What worked in the area of article marketing in the past, still works today – except that the announcement lists aren’t as effective for getting your article out.

There have been many attempts, however, to change article marketing, in terms of writing and distributing. Some of those new methods are successful, while others are not.

For instance, in recent years, automated submission software has come into the picture. This worked for a while, greatly speeding up the submission process, but most of the top article directories now block such software, and reject articles that are auto submitted. The owners of those directories understand that such software could eventually make article marketing a thing of the past.

There has been software created to help one write articles. While this is useful software, what people don’t realize is that it still takes some degree of writing skill to produce a quality article. This software is not 100% effective. What most people do now, if they don’t have the writing skills that article marketing demands, is to hire ghostwriters to write their articles for them.

Unfortunately, not everyone who calls themselves a writer actually is. Some of the so-called writers out there have worse writing skills than the person seeking the help! Many don’t even speak English.

Hiring a ghostwriter is perfectly acceptable. First, nobody knows that you did not write the article yourself. If you choose a good ghostwriter, you will have quality articles that do what they were meant to do. You will also find that the cost of a ghostwriter is quite reasonable.

Most people hire a ghostwriter and then have the writer write a couple of articles to see how well they do, and then stick with the ghostwriter long term when they see that the ghostwriter can accomplish the task effectively.

In the past year or so, numerous new article repositories have popped up around the Internet. This is due to the release (and sale) of article directory scripts. You see, owning and operating an article directory can make you money. People come to your site to submit their articles to your directory.

While they are there, they may view AdSense ads or other ads that are on your site. Since they register for your site to be able to submit articles, you are also now able to send them emails as well.

If the article directory site is promoted properly by the owner, he or she makes additional money by placing AdSense or other ads on all of the article pages. This does not hurt the author of the articles in any way.

The key here is that the site must be promoted by the owner in order for it to gain in popularity. While submitting to these newcomers may not be very beneficial to the author of the article at the moment, it will be beneficial in the future – once the site has aged and become popular.

There are numerous courses available now that teach the art of article marketing today as well. In the past, it was something that you had to figure out on your own. Today, there is help to be had. There is free information, as well as paid information.

If you need to learn, the free information will give you the help you need to get started in the right direction, but the paid information is what you will need in order to succeed and get the most benefits out of article marketing.

As in the past, there are still newcomers to Internet Marketing who don’t understand the spirit of the Internet. You will still see articles, from time to time, that are nothing more than sales letters. Thankfully, however, the people who run the most authoritative article repositories don’t allow such salesy articles to make it into their database. Articles are still usually manually viewed and approved before they are published on these sites.

Article theft, where someone takes your article and removes your name, trying to pass it off as their own work, has become a small problem. But for the most part, this problem doesn’t have a large impact on the Internet community. Usually, when the offender is called out and informed of the legal ramifications, the article is removed.

No matter what new methods come into play, one thing will always remain the same. In order to be successful at article marketing, you must turn out quality articles that serve to help, inform, or educate people. This is the only way that you will be rewarded for your efforts, because the spirit of the Internet really does exist – and it’s here to stay.

The History of Article Marketing

2011-07-12T21:31:00.001-07:00

The History of Article Marketing

Article marketing has been around almost as long as the Internet has been around – even though it wasn’t meant for actual marketing purposes. Many years ago, back in the 90’s, people actually shared information with each other. This was termed ‘the spirit of the Internet’ way back then, and that spirit still exists today, even though it isn’t as obvious.

The Internet was designed for the free and fast exchange of information. People wrote articles on a variety of topics, for the purpose of sharing information and educating others. At first, there really weren’t any article repositories. In fact, newsletters, also called ezines, came into play long before article banks did.

So, when you wanted to share an article with the Internet community, you posted the article on your website, in a Usenet newsgroup, or in your ezine. Eventually, people started allowing other ezine publishers to use their articles as well – and the author’s resource box was born.

Because articles had such an impact in each niche (niche being another word that wasn’t used at that time), intelligent marketers saw the potential for writing and distributing articles – freely – in order to promote their businesses. They started writing and distributing articles on a regular basis – and article marketing was born – even though it wasn’t necessarily called that then. It was simply called ‘writing and distributing articles.’

Those articles were formatted much the way that articles are formatted today, except html tags were not used. The articles were all text, just as many are today. However, while links in the article are hyperlinked today, they were not hyperlinked back then, in most cases.

In case you don’t know, when a link is hyperlinked, the reader can simply click on the link to visit the webpage. When it is not hyperlinked, the reader must copy and paste the URL into their web browser, or type it in.

Over time, people learned that some measure of copywriting skills were needed for article marketing, for the purpose of writing outstanding, attention getting headlines, and in order to create an effective author’s resource box.

Even though writing and distributing articles was turning out to be an effective and cost effective way to market a business, the articles that were written and distributed were of very high quality. The spirit of the Internet was still very visible and in full swing.

The articles were written more for the purpose of sharing information, and less for the purpose of marketing a business – yet business owners who were doing this were thriving because of it.

At that time, we were not inundated with information. There was no information overload, and nobody would dare write a sales letter and try to disguise it as an article. That’s what solo ads in ezines were for – sales letters. Articles, on the other hand, were helpful to those reading them.

Over the years, newbie marketers came on the scene and saw article marketing as an opportunity – but really did not fully understand or pay attention to the spirit of the Internet – the free exchange of information on a global scale. This is when salesy articles started appearing. Those newbie marketers soon learned that they wouldn’t get anywhere with this type of article marketing. Some gave up; others changed their ways and started doing it right.

It’s hard to say when the first article repository was born. Before that, however, articles were just sent to ezine publishers directly and posted to newsgroups. However, article announcement email lists came into play – where people could more easily get their articles into the hands of ezine publishers and web publishers.

Those announcement lists were very good, for a very long time, but they eventually played out, just as FFA Link sites played out. People were participating only for the purpose of distributing their own articles, but were not actually reading or using other people’s articles. However, those announcement lists did have a nice long run, and many people still use them today just for the small results that they get.

For the most part, however, article marketing is done today just as it was in the beginning, with very few differences. Article marketing is one of the few types of Internet Marketing methods that have remained the same, without losing any of its effectiveness.

Furthermore, article marketing is also one of the few marketing methods that have been able to stand the test of time, regardless of changes that have been made to search engines, the way people buy on the Internet or even laws that have changed – such as the spamming laws. None of the changes that have been made have had any impact, and there is no impact expected in the future as well.

What Is Article Marketing?

2011-07-12T21:30:00.001-07:00

What Is Article Marketing?

Article Marketing is essentially writing and distributing short articles to a variety of outlets, including article repositories, which are also called article directories and article banks, forums, and newsletter publishers. Article marketing is one of the most effective types of marketing that one can do – it is also one of the least expensive ways to market a business. In fact, it can even be free, costing you nothing more than your time.

There are many benefits to article marketing. Because articles become viral, your message literally travels far and wide, increasing traffic to your website and increasing newsletter signups. Article marketing is also used to make sales and to build credibility. Anyone who wants to establish themselves as an expert in their niche should take advantage of all that article marketing has to offer.

Here is how it works. Let’s say that you are in the weight loss niche, and you sell various weight loss products, whether they are your own products or products of which you are an affiliate. You write a weight loss article, preferably one that is closely related to one of your products – but you don’t want to necessarily advertise the product in the article.

Instead, you want to address a problem that the product can help to solve in your article – without mentioning the product. For instance, if you sell a cellulite cream, you can write an article about what cellulite is, what causes it, and the various methods used to get rid of it. The article should be no more than 750 words, and have a compelling title.

At the bottom of your article, you include an author’s resource box. This is basically a block of text, made up of one paragraph that is anywhere from five to seven lines long. In this paragraph, you might say something like this:

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John Doe is a weight loss expert who has helped hundreds of people get and keep weight off. You can find more valuable weight loss information and help at his website, John Doe’s Weight Loss Secrets, located at http://www.johndoe.com . You can find specific information for getting rid of cellulite at http://www.johndoe.com/cellulite.html .
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Once you have written your article, ensured that you have made all of the points that you wanted to make, and checked the article for spelling and grammar mistakes, you are ready to distribute it.

Distributing an article can be a very time consuming task. Many people outsource this work, and pay a fee for someone else to do the distribution work. Other’s do it themselves using software that automates the process. You should note, however, that a large number of the best article repositories do not allow or approve articles that are auto submitted – and they can tell when this is done. Manual submissions – whether done by you or someone else – is always best.

The article is distributed to the article repositories first. There are hundreds of these in existence, and some are better than others. For these repositories, you will need your article, the title, possibly a sub title, your author’s resource box, your website Url, your email address, a short description of your article, and a list of keywords, separated by commas, for your article.

Essentially, you visit each article repository, either sign up for a new account or log in, and copy and paste all of the information into a form that is provided for article submissions. Most article repositories have a manual approval process, so it may take a week or more before your article appears on their website.

Once you have submitted to the article repositories, you will want to distribute your article to ezine publishers that cover topics within your niche. You can build your own database of these publishers. You find them by visiting the ezine directories.

Look first for ezines in your niche, and then check each ezine to see if they accept articles. Load those article submission email addresses into your autoresponder, and each time you write a new article, send it to these publishers, asking them to publish the article.

Next, you visit forums that are of interest to your target market. If your niche is weight loss, you visit weight loss forums, and look to see if they have a place for articles. If so, submit your article there. If not, post the article on your own website, and then become an active member in the forum. If your article is about cellulite, look for posts concerning cellulite.

It is perfectly acceptable to make a post and say that you have an article about this on your website, and leave the link directly to the article. Just make sure that your post is relevant and on topic, and that your article provides useful information that is also relevant.

All of this is essentially what article marketing is, and how it is done, however, there is a great deal more to learn and know about article marketing in order to become successful at it.

Affiliate Marketing Quick Tip

2011-07-12T12:22:00.000-07:00

Affiliate Marketing Quick Tip

I've seen some people suggest to newbies that to get good results they should buy and create a domain that has the name of the affiliate product that they going to promote. When I read this, my internal warning mechanisms kicked in.

If you heeded this suggestion, you are in fact, violating the terms of that company. All companies have affiliate programs rules which prohibit this type of behavior.

Remember, the company affiliate rules are there for a purpose. And it is not to protect you, but to protect the company's brand. Thus, if you violate this rule, the company can legally suspend your commission and not pay you for what commissions you have earned due to the violation.

Finally, this tactic can ruin your reputation online. My thought, it's not worth it, if you truly want a business online.

List Building Techniques

2011-07-10T23:08:00.000-07:00

List Building Techniques

The following list building techniques have been used by internet marketers again and again to make thousands of dollars on the internet. These are all honest means of list building and they are perfect for building not only lists of email address, but quality lists of email addresses from people who are actually interested in what you’re offering. Some cost money and some are free, but one thing is for sure: they all work. So grab a cup of coffee, relax and keep reading for the most effective ways to build quality lists that get results.

Newsletters

One of the most popular ways to build lists is to write a regular newsletter. The newsletter will provide quality information about your given niche. People are hungry for information and your newsletter will provide them with the information they seek. All people have to do to subscribe to your newsletter is provide their name and email address into the required box on your website or squeeze page and they’ll get more of the great information they’re looking for. They get the information and you get their information, and everyone wins.

You don’t have to write a newsletter every week or even every two weeks. Once a month is perfect and people will actually appreciate that you’re not blasting them with too many emails in such a short period of time.

eCourses

eCourses are another great way to build quality lists. You can teach people to do all sorts of things within your given niche. You don’t even have to be an expert. You can research the information online and then write a course teaching certain techniques with the intention that people subscribe to it. Separate your course into several parts that will be delivered to their inboxes steadily over the weeks. To maximize your success, subtly sell your pre-sell your product within the e-course.

Articles

If you’re a good writer, you can write articles and then distribute them to article directories and ezines. If you’re not a good writer, you can always hire someone to do the writing for you. You must ensure that your articles have eye-catching titles and that the articles themselves provide useful information. Then, in your resource box, include information about signing up for your newsletter. This will allow you to build a loyal readership as well as get addresses from people who are interested in what you’re offering.

Free Membership

You can offer a free membership to your visitors that provides them special benefits for signing up. You can offer valuable information for free, but only to members who register. Then, you can upsell to those members or you can even offer various levels of membership where you’ll offer more products and more resources. This can build even more value to your brand, your products and services because your prospects will come to believe that they are part of an exclusive club.

eBooks

Free eBooks are always a hit. You don’t have to write a Pulitzer prize-winning book, but you do need to ensure that the information provided is valuable and useful. Again, if you don’t consider yourself a good writer you can always get someone to ghostwrite the book for you. Then, within the book’s text, you would include links to your own or affiliate products as well as to your newsletter or sign-up page. The book doesn’t have to be very long, about ten to twenty pages will do fine, but it should make your readers feel as though they downloaded something valuable.

Pop-Up Windows

When people land on your site, and encounter a unique or particularly striking pop up window, this can be a very effective way to persuade people to sign up for your newsletter. You may think that pop-up windows are annoying and that they’ll turn people off, but if they are looking for what you’re offering, and you’ve given them solid information thus far, they will often part with their email address quicker than you think.

See, people don’t like to part with their email addresses when they believe they’re being scammed or spammed. If you provide them with information they can use, they will come to you again and again because they will see you as an authority on the subject. That’s called building reader loyalty.

Free Giveaways Events

Internet giveaways events are steadily becoming a very popular list building technique. This is where you cooperate with others by giving products away for free in exchange for a newsletter sign up. You may give away a free e-book, a report, etc. However, be warned that people who are looking for lots of free things may not be the best people to populate your lists with as they may be less likely to respond to your attempts to sell.

Sign Up Bonuses

This is where you offer people bonuses for signing up for your newsletter. For example, you may offer them 15-20% off one of your products, or you may even give them discounts on several products. This not only makes them feel as though they’re part of something exclusive but it also builds value. That’s not even mentioning the fact that people love receiving discounts, especially if they know that all of your products offer solid and useful information.

Tell a Friend

Why not just ask your subscribers to tell a friend about your newsletter so that you can add even more names to your list. You may tell them that they’ll receive a discount for every three people they get to subscribe, or half off, etc. This gives them an incentive to tell everyone they know, it builds value and it’s a great way to double or triple your list in just a few days. There are plenty of free scripts that can be used to automate the whole process. Try Googling: ‘free tell a friend script’.

Plus, if your list is already populated by quality prospects, the chances of those prospects referring other quality prospects are very good. After all, what better way to get buyers than by asking buyers to refer likeminded people?

Create a Community

You can create a community on your website where people must register to join. They’ll be given a password and it will essentially be a private club. This is another tactic that provides exclusivity, which people generally respond to. You could do this by creating a forum where you can not only build a community but you can encourage people to get into discussions about the information you offer, the products you sell, or just regarding your niche in general.

Again there are many free forum scripts available on the internet including the very popular phpBB script. This tactic will help you to build loyalty as well as interest in what you’re offering, and of course they need to register to sign up for the forum so you’ll be able to build your quality list in the process.

Joint Ventures

Another great idea is to join forces with other marketers in an arrangement that allows you to recommend each other’s lists to your subscribers. When the recommendation comes from you, who your subscribers trust, your partner’s list is sure to grow in size. And your list will grow as well, as long as that partner has been able to brand himself and build trust correctly.

However, you should never just jump into a partnership like this. That’s because you want to be certain the partner you’re considering is as serious about offering quality content as you are. If you get into a partnership with someone who regularly spams his readers, you may lose some of your subscribers in the process because they will learn not to trust you anymore.

So before you get into any marketing partnerships, make sure you are protecting your subscribers, and your integrity, by thoroughly researching any marketers who seem like they’d be good partners in your list building ventures.

Autoresponder for List Building

2011-07-10T23:05:00.000-07:00

Autoresponder

Once you have your squeeze page up, it’s a good idea to integrate an autoresponder into the name and address collection process. You can build your list by hand if you want to, as many people were forced to do in the past, but these days an autoresponder will do everything for you automatically. It will manage your contacts, manage unsubscribe requests, allow simple broadcasts and it will even allow you to schedule messages to go out at certain times.

There are online marketing services that will set an autoresponder up for you and there are also companies that completely specialize in autoresponders such as www.aweber.com. Once you have an autoresponder set up on your page, you will free up a lot of your time that you can spend writing communications to your subscribers as well as building an even bigger list.

One more thing before we get to the actual list building techniques. Some experts have found that the best times to send out communications to your subscribers are on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. That’s because on Mondays, people are trying to readjust from the weekend and they usually don’t have the will or the time to read emails calling them to action. Similarly, from Thursday onwards people are too busy getting ready for the weekends.

Therefore, if you’re going to schedule emails, do it right in the middle of the week when people are more likely to read your emails and buy what you’re offering. If you do this, you will increase the chances that your subscribers will respond to your emails and you’ll likely make more sales than you ever did before.

Now that you’ve got your squeeze page ready, and your product’s webpage is up and running, you now have to build that list so that you can have instant access to a team of ready to buy customers. So, without further delay, let’s find out how to build those winning lists so that you can maximize your sales.

Squeeze or Landing Pages

2011-07-10T23:03:00.001-07:00

Squeeze or Landing Pages

A squeeze or landing page is a page that people have arrived at by clicking on a pay per click ad, a link on a website, a banner ad or even from doing a keyword search. Your goal with a landing page is to get people to take action. You either want them to click on a buy button, sign up for an affiliate program, buy an e-book, sign up for a free e-course or subscribe to a newsletter.

When you have a product or service to sell, you have to have a way to introduce that product to people. This is very effectively done with a landing page. However, you cannot just throw together a page and then expect people to flock to it and buy what you’re offering. You must put thought and effort into the website so that you look credible. Your site must be rich in content. If it’s not, people are going to become annoyed and your reputation may even become tarnished.

Finally, you must convince them to give you their information. You must tell them exactly what you’re offering, what you plan to do with their information (such as send them a newsletter) and you must let them know that their information is being compiled in a list. The more honest you are with your subscribers, the better they’ll react when they receive your first communication.

The squeeze or landing page informs the visitor of the benefits of the product or service you’re offering and it also forces people to give you their information before they can access the actual webpage that promotes the product or service. It is essentially a bribe. You generally promise to give them access to a free product in exchange for their information. This is one of the best ways to build a list that you can then use to sell to again and again.

Your landing page must provide valuable information or else it won’t get the response you’re after. After all, the people who have found your landing page, as long as you were marketing correctly, were searching for what you have to offer. As long as you provide some of the information they want, you’ll do well.

If you don’t give your visitors solid information, however, they will become annoyed and they will never visit your site again and, possibly, any other site with your name on it. Your reputation may become tarnished and you’ll have to start from scratch. For that reason, make sure your landing or squeeze page, and everything else you design with your brand, offers quality information or else you’ll have wasted your precious time and you won’t get anywhere with your list building efforts.

If you don’t know how to create a landing or squeeze page, it might be a good idea to have a professional design it for you so as to maximize your efforts. After all, if you do everything correctly, and people flock to your page, but they don’t like what they find, they will leave quickly without providing you with one iota of their information. For that reason, make sure your landing page looks professional and that it’s designed by someone who knows what they’re doing.

List Building Introduction

2011-07-10T23:01:00.000-07:00

List Building Introduction

If you are interested in the subject of List Building, chances are you have a product or service you’re trying to sell or you are an affiliate trying to sell someone else’s products. Either way, you’ve come to the right place. We are going to show you several ways to build that perfect list so that you can finally make the kind of money you’ve always dreamed about.

They say that the money is in the list, and they’re right. Now you’ll be able to make the money you want to make and you’ll be able to do it time and again because you’ll have a list of dedicated buyers who will look forward to every communication you send.

But before we get into these winning list-building techniques, it’s important to go over the reasons for building lists in the first place. It’s pointless to build a list, after all, if you have no game plan in place once you’ve completed that list.

Why Build a List?

When you set out to build a list, you are hoping to gather the names and email addresses of dedicated subscribers and prospects. You’re hoping to gain instant access to customers and also to build a following of readers for your ezines and articles, or whatever game plan you have in mind.

However, these days it’s not easy to get people to part with personal information. There is so much spam out there that people have become wary of anybody who asks for their names and email addresses. For that reason, you are going to have to convince people they should offer this information to you. The most effective way to do this is by building trust as well as value. You must give them a good reason to part with their personal information.

You must make them believe that you will never share their information or use it for nefarious reasons. They must believe that all you want to do is give them the information they seek. To do this, they must see you as an authority over your particular niche. And that’s just what we’re going to teach you how to do.

When you build a list, you are creating a dedicated following. These people, if you do everything correctly, will eagerly await your next communication in which you offer them the next great product or service that they’re sure to be interested in.

See, to build a quality list, people must be looking for what you’re offering in the first place. They may search for you using Google, or they may click on an ad, and that’s when they’re taken to your website that offers them something in exchange for their information.

That essentially means that, for you to build a quality list, they have to seek you out. For that to happen, you must give them an opportunity to find you. This can be done in a number of ways. You can use paid advertising, article marketing, or you can use several of the techniques we’re about to discuss. Then, once they find you and they give you their information, you’ll be able to offer them what they want whenever you want to.

If you have a new product you’re selling, you can instantly send out an email telling all your subscribers about it. If you just published an article on an ezine, you can also tell your subscribers to go read it. It’s an effective way to build a fan base that is always hungry for what you’re offering. That makes list building, hands down, one of the most effective marketing techniques ever conceived.

There are other techniques that are great for marketing, but none target a group quite like list building. When you drive down the highway, you see billboards advertising products and services and even ideologies. These billboards are designed to reach everyone who passes by. Some people may respond to these billboards, but most people won’t. They’ll just pass them by and they’ll become essentially just another part of their surroundings.

Now, consider if you could design a billboard that could only be seen by the very people who would love to respond to it. That’s essentially the idea behind list building. You are delivering information and products to people that are looking for those exact things. That means you have a higher chance of making money than if you were to blanket market to people who may or may not be interested in what you have to offer.

Finally, the reason you want to build a list is because people often don’t buy the first time they’re offered something. For example, let’s pretend you have a product. You build a website, you fill it with quality content and you optimize it effectively for the search engines. Then, you do some article marketing and you even create an Adwords campaign to promote that site. You may get a few visitors but most people don’t buy and those that do visit never return.

Now, what if you could get the visitors’ email addresses so that you could keep in contact with them? Do you think you could convince them to buy if you could offer them more information over a longer period of time and actually build a trusting relationship with them? I bet you could and that right there is the primary reason why list building is essential to online marketing.

The Spam Problem

I don’t have to tell you just how much spam there is out there on the internet. Right now, for example, my spam box has 4,000 messages that my email provider instantly filtered and separated into its special folder. Yet, I still get plenty of messages that I have to select as spam because the email filter doesn’t pick them up. These spam messages are pretty easy to spot. I, like many people online, have become quite good at eyeing spam messages. Keeping that in mind, a word needs to be said about spam in the context of list-building.

Once you learn and apply the information in this book and you begin to build your own list, be careful of the communications you send to the people on that list. You must send quality information and you must be yourself. People can smell spam a mile away these days and so you will want to carefully craft every email you send out so that it’s not deleted outright.

Consider what information you would like to receive in your inbox if you were a prospective customer for the information you’re promoting. What types of communications would cause you to actually open the emails and read them? You must think about this before you send a single email or else you could end up losing those valuable subscribers you worked so hard to gather for your list.

You can guarantee that a sufficient number of people will respond to your emails once you have built trust which, of course, you do by providing them with the quality information they’re looking for. If you can do that, you will have a steady supply of customers just waiting to read the next email you send out.

Don’t add to the spam already on the internet. Provide value and you will be able to gain a loyal readership which will ultimately generate for you the return you deserve.

Final Tips List Building

2011-07-10T22:57:00.000-07:00

Final Tips List Building

Split Test!
Split testing squeeze pages is an important element of a successful email marketing campaign.

Regardless how well you design your site, or how thoroughly you analyze each section of your squeeze page, there is no way that you will be able to accurately predict how well your visitors will respond to your offer, without comparatively testing alternative layouts.

One easy method of testing your pages and evaluating conversion rates is by using Google’s Website Optimizer, a free tool that will help you run simple split tests of any websites you own.

You can sign up for a free account at:
http://www.google.com/analytics/

Develop Your Brand!
It’s important to build brand awareness and develop a relationship with your subscriber base, because the more that your list members trust you and the product recommendations that you make, the easier it will be to convert those subscribers into repeat customers.

Every email you send to your list should directly work towards strengthening your brands recognition for value. This means that you must be extremely careful with the kinds of products you promote as well as the quality of the products you endorse.

Whether you are the developer or not, if you give it your stamp of approval, your subscriber base will hold you accountable should the product or service fail to deliver.

You should therefore always review each product or offer you are planning to promote so that you can not only stand behind it, but can directly answer any questions that your subscribers may have about the offer.

Keep your emails focused and relevant. If you end up venturing into a new niche or are interested in exploring other markets, you should work towards creating individual segmented lists for each niche.

Segment Your Lists For Better Targeting!
Segmenting your lists does more than maximize your chances of having your emails delivered successfully. List segmenting will also help you effectively communicate and target specific subscribers, increasing response rate and helping you create successful broadcasts.

For example, if you developed a mailing list catering to the “Internet Marketing” crowd, it’s likely that your subscribers come from different backgrounds, are currently at different levels of their marketing training or are interested in various areas of the Internet Marketing industry.

By segmenting your lists, you can create content based on each groups interests and skill levels as well as develop products and services around each subscriber category.

Don’t Let Your Lists Run Cold!
You absolutely need to focus on staying in constant communication with your subscriber base.

This doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to email them every day, but what you want to do is consider creating a posting schedule so that you can get into the habit of connecting with your subscribers regularly, while demonstrating consistency.

Your subscribers will then begin to expect your emails on certain days and by doing this, you will begin to see a dramatic increase in your open rates.

The more consistent you are with your broadcasts, the easier it will be to condition your subscribers to accept promotional based emails and advertisements in between mailings containing free content and resources.

Here are a few ways to build the highest preforming mailing lists, quickly and easily

2011-07-10T22:53:00.001-07:00

Here are a few ways to build the highest preforming mailing lists, quickly and easily:

Create Multiple Squeeze Pages
Rather than just constructing one squeeze page, consider creating a network of opt-in pages that cover various markets as well as the SAME market, but offering a different giveaway product.
By doing this, you are able to cater to all sorts of people who might not be interested in one giveaway but would gladly sign up to receive another. Plus, you can easily split test different layouts and templates by running various squeeze page offers at once.
Keep in mind that the more squeeze pages you have in circulation, the more exposure you'll receive.

Note: You can use the same autoresponder sequences for all of your squeeze pages within the same niche markets, as long as you customize the introductory email so that it features each unique giveaway/offer.
Implement Your Squeeze Page Into Social Profiles
If you have a Squidoo lens, you can now add opt-in pages right into your existing page. It's available as a module, and it's a great way to generate instant traffic to a remotely hosted opt-in page.

You can set up an unlimited number of Squidoo lens pages, incorporating your squeeze page into each one. Just make sure to make sufficient content into your lens so that you are offering something of value to visitors.
Note: Squidoo is considered an authority website and carries exceptional weight within the search engines, not only will you be able to generate fresh leads from your opt-in page itself, but you could also add links to your Squidoo lens pages that lead visitors to your other squeeze pages as well.
Hub Pages is also another great method of drawing in new traffic and subscribers. HubPages works similarly to Squidoo in terms of being able to create instant single websites even if you are unfamiliar with HTML.

http://www.Squidoo.com
http://www.HubPages.com
You should also add your squeeze page into your www.twitter.com profile, as well as every other social community you are a part of including Facebook, YouTube and MySpace.

Article Marketing
Article marketing is a very effective (and free!) marketing strategy and for many of us, end up being our primary force behind generating consistent traffic to our squeeze pages.

With article marketing, it's all about offering high quality, relevant content that targets your market and propels them into investigating your resource box and visiting your website to find out more about you.
Article marketing is extremely easy to set up, and even if you aren't a proficient writer, you can easily outsource article creation to affordable, high quality writers.
Even if your budget is very small, there is no reason why you can't compile a small package of articles, spanning from 300-500 words in length that are highly targeted and relevant to your squeeze page's topic.

Start out by submitting 3-5 articles every week, and before you know it, your article campaign will generate consistent traffic to your squeeze pages. As you continue to expand on the number or articles in circulation, you will be able to generate more traffic on a regular basis.
Just make sure that the articles you do submit into article directories are exceptionally well written and targeted.

After all, these articles represent you and your brand, and you want your readers to be impressed with the quality as they are likely going to base your other products on the information found within your article content.

Pay attention when constructing your author's resource box (which is attached to each article that you submit.)

This resource box is the only place in which you are allowed to include external links and you want to include a call to action that motivates your reader into clicking on your link and visiting your squeeze page.

You also want to use anchor text whenever possible, so that not only are you able to generate traffic from article directories, but you can also rank for specific keywords within the search engines.

Here are a few article directories to get started:

http://www.EzineArticles.com
http://www.GoArticles.com
http://www.ArticleDashboard.com

Promoting Your Squeeze Page For Maximum Profits

2011-07-10T22:52:00.003-07:00

Promoting Your Squeeze Page For Maximum Profits

Once you have your squeeze page set up and your autoresponder account created, you need to focus on developing an email sequence that is activated from the moment a website visitor becomes a subscriber.

This is how it works:

Your visitor enters in their information via your squeeze page and confirms their request to be added to your newsletter.

Your autoresponder kicks in and emails your prospect a welcome email that you have written. This is sent out automatically within minutes of their subscription.

Your autoresponder continues to email your subscriber on pre-set dates, according to the system you have set up within your autoresponder account.
You can determine delivery dates and times from your administration panel, and all of the emails you create within your autoresponder account will be sent out to all active subscribers on a regular schedule.

Example: You create 4 emails that are scheduled to be delivered accordingly:

1st Email: instantly sent to your subscriber thanking them for subscribing to your list and provides the download that you initially offered on your squeeze page, usually a direct link to the download location on your website.
2nd Email: Scheduled to sent out on the third day after your subscriber has confirmed their request, and includes an email offering free content, additional articles or another report.
3rd Email: Scheduled to go out on the 7th day of the sequence, promotional based, advertising a related product.
4th Email: Scheduled to go out on the 10th day.. and so on.

The balance that you use, when mixing up free content with promotional based material is entirely up to you, however the more value you give to your list, the easier and faster it will be to develop a relationship with your subscribers.

Taking an aggressive approach to email marketing works for some, however for the majority, it's always best to tread carefully, initially focusing on building a relationship with your list, and then doubling that up with promotional offers, or recommendations to affiliate based products.
Essentially, you want to 'condition' your list so that they grow accustomed to receiving promotional based emails from you on a regular basis.
It's up to you to keep a pulse on your subscriber base, and determine what works best, how frequently you contact them, and whether they respond well to the products you are promoting.
Just don't be afraid to experiment and test out new ideas and innovative ways to consistently grow and maintain your subscriber base.

Your Incentive Offer

2011-07-10T22:52:00.001-07:00

Your Incentive Offer

In order to entice your website visitors into subscribing to your autoresponder, you want to really take the time to consider a free incentive to maximize the number of visitors that you can convert into subscribers.

People are often leery about handing over their name and email address to a complete stranger. With so many Email Marketers spamming their lists with useless garbage, web users have become cautious about whose lists they join.

This is why you need to present an offer that is
absolutely irresistible.

You want to stand out from the crowd by taking them by the hand and saying “Look at what I can offer you!”, and in case they aren’t listening, a free incentive just may be the push they need to motivate them to take action and subscribe to your list.

It’s a very powerful way to generate a huge list of valid opt-in readers as well as begin the process of building a relationship with these subscribers.

When it comes to what you should offer your visitors, there are many different products format that work well, depending on your niche market.

You could offer:

 Free Report
 Free Ebooks
 Free Graphic Packages
 Free Tutorials
 Free Sample Chapter (from a paid product)
 Free e-Courses

You really want to spend some time evaluating your options when it comes to the giveaway (otherwise called a ‘bribe’), because it ultimately will be responsible for whether your squeeze page converts or fails.

When deciding on a squeeze page incentive, you want to determine what your target market is actually looking for, and simply giving them a high quality product that they can’t find anywhere else.

You can do this with a free report, ebook or a simple e-course that is set up to deliver training tools and resources on a weekly basis.

Creating A High Converting Squeeze Page

2011-07-10T22:51:00.000-07:00

Creating A High Converting Squeeze Page

This is where it all really begins; creating a high converting squeeze page that directly communicates with your target audience and motivates them into subscribing to your list.

By providing solid information, and relevant content, you will quickly begin to establish credibility with your list members and a reputation as someone who is interested in providing high quality information and exceptional value.

A squeeze page is NOT designed to sell. It’s primary job is to convert traffic into confirmed subscribers and you need to keep this in mind when creating your page.

All you need is a simple HTML page you can set up on your website or blog on websites such as http://www.Wordpress.com or http://www.Blogger.com .

There are even free plugins for websites that are designed on the Wordpress platform that will automatically insert an opt-in form on your website.

One of these services is available at http://www.CodeBanter.com

To help you create the most effective squeeze page possible, here is a quick overview of the most important elements that you need to include in your own squeeze page:

Compelling, Attention-Grabbing Headlines
Your squeeze page's headline should be the very first thing that your visitor sees and therefore it needs to attract attention, draw them in and keep them focused long enough for them to become a confirmed subscriber of your mailing list.

Your headlines text size should be larger than the rest of the text on your page, and for increased exposure, consider adding color to your headline (red and blue works well).
You could also consider highlighting your headline and any sub headline that you use. You can use the <h1> and <h2> tags to enlarge your text, which will not only help with capturing attention from your visitors but will also alert search engine crawlers that the enlarged text is important.

Center your headline within your template and try to work in your opt-in box so that it is close to the headline itself. If you are using a CSS based squeeze page, your opt-in box could be placed in a right column, with a bullet list of benefits featured in the main body of your page.

Content/Body
You should keep your content trimmed down so that it focuses only on the most important information that you have to share.
Avoid wordy squeeze pages that offer endless paragraphs of information. Your squeeze page has ONLY one task, to convert visitors into subscribers and so you need to keep it clear, concise and of course, exciting!

You will want to split test your copy (including lengths) to determine what will increase conversion rates, but in the meantime, here is a quick overview of how to better structure your squeeze page content so that it is easy to read, understand and encourages subscriptions:

1) Use Bullet Points To Highlight Benefits
Bullet points emphasize important features and draw attention to the special aspects of becoming a subscriber of your list.
This is a great way to showcase the benefits of becoming a subscriber, and what they will receive, in return, for their subscription.

For example, if you were offering a report on the 'Insider Secrets To Finding A Work At Home Job', your benefit list could include:
•   Find out how to land a high paying telecommuting job even if you have absolutely no experience online!
•   Avoid devestating work at home job scams that circulate the industry and target people just like you!
•   Discover the #1 freelance website where 99.9% of new telecommuters are able to secure employment in their first week online.
•   Create a compelling resume that guarantees you stand out from the crowd and get noticed by top paying companies online!

2) Retain Focus At ALL Times
Eliminate any external links and keep your squeeze page focused. You want to avoid distractions or in directing potential subscribers to external websites (or even internal pages on your site).
Their ONLY option should be to subscribe to your mailing list. You don't want to confuse them or deter them from your one objective; getting that lead.

Avoid navigation menus, widgets, plugins, or links to articles. Your squeeze page should be one-page long, feature your bullet list, headline, opt-in box and private policy. Eliminate clutter and any information or content that is not necessary to securing the subscriber.
3) Strong & Clear Call To Action
If you want your squeeze page to successfully recruit new subscribers, you NEED to clearly direct visitors to fill out your opt-in form and confirm their request.

Do NOT assume that people know what to do. Remember, not everyone is likely to have experience with mailing lists, and so you need to directly instruct them as to how they are able to gain access to your free, high quality offer.

Just the same, you also want to direct them to confirm their request to you’re your list once they have entered in their name and email address.

If you are using a double opt-in format, you will NOT be able to communicate with subscribers who have not verified their request, so make absolutely certain that you are following up and instructing everyone to confirm.

(You can do this by automatically directing subscribers to a secondary page on your site that thanks them for subscribing and tells them that the final step is to check their email and confirm their request to join your list by clicking on the verification link sent out by your autoresponder system).

Just like your squeeze page, keep your confirmation page clean and crisp. Avoid ANY external links at this point because you need your subscriber to follow your instructions instantly, eliminating any chance of them forgetting to confirm.

The Tools You Need to create List Building

2011-07-10T22:47:00.000-07:00

The Tools You Need

In order to begin building a profitable email marketing campaign however, you will need to make sure that you have all of the tools that are required, including:

1) Professional Autoresponder Account

With autoresponder services like www.GetResponse.com and www.Aweber.com, you are able to set up an unlimited number of mailing lists, each one featuring customized code that serves as your opt-in box.

By segmenting your lists, you will be able to tailor your emails so that they directly communicate with targeted groups of subscribers who are interested in specific information or topics.

An autoresponder is a mailing list system set up with pre-loaded messages due to go out on scheduled times. This means that you can write all of your messages at once but have them trickle out to your subscribers on various days.

Being able to pre-create this content makes life a lot easier as an email marketer because you can set it up on auto-pilot and spend your time and effort consistently driving traffic to your squeeze page in order to continuously expand your list.

The autoresponder service provider you choose will provide you with an account where you can log in and create unlimited email campaigns as well. This means that you can cater to a dozen or more niche markets but keep things organized and well managed by emailing these groups individually as to avoid confusion.

For instance, perhaps you are interested in the dog training niche market as well as the golfing market. You would simply create two autoresponder campaigns. One titled golfing and one title dog training.

You would create your content separately for these two markets, pre-fill your autoresponder account and it would instantly send out your notices, news and updates to each group of subscribers.

If you choose to host your own autoresponder system, one of the most feature-laden scripts on the Internet is available from Interspire, http://www.interspire.com/emailmarketer/

2) Squeeze Page

A squeeze page houses your opt-in form and provides a place for your contacts to find you, evaluate what you are offering and make the decision to become an active subscriber of your list.

A squeeze page is very similar to a salespage in terms of its primary function is to pull in customers and motivate them to take action, in this case, subscribe to your list.
That call of action is essential in creating high preformance squeeze pages, and you must place emphasis on ensuring that your visitors are directed to fill in the opt-in form, otherwise they will not be added to your list.
You need to clearly direct visitors to enter in their name and email address as well as instruct them to confirm their request to join your list (if you are using double opt-in).

One thing to keep in mind when developing your squeeze page is that it should motivate visitors in the same way that a traditional sales page should, however, the actual structure of your squeeze page will be very different.
With sales pages, they are typically designed to offer as much information about a particular product or service as possible, since the main focus is on transforming a visitor into a customer.

With a squeeze page, you aren't asking your visitor to make a decision to purchase or committ to anything other than to subscribe to your mailing list where they are rewarded with a free product.
Keeping this offer or giveaway in mind, when you develop a squeeze page, you need to have a strong focus on your market, and design your offer around an existing problem, need or question.

To come up with the best incentive offer possible, you'll need to thoroughly evaluate your market, as well as competing offers so that you can create a relevant product that is in demand and likely to capture attention from your target audience.

Squeeze pages should be designed to offer a clear navigation system, basic structure and template and a compelling offer.

To summarize, your list building funnel consists of three major parts:

1: Squeeze Page With Opt-In Form
2: Compelling High Quality Offer or Incentive
3: Follow Up Emails And Broadcasts

We will discuss the anatomy of a successful squeeze page in an upcoming chapter, so that you can begin to develop your own.

3) Giveaway (Incentive)

Your giveaway is essentially, the most important element on your squeeze page.

If your offer doesn’t motivate visitors into subscribing, all of your marketing efforts will be lost. This means that you need your offer to be of interest to the majority of your target market, rather than to a small group of subscribers. The higher the quality of your giveaway as well as the more relevant your offer is to your market, the easier it will be to recruit new subscribers.

There are many different ways to ensure that the product you are giving away is of a high-perceived value by your subscriber base and likely to be successful in converting new subscribers.

To start, consider the different types of products that are being successfully sold in online marketplaces and create a shorter version of a hot selling product, and offer it for free to anyone who subscribes to your list.

If competitors are successful in selling a similar product and you are giving away a high quality product based on the same topic, imagine just how easy it will be to recruit visitors and subscribers to your site.

And better yet, what better way to begin building a relationship with an active subscriber base than by offering them something of equal value with no strings (or price tag) attached!

You could offer:

 Free Reports
 Free Ebooks (full length of leaked chapters)
 Free Tutorial Guides
 Video Tutorials
 Free or Trial Access To a Membership Program
 Free Booklet with “Top Tips”
 Free Weekly Newsletter Subscription
 Free templates or graphics
 Free Audio Interviews, Lessons, Tutorials

The key to creating a successful giveaway product is in its overall relevancy and existing demand.
You want to make sure that your target audience is actively searching for similar information, and that it is being sold successfully in the marketplace. If you do that, you will have little difficulty building a massive list of targeted prospects who will be eager to receive your emails and broadcasts.
If you plan to promote an ebook or e-course of some kind, a very powerful method of building a massive mailing list while generating new business for your product is by offering a leaked chapter of your info product.

By offering this free chapter, you are able to provide new subscribers with a sample of the quality of your work, as well as generate buzz around your upcoming product launch.
If your product is well written, you will find it exceptionally easy to build a subscriber base of people who will likely purchase the full length version when it launches.
This is also a savvy method of creating a viral campaign for your upcoming launch as people pass around the 'leaked chapter' to everyone they know.
If you are interested in outsourcing your project to experienced freelancers, you can easily find a trustworthy professional from the following freelance marketplaces:

http://www.Guru.com
http://www.Elance.com
http://www.Scriptlance.com

4) Domain And Hosting Accounts
There are many different domain registrars available to choose from. Personally, I use www.namecheap.com and www.godaddy.com however, one thing to keep in mind however, is that you should have a good idea as to the niche or market that you are intending on targeting prior to registering your domain.

That way, you can register a domain name that incorporates relevant keywords pertaining to that target audience.

For example, if I wanted to build a mailing list that targeted the work at home job niche, I would consider registering a domain name that incorporated the keywords 'legit online jobs', such as www.Legit-Online-Jobs.com where I would offer a free report focusing on how to find a legitimate work at home job. The domain and the content both speak directly to my target audience.

In order to streamline your ability to build targeted lists, you also need a web hosting account, making it easy to capture your visitor’s information, and add them to your list by showcasing a squeeze or landing page.

When it comes to choosing a hosting provider, you need to make sure that you go with a service that allows for flexibility and fast upgrades.

You can start out with a smaller package, and as your marketing expands, you can upgrade your account to a larger package.

With your hosting provider, make sure that they offer the ability to use sub domains, so that you can create multiple interior pages for every squeeze page you create. I recommend using www.HostGator.com

7 Figure List Building

2011-07-10T22:46:00.000-07:00

List building is all about connecting with your target audience by offering them high quality information in exchange for their subscription and in affiliate marketing, a laser targeted, responsive email list will be the key element to your success.

Once a subscriber is a confirmed member of your list, you can begin sending promotional based follow up emails in balance with relevant and useful content based on your overall market.

Email marketers collect leads using a combination of squeeze pages and opt-in forms. These forms are generated by your autoresponder provider and are embedded into the HTML code of your squeeze page template.
Each time a visitor to your squeeze page enters in their name and email address, they are added to your mailing list database, and become an active subscriber of your newsletter.

List building helps faciliate the process of converting subscribers into active customers, since once your prospect has been added to our mailing list, you are able to develop a relationship with them, that will encourage sales as well as repeat sales (which will make up the larger majority of your email marketing income).

Making Money With CPA

2011-07-10T22:43:00.001-07:00

Making Money With CPA

CPA (cost per action) is also known as PPA (pay per action) and is an online marketing opportunity that pays you based on a specific structure or model.

For example, if you participated in CPA offers, you would be paid each time a prospect completed a specific action, such as registering on a website, filling out a form, signing up for an offer, or perhaps just visiting a particular website.

The requirements often range from a single email opt-in to lengthier form processing including three, four page surveys, application forms as well as downloading software, scripts, demos and screen savers.
While CPA offers vary and the requirements associated with being credited for an 'action', there are an abundance of high paying CPA offers and programs that you can get involved in.

Most CPA Companies pay out anywhere from $.25 right up to $4.00 for a single email capture (visitor enters in their email for information), with other CPA opportunities paying out as much as $150.00 for a multi-part process or a more in depth requirement where your prospect may need to verify their address, accept a free trial offer and at times, your payment will only be credited weeks later once your prospect has completed the process.

In order to begin earning money with CPA offers, you will need to enroll into a handful of CPA based programs.

There are networks available online that house a large variety of CPA offers, enabling you to join one website and being given the opportunity to participate in multiple programs from many different companies.

Here are a few of the popular CPA networks online:

AzoogleAds
This is one of the more popular CPA networks, and is consistently growing in size each day. Having been established in 2000, it’s known to be one of the more reliable networks, offering payouts per lead, per sale and per download.

They have a consolidated payment via check for a minimum of $50.00, with stats and data appearing in real time on their website.

http://www.AzoogleAds.com

MaxBounty
Simple registration and guaranteed acceptance makes Max Bounty a popular program within communities and online forums based around CPA networking.

Another company that has been active for quite some time and has proven themselves reliable with support and payout.

You can set your payment minimum to a different amount ranging from their minimum of $50, up to 200.00 with payments disbursed monthly via check, bank transfer or Paypal.

International members are also permitted to join with special promotions and campaigns available targeting those groups.

http://www.MaxBounty.com
Never Blue Ads
This network offers a large variety of different campaigns, with a focus on pay per lead programs. With over 20 categories chalk full of viable and lucrative offers, there is no shortage of programs to promote.
Payout is monthly with a minimum requirement of only $25.00, another great reason to join Never Blue Ads.

Initially, on the registration form the only form of payment appears to be via check, however once you are a member you can contact your affiliate representative for additional options including Paypal.
Registration is a simple online registration, and approval is quick, with confirmation within two business days.

http://www.NeverBlueAds.com
Offers Quest - This is a smaller network but is growing in popularity with their focus primarily on Cost Per Lead campaigns.

However before you are able to join you must have a fully functional website that is already generating a bit of traffic, written in English (only). You are also not permitted to offer incentives to your visitors (for action).

Payouts are monthly via Paypal or check with a minimum balance requirement of $20.00 for those within the United States or Canada, with a minimum payment requirement of $50.00 for other countries.
http://www.OffersQuest.com

Copeac - This network offers a variety of action based programs including: Cost Per Sale, Cost Per Click, Cost Per Acquisition, and Cost Per Lead, with many categories available and a referral program offering an additional 2% for new advertiser sign ups.

Payment is made via bank wire or check, monthly, with a minimum requirement of $100.00. They also offer a 24 hour emergency hotline if you need help at any time.

During registration, you will be required to verify your location using their automated telephone verification system (similar to the system that Paypal uses)

http://www.Copeac.com

Rocket Profit
This is one of my favorite networks, due to their extremely wide scope in terms of unique Cost Per Lead and Cost Per Sale offers. Payment is available via bank wire, Paypal and check with a minimum requirement of only $25.00 and is disbursed every two weeks.

Applications are reviewed daily, with notification of acceptance received within 2-3 business days.

http://www.RocketProfit.com

Hydra Network
This is a widely popular CPA network featuring Cost per Click, Cost Per Lead and Cost Per Sale offers. Hydra offers a large assortment of promotional media as well, including email campaigns, co-registration and search.

They also provide very detailed statistics and reporting making it easy for you to monitor your progress in real-time with pre-screening of campaign matches available to ensure that you choose the best campaigns to match your existing audience/traffic.

Payments are every 15 days via bank deposit (wire), and Paypal. Hydra Network also offers the highest payouts for their campaigns.

http://www.HydraNetwork.com

Modern Click
This program is very difficult to get into, as they manually approve every applicant, however once you are accepted you will find quite a few lucrative campaigns to work with including access to advanced tracking tools and real-time stats.

The minimum payment requirement is $25 and the pay period is once a month via check or PayPal. Their registration process is a bit tedious and lengthy but approval is quick.

http://www.ModernClick.com

Direct Leads
Features a solid program with a wide scope of available offers.

http://www.DirectLeads.com
Web Sponsors
This is one of the larger affiliate networks. Their featured offers are lucrative and high quality products that make promoting very easy.
http://www.WebSponsors.com

Review Based Commissions

2011-07-10T22:42:00.003-07:00

Review Based Commissions

One of the easiest ways to create powerful, high performance affiliate websites is to use the power of a strong review.

Review based affiliate sites capture the sale as people looking for last minute information or reassurance regarding a product are always on the lookout for feedback and testimonials from customers who have purchased and used the product.

When creating your review website, you want to again, focus it on one specific topic.

Don't create a multi-level review site that spreads out its information or coverage across multiple niche markets, because you want potential customers to put faith in your review, and it's difficult to do that if you are writing dozens of reviews on various products in the same market, and giving each one a "thumbs up"!

People will only be motivated to purchase a product after reading your review, if they believe it is honest and thorough.

People want to know that you’ve done your homework, or that you have personal experience with the products you are reviewing on your website.

This means you need to include both pros and cons about each product, highlighting the products strengths, but being upfront about any weaknesses in the product.

If you do this, your reviews will appear more genuine, and you'll find it easier to motivate visitors into taking action and closing the sale.

You may get a lot of search engine traffic for specific product names and model numbers. This is where review sites shine.

Instead of trying to rank for a competitive phrase like “cell phones”, you can instead rank for “brand name model number review”.

So, make sure to optimize every review page to include the product title, authors name and other relevant keywords that will help visitors find your page within the search engines.

WP Review Site is a script that will allow you to turn an existing Wordpress blog into a dynamic, powerful review website network, allowing you to easily create niche review sites on as many topics as you wish.

It’s available at http://www.WPReviewSite.com

Product Specific Blogs

2011-07-10T22:42:00.001-07:00

Product Specific Blogs

One of the easiest ways to create an affiliate based content website is to use the power of Wordpress blogs.

With Wordpress, you can download a free copy of their powerful blogging software, install it onto your own hosting account and have a fully functional, dynamic website created in under a few minutes.

Then, you can easily optimize your blog for the search engines using Wordpress's built in optimization tools, or download interactive plugins that will help to thoroughly optimize (and monetize) your blog for top search engine ranking.

Blogs always rank quickly within the major search engines based on their SILO structure. A SILO is a targeted websites that is broken down into segments or individual categories.

Then, keywords are used to clearly describe each area of the site. Since SILO's help search engine crawlers explore the website, and identify the relevancy of your website based on the keywords featured throughout the site, blogs tend to rank quickly AND rank higher!

You can grab a copy of Wordpress from http://www.Wordpress.org

When creating affiliate content pages either with HTML or with blogs, make sure to choose a keyword-rich domain name that clearly defines what your site is about.

Depending on your niche market, you’ll want to make sure that your domain name encompasses primary keywords OR go generic if you plan to cover a variety of niches or sub niche markets.

For example, if you were focusing just on the weight loss market, you could set up a domain name such as www.WeightLossResources.com and then promote a variety of instant-affiliate programs on your site, all focusing on the weight loss industry.

If you are interested in promoting a variety of topics based on a larger market (like ‘health topics’, ‘relationship topics’ or ‘business topics’), you’ll want to choose a domain name that encompasses all of your markets, such as: www.TopHealthResources.com

You can register a domain name at http://www.nameCheap.com or http://www.GoDaddy.com

You’ll also want to set up a proper hosting account, so that you can develop an online presence of your own!

You can set up a hosting account to house your website at a variety of hosting providers, with my favorite being http://www.HostGator.com

Host Gator not only allows you the opportunity to set up automatic hosting accounts, but they are the one of the most affordable providers online.

You could also use your domain name to redirect leads to affiliate products while cloaking your links to prevent ‘lost profits’. You can do this without needing a hosting account by just logging into your domain registrar and redirecting the URL to transfer traffic directly through your affiliate link.

Prospects who see your link won’t even realize it’s an affiliate one!

Plus, if you plan on promoting your website with PPC marketing campaigns, a direct, keyword rich domain name will increase your click through rates.

For example, if you are setting up an affiliate website focusing on weight loss, consider domain names such as:

WeightLossReviews
WeightLossIdeas
LosingWeightQuickly
HowToLoseWeight
WeightLossHub

A few ways to set up highly targeted affiliate campaigns - Niche Profit System

2011-07-10T22:41:00.005-07:00

Here are a few ways to set up highly targeted affiliate campaigns:

Niche Profit System

With niche-based websites, you simply select 10-20 products all based around a specific niche market. For example, weight loss or parenting.

You then construct an article-powered niche website that features 10 different articles, and at the bottom of every article, you feature a direct link to the merchants website.

Niche based websites are very easy to set up, but just keep in mind that each website needs a specific theme. You want to segment your affiliate campaigns so that every website is focused around one specific market (or niche), so that you can funnel targeted traffic to your websites without convoluting the process.

Think about your websites structure from your visitors’ perspective. If you were interested in finding out more information about the golf market, and you landed on a content website that had multiple categories where golf wasn't the main focus, not only would you likely exit the site but you wouldn't think it was an authority site.

Authority sites ALWAYS focus on one specific market segment, so that they can deliver quality and informative content that warms up visitors and maximizes profits.

When creating your content site, hire a writer to create 10-15 keyword rich articles around different areas within that market.

For example, if you were to create an affiliate based content site on weight loss, you could create articles on all different aspects of losing weight, from healthy eating guides to work out routines.

Then, match up each article with a relevant affiliate product, and feature an ad box in the middle and end of each article, or integrate text based affiliate links within the content itself.

Tip: You can download a free copy of XSitePro's HTML Editing tool to create your content pages quickly and easily.
Download: http://www.xsitepro.com/

Turbo Charged Commissions

2011-07-10T22:41:00.001-07:00

Turbo Charged Commissions

Looking for instant commissions without having to wait for a paycheck to arrive a few weeks down the road?

There are a few different scripts available on the market that allow vendors to pay affiliate automatically, and it's important that you're familiar with them because you can then seek out hundreds of other automatic commission programs!

The most popular script is the '$7 script', and if you're looking to find hundreds of instant affiliate programs, try entering in '7 dollar script' or $7 script' at http://www.Google.com

Another script that is used by the majority of vendors to offer instant affiliate payouts is the 'Rapid Action Profits' script, and again, you can find a TON of affiliate programs using this script by visiting Google or Yahoo and entering in:

'Powered by rapid action profifts'.

With Rapid Action Profits, you earn 100% commissions on every 'other' sale generated by your promotions. For example, if you sell 2 copies of a digital product, the first sale will go directly to the merchant, and you'll be credited instantly for 100% of the second sale.

Here are a few other resources to help you out:

http://www.7DollarOffers.com
http://www.RapMall.com/Products.html
http://www.RAPBANK.com
http://www.PaySpree.com

When it comes to formatting your affiliate links, these scripts don't usually require that you create a traditional affiliate account, but instead, you simply add your Paypal email address to the end of the affiliate link like this:

http://www.Website-URL.com/?yourid=Your-Paypal-Email

It's important to make sure that you format your link properly so that you are credited with every sale generated as a result of your promotions, so take the time to create a 'swipe file' by opening up your text editor and creating affiliate links for the different products that you are interested in promoting.

Not only will this help you keep track of the different products you are advertising, but it will also help you cover more ground in less time by having a 'ready made' swipe file at your fingertips!

You will want to first choose a niche topic so you know what types of products to search for, and then start building promotional campaigns around these topics.

The majority of your time as an affiliate marketer will be spent setting up campaigns. Campaigns involve a series of tasks, including developing squeeze pages, landing pages and most importantly - content pages.

Content pages offer information to visitors who land on the website, and essentially warm them up by giving them valuable information and then focusing that information about specific products.

For example, if you decided to promote a golf equipment package via Amazon's marketplace, you could create a content site based around golf.

You would offer a variety of resources including articles and resources that provided visitors with sufficient information about the niche, while promoting the golf package within the content.

Not only are content pages important in order to convert visitors into customers by providing valuable information, but they are important to your search engine ranking as well.

Search engines will see that your website provides a lot of great content and is targeted towards relevant keywords, and in turn, will rank your website accordingly.

This means you'll be able to generate very high quality, organic traffic to your affiliate based content sites in a very short amount of time - and without paying a dime for traffic!

Commission Swipe: Maximizing Your Income

2011-07-10T22:40:00.001-07:00

Commission Swipe: Maximizing Your Income

Choosing quality products is an important part of every affiliate campaign, because you want to make sure that you are setting up campaigns around products that are likely to convert.

This means that you need to spend time carefully researching and evaluating products in order to choose winners. Your ability to generate commissions and convert visitors into buyers depends on the quality and brand of the products you choose.

When it comes to choosing a niche, there are two methods that will help you get started:

1) Choose a niche that is evergreen
2) Identify demand and profitability based on existing competition

One of the most important things you can do is first evaluate and identify niche markets that encompass three major elements:

1) You can easily identify exactly who your audience is.
2) There are motivated, active buyers in the niche market.
3) You are able to penetrate the market with your campaigns.

There’s no sense in trying to find an untapped niche market. There are few of them out there and those that exist would take a lot of work in order to penetrate. Then, you’d have to condition buyers, research angles and test out different campaigns and approaches before you determine what was successful.

Forget about that! It’s always easier to make money in niches that are already proven to be profitable, because if you do that, you’ll instantly maximize your chances of building a successful campaign.

Evaluating markets doesn’t have to be difficult. Your primary objective is to determine the viability of a market based on existing demand and buyers.

You do this a number of different ways, including by researching the number of products in the market versus the demand / size of the customer base. In most cases, you’ll be able to determine the viability of a market, (or even a specific product) in a matter of minutes just by using a combination of market research with search engine research.

You always want to conduct as much research about your markets as possible so that you can really understand what your target audience is interested in and create compelling campaigns that ‘speak their language’, essentially communicating directly to your target audience.

You want to know:

- What people are currently buying
- Where there are any potential market gaps for products you could create
- How much of a demand exists in the market
- What your customer base is most interested in, concerned with, needing help with.

In other words, pay attention to who you are selling to before you determine what you are going to sell and your campaigns will be successful.

Commisson Swipe - Your Product Swipe File

2011-07-10T22:39:00.000-07:00

Your Product Swipe File

Affiliate marketing is not only incredibly simple to get involved in but it's a very rewarding experience.

It gives you the freedom to choose as many different niche markets as you wish, exploring countless opportunities and learning the ropes as you go.

What other way can you "earn as you learn"?

But there's one problem with affiliate marketing, versus selling your own products:

You have to wait for your commission check to arrive!

For the most part, waiting a couple of weeks for your commission payment to land in your mailbox, or bank account isn't a problem, but what do you do when you need fast cash, and simply can't wait for your earnings to arrive?

That's where the Commission Swipe comes into play. With this ebook, you'll learn how you can generate fast (and quite often, INSTANT) cash from a variety of affiliate programs that are set up to deliver automated payments.

Where To find out what are people looking to buy?

2011-07-10T22:36:00.000-07:00

To find out what are people looking to buy:

Amazon Best Sellers – Amazon.com
Pulse.ebay.com
Terapeak.com

Amazon.com Bestsellers
Amazon gives you a quick and easy way to find out what’s hot and what’s not on their site. It is a clear indicator of what the buying market is looking for, making it very easy for your to put yourself in the path of oncoming web traffic and make sales.
If you sign up with Amazon’s affiliate program, you can sell all of the products on the site, and with the Bestsellers section, you will know for sure that certain products are selling. They even give you a Top10 list for each category so that you can use that to make articles, reviews and blog posts.
Ebay Pulse tool: http://pulse.eBay.com

This is a great place to find out what the hot products are because if a person is typing it into eBay, they are typing it into Google and Amazon. Ebay Pulse gives you a real-time look at what people are looking to buy.
You can log into eBay and do a search on the completed items. It will tell you what people are selling, how many have sold and the average price.

Look for items with bids, and this is a great way to get an idea of what people are looking for.

Terapeak is another great way to do things www.terapeak.com
Go to Hot Research, sort of like eBay pulse. It will give you a listing of what’s hot on eBay. You can then drill down and it will give you an idea of some of the different auctions that are going on. If there are bids, this is a good item to become an affiliate for.

Hot Research > Hot Searches and then Search
Good average price above $30.00, with a good commission rate of no less than 40%, the higher the better. Also, don’t go for the very high end products that are priced at above $125 dollars.

Researching Your Products

2011-07-10T22:34:00.001-07:00

Researching Your Products
Pick a niche product and start to research if it’s a viable topic or subject. Whether you want to go with Clickbank products or with other affiliate products, you will need to do your research.

Finding a profitable niche should be the very first thing you do when starting in affiliate marketing.

You want to have a product that is Hot! If you find a product that isn’t very hot, don’t expect to make any kind of money with it.

The reason I picked the Maverick Money Makers is because it is a hot item. People are interested in the niche, and it’s marketed well, presented in a professional manner, and has tools for its affiliates to use to make money.

The ClickBank Marketplace 101

2011-07-10T22:33:00.001-07:00

The ClickBank Marketplace 101
Clickbank has been in business since 1998, and has built their network to one of the largest retailer of digital products. With over 10,000 digital products, it is one of the premier affiliate networks.
It is easy to use, easy to join and there are products in a ton of different areas from pets to electronics.
In order to earn commissions, all you need to do is take your affiliate ID and you get a link which you can use to send customers to. When they click on your link, it will record your commissions when they buy the product.

These affiliate networks generally require that you have a website that is related to the affiliate program you want to sell.

However, that’s not impossible to accomplish, and you can get one at www.blogger.com, www.typepad.com, www.wordpress.com and the like.
You can also sign up with very reasonable hosting services that provide one click installation of your blog site where you can start posting articles and blog posts related to the product or service you apply for at one of the larger networks like the ones listed below:
Clickbank is a Fast Start, Needs no website and pretty easy to be accepted into this program.
www.clickbank.com
Need to have a website, makes sure that it’s established with an About Us, Contact Us and Privacy page on the site. Should have a few weeks of posts at the very least.
www.shareasale.com
www.cj.com
www.linkshare.com
www.amazon.com
www.ebaypartnernetwork.com
www.pepperjamnetwork.com
www.datafeedr.com
www.goldenCAN.com
www.rubiconproject.com

Wait at least 90 days before putting Adsense on your site. To ensure that you will be accepted to the Adsense program, it’s best not to apply until you have an established site to show them.
www.adsense.com
These two are secondary and shouldn’t be considered until you’ve got your sites up and running for a few months.
www.azoogleads.com – CPA network
www.cpaempire.com

Before you apply to any of the other sites, you need to have a real site. You will want to blog on the site for at least two weeks, one blog post per day.
If you aren’t a writer, you will need to hire a freelancer. Go to Elance.com, rentacoder.com and the like to find a writer. You can hire a freelancer fairly inexpensively who will deliver you blog posts to add to your site.

Affiliate Marketing 101 – The Basics

2011-07-10T22:32:00.001-07:00

Affiliate Marketing 101 – The Basics
Since you are reading this e-book, I will assume that you are interested in making your fortune. Before you can even contemplate picking an affiliate program to join, you will need to make some basic changes in your thinking.
Change the way you think about money.

You’ve got to really change the way you view money and you want to begin to feel like you deserve to be wealthy. While this concept seems simple, many people don’t feel like they deserve money.

As a result, their activities reflect their feelings of lack of worthiness. Instead of coming home from work and hitting the computer, reading an ebook, taking action on a plan, they will instead come home, sit in front of the television and time will pass.

Instead of becoming a veteran internet marketer, they will become the master of television watching.

People who feel like they should be able to make lots of money online will naturally make a lot of money online. This is not some spiritual mish-mosh, although I feel that spirituality is a part of everyone’s journey. However, that is not what I’m talking about when I say people can make lots of money.
The most important thing to remember is that if you feel like you deserve lots of money, you will take the actions to make it happen.

It takes some basic things to be successful at affiliate marketing:

Stay focused
Pick a niche product to start with and then START
Read this e-book and then take action.
Make a schedule and then stick to it.

Start small and apply what you learn as you go.
Avoid being overwhelmed out of the gate. You want to learn, apply it on a small level and then scale up when you feel you have the basics under control.
While you are doing this, you will start to make money. By staying focused, I mean avoid the multi-tab distractions. You can open a ton of websites in browser’s nowadays.

If your plan calls for answering email between a certain time and certain time, avoid reading emails before that time. Tell yourself, it will still be sitting there waiting for you at.

Basics of Affiliate Marketing

2011-07-09T10:21:00.000-07:00

Basics of Affiliate Marketing
The concept of affiliate marketing is a variation on the outside sales position except that it all happens in cyber-space, and there is no door-to-door component.
Think of yourself as the salesman, one of many, for a specific product or service and you’ve mastered the basics of what is an affiliate.

People have all kinds of products and services that they want to sell online.
Part of the process to become successful is to have a large amount of traffic that is interested in what you have to offer. The way you can accomplish this is by having salesman or affiliate promote your products.

When a sale is made, you share the earnings with your affiliate/salesman through commissions. Successful affiliates make a good living by promoting products and services of other vendors in order to make that commission.

For the purposes of this e-book, I will focus on one of the easiest affiliate networks to get started – Clickbank and list the others with a brief look at the larger networks. Once you learn how an affiliate network like Clickbank works, you will be able to expand that to other larger networks that have a myriad of different products and services that are commissionable.

Clickbank is one of the largest, oldest affiliate networks out there online. Clickbank sells only digital products, is extremely easy to learn how to use and has a ton of vendors just waiting to snap up a good affiliate.

There is no waiting time to become a part of the Clickbank affiliate family, and the commissions are much higher than the other networks, with some commissions going as high as 75%.

Clickbank is an affiliate network in that it is a whole bunch of vendors and affiliates all working under the umbrella organization called Clickbank.
Through Clickbank, products and services are bought and sold, accounting goes on within the network and commissions are calculated per product sold. Before we go any further, let’s look at what you can potentially earn from one product.

For example: You promote and sell on Clickbank product called Maverick Money Makers: Get Paid For Life!. It sounds like a pretty exciting product, right?
Well, it has the highest payout of any Top 10 Clickbank Product and is the Top Converting product offer online. It pays out at a 50% commission level.

When you look at it’s pitch page, it is endorsed by some pretty heavy weight people including CNBC, As Seen On TV, Small Business Opportunities, Fox News, CBS News and Readers Digest.

As an affiliate, you will earn 50% of the $97 dollar price tag, and it’s repaid on a monthly basis.

So, that means that for every person who signs up through your affiliate link (which we will get in a minute), you will be paid $44 each month as long as that person stays signed up.

What do you think if you simply stuck with this affiliate program and reached their magical 100 referral mark. That’s $4400 per month for promoting only one product.
Are you beginning to see how lucrative affiliate marketing can be?

Think about how much you could make if you found 10 affiliate programs like this one? This is not only possible, but not that hard to accomplish if you know how.
Look on Clickbank and find 10 things that you think you might want to sell.

Make a list because as you learn more, you may want to revise it, and you may find that your choices are golden.

Affiliate Greed - Complete Guide To Building Your Online Fortune With Affiliate Marketing

2011-07-09T10:19:00.000-07:00

Affiliate Greed - Complete Guide To Building Your Online Fortune With Affiliate Marketing

INTRODUCTION TO AFFILIATE MARKETING

When it comes to going into business online, one of the easiest and most lucrative methods is through Affiliate Marketing. This is because becoming an affiliate marketer requires no experience, no website and simple promotional techniques that will convert prospective buyers into customers.

For the relative newcomer, affiliate marketing offers a planned method and blueprint to begin making sales online. There are a multitude of different opportunities, niches and markets to choose from.

A person can become an affiliate for just about anything from digital products to flowers and everything in between. In this e-book, we will cover the basics of affiliate marketing to give you an idea of where to start, how to get started and what websites are good to work with.

We will then move into how to become a profitable affiliate in 60 days or less, becoming an affiliate insider and some advanced techniques that if applied properly will take your earnings to the next level.

This e-book is not the end all in affiliate learning; instead, it is a good step-off point that will lead you to other e-books that will expand your horizons and earnings.

By the time you finish reading this e-book, you will be able to implement a concrete plan that will get you into earning money quickly and easily.
These techniques have worked for a long time, and they work consistently to earn money from affiliate marketing if followed.

If you are already familiar with affiliate marketing, this e-book will give you new techniques to add to your marketing arsenal so that you can increase your affiliate earnings and expand on the methods that you use in order to be successful.

So, without further ado, let’s get started on our journey to affiliate profitability!

How to Promoting Your Campaigns with Feeder Sites

2011-07-07T18:10:00.001-07:00

Feeder Sites

If you want to push your marketing message out to your niche market quickly, and absolutely free - you'll want to turn to feeder sites.

Feeder sites are free remotely hosted web services that allow you to create simple websites or web pages, such as Squidoo, available at http://www.Squidoo.com, who provides a free "hub building service" to anyone wishing to create a content rich web page.

Feeder sites are such a popular method of building targeted traffic campaigns because of how quickly they rank in the major search engines.

Since these websites are deemed "authority sites", they're already ranked high in engines like Google.com, and so by creating your sub-page on their server, your page will be discovered by search engine spiders, and ranked very quickly.

When creating your Squidoo lens, be sure to take advantage of the various modules that you can include on your page, and place a prominent link back to your main affiliate content page as well!

In addition, break up you content into short articles, and avoid linking to any related products until after the initial launch is over, since your focus is on funneling this traffic through your affiliate link to the products order page.

For each feeder site, upload 1-2 keyword rich articles and spice up your pages with images, videos and use built in modules or plugins whenever possible.

When you've finished creating your feeder pages, ping each URL to get the traffic pumping in. You can do this with either http://www.Pingomatic.com or http://www.PingGoat.com

Here are the top feeder site resources to help you get started:

Blogger: http://www.Blogger.com
Wordpress: http://www.Wordpress.com

WikiDot
This is a great way to get your sites ranking in the search engines quickly is by creating an account at http://www.Wikidot.com

Weebly
Create free websites and blogs, switch designs instantly, and features a drag and drop interface, Weebly helps you rank higher in search engines especially Google. http://www.Weebly.com

http://www.WetPaint.com
Wet Paint features free wiki based websites that allow you to start your own social website instantly. Very good site for backlinks and ranking.

http://www.LiveJournal.com
Another free blog platform that will allow you to customize it from top to bottom including free themes and modules.

You now have the basics of creating profitable affiliate marketing campaigns. The next step: Take action!

It all begins with choosing a single product and creating a quality content page that highlights the strengths and benefits of that product. Then, once you’ve been able to generate targeted traffic to your content page and you’ve seen results, begin working towards expanding your outreach by creating additional affiliate campaigns, focusing on new products and evergreen markets.

Affiliate marketing is an exciting industry to be a part of, and if you take consistent action in developing campaigns, creating high quality content and keeping a pulse on market trends and demand, you’ll quickly reap the rewards.

I wish you the very best of success in your affiliate marketing career!

How to Promoting Your Campaigns with Ezine Advertising

2011-07-07T18:09:00.003-07:00

Ezine Advertising

Advertising in newsletters can be a cost effective and very powerful method of spreading your affiliate links throughout the market very quickly.

When purchasing ezine (or newsletter) advertising, you always want to try to purchase "solo" ads, so that you are able to broadcast an article tied in with your affiliate link, without having to compete with other advertisers.

Here is a partial list of ezines that offer solo advertisement spacing:

http://soloadsonly.com/
http://www.bizopzine.com/
http://probiztips.com/
http://www.rent-a-list.com/

When contacting newsletter owners to promote within their broadcasts, you want to find out how many subscribers they have, as well as how many times they'll run your ad.

You also want a good idea as to their overall open rate, and whether there are specific days where they've seen a higher response level.

To find more ezines to advertise in or to find ezines that are targeted towards non-IM niches, consider the following directories:

http://www.directoryofezines.com/
http://www.ezinelocater.com/
http://www.ezinehub.com

How to Promoting Your Campaigns with Article Marketing

2011-07-07T18:09:00.001-07:00

Promoting Your Campaigns

Once you have an affiliate content website ready for your market, it's time to begin driving targeted traffic to it!

You can do this a number of different ways, and in this segment of the report, we'll explore the most cost effective strategies to jump-starting your campaigns.

Article Marketing
One of the easiest ways of launching an affiliate campaign is by using article marketing directories.

With article content, you can simply submit it into the larger article directories and within minutes of being approved, can begin to see traffic flowing to your landing pages.

In exchange for providing them with free content, you get to include some text and links in a section at the bottom of each article called a resource box.

EzineArticles.com (http://www.ezinearticles.com) is the biggest, most popular, highest-traffic article directory. They have tremendous authority in Google, and articles often rank extremely well, so they can get a lot of traffic.

As long as your articles are structured so that you are providing solid, useful content with a link back to your website showcased within the resource box, article marketing is a simple and effective strategy to generating prime traffic.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that you should always use anchor text within your resource boxes, rather than a direct link to your site. Anchor text will help you rank for many different keywords rather than just your website URL itself.

Here is the HTML code to use in your resource box if you want to use anchor text rather than a direct URL:

Your Anchor Keyword Here

You would replace yourdomain.com with your domain URL and include a relevant keyword phrase in the anchor text.

Your author’s resource box needs to be as strong as your article’s headline and contain information that will pull a reader in and motivate them to click on your link and visit your website.

Essentially, a resource box is very much like a fast-track commercial. You have only a few seconds to motivate them to read further and explore your website.

Here are the top five article marketing directories that I personally use for all of my campaigns:

www.EzineArticles.com
www.GoArticles.com
www.ArticlesBase.com
www.ArticleCity.com
www.ArticleDashboard.com

You can always choose to save time by hiring an Article submission service to automatically submit your articles for you.

One popular resource is available at:
http://www.SubmitYourArticle.com

How to create powerful, high performance affiliate websites - Review Websites And Pages

2011-07-07T18:08:00.001-07:00

Review Websites And Pages

One of the easiest ways to create powerful, high performance affiliate websites is to use the power of a strong review.

Review based affiliate sites capture the sale as people looking for last minute information or reassurance regarding a product are always on the lookout for feedback and testimonials from customers who have purchased and used the product.

When creating your review website, you want to again, focus it on one specific topic.

Don't create a multi-level review site that spreads out its information or coverage across multiple niche markets, because you want potential customers to put faith in your review, and it's difficult to do that if you are writing dozens of reviews on various products in the same market, and giving each one a "thumbs up"!

People will only be motivated to purchase a product after reading your review, if they believe it is honest and thorough. People want to know that you’ve done your homework, or that you have personal experience with the products you are reviewing on your website.

This means you need to include both pros and cons about each product, highlighting the products strengths, but being upfront about any weaknesses in the product.

If you do this, your reviews will appear more genuine, and you'll find it easier to motivate visitors into taking action and closing the sale.

You may get a lot of search engine traffic for specific product names and model numbers. This is where review sites shine. Instead of trying to rank for a competitive phrase like “cell phones”, you can instead rank for “brand name model number review”.

So, make sure to optimize every review page to include the product title, authors name and other relevant keywords that will help visitors find your page within the search engines.

WP Review Site is a script that will allow you to turn an existing Wordpress blog into a dynamic, powerful review website network, allowing you to easily create niche review sites on as many topics as you wish.

It’s available at http://www.WPReviewSite.com

How to create an affiliate based content website?

2011-07-07T18:07:00.000-07:00

How to set up highly targeted affiliate campaigns?

2011-07-07T18:06:00.001-07:00

Here are a few ways to set up highly targeted affiliate campaigns:

Niche Based Websites

With niche-based websites, you simply select 10-20 products all based around a specific niche market. For example, weight loss or parenting.

You then construct an article-powered niche website that features 10 different articles, and at the bottom of every article, you feature a direct link to the merchants website.

Niche based websites are very easy to set up, but just keep in mind that each website needs a specific theme. You want to segment your affiliate campaigns so that every website is focused around one specific market (or niche), so that you can funnel targeted traffic to your websites without convoluting the process.

Think about your websites structure from your visitors’ perspective. If you were interested in finding out more information about the golf market, and you landed on a content website that had multiple categories where golf wasn't the main focus, not only would you likely exit the site but you wouldn't think it was an authority site.

Authority sites ALWAYS focus on one specific market segment, so that they can deliver quality and informative content that warms up visitors and maximizes profits.

When creating your content site, hire a writer to create 10-15 keyword rich articles around different areas within that market.

For example, if you were to create an affiliate based content site on weight loss, you could create articles on all different aspects of losing weight, from healthy eating guides to work out routines.

Then, match up each article with a relevant affiliate product, and feature an ad box in the middle and end of each article, or integrate text based affiliate links within the content itself.

Tip: You can download a free copy of XSitePro's HTML Editing tool to create your content pages quickly and easily.
Download: http://www.xsitepro.com/

Setting Up Campaigns for affiliate marketer

2011-07-07T18:04:00.001-07:00

Setting Up Campaigns

The majority of your time as an affiliate marketer will be spent setting up campaigns. Campaigns involve a series of tasks, including developing squeeze pages, landing pages and most importantly - content pages.

Content pages offer information to visitors who land on the website, and essentially warm them up by giving them valuable information and then focusing that information about specific products.

For example, if you decided to promote a golf equipment package via Amazon's marketplace, you could create a content site based around golf.

You would offer a variety of resources including articles and resources that provided visitors with sufficient information about the niche, while promoting the golf package within the content.

Not only are content pages important in order to convert visitors into customers by providing valuable information, but they are important to your search engine ranking as well. Search engines will see that your website provides a lot of great content and is targeted towards relevant keywords, and in turn, will rank your website accordingly.

This means you'll be able to generate very high quality, organic traffic to your affiliate based content sites in a very short amount of time - and without paying a dime for traffic!

Choosing Products To Promote 2 - Affiliate Rockstar

2011-07-07T18:02:00.001-07:00

Choosing Products To Promote 1 - Affiliate Rockstar

There are many other affiliate networks and marketplaces worth exploring, with many offering a combination of both digital and physical products.

Here are a few to help you get started:

Amazon Marketplace
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/
I suggest using Amazon to locate products primarily with a higher price point, as their payout rate is set at only 4%. Personally, I use Amazon only for products priced at $200 or higher to make up the difference in the low-end commission offer.

Still, the Amazon marketplace is a great way to monetize extra space on your website or blog, and with their extended affiliate options, such as being able to integrate an "astore" into your website, you're given a lot of flexibility as to how you can develop affiliate campaigns.

Tip: You can monetize your feeder sites with Amazon modules and plugins, just by logging into your Amazon Associates account and exploring their 'extended' options.

Commission Junction
Otherwise known as “CJ.com”, Commission Junction has been around for many years and is known to pay on time and provide unbeatable support.

They also feature hundreds of merchants across the board spanning thousands of niche markets.

You may require approval prior to being able to participate in select affiliate programs, as Commission Junction provides merchants the opportunity to pre-approve affiliates, but the application is extremely simple and you can expect to receive a response in a matter of a few hours.

http://www.CommissionJunction.com

Share A Sale
http://www.ShareASale.com
ShareASale.com has grown into an extensive affiliate marketplace, and since all merchants are required to retain a cash balance of funds used to pay affiliates, it’s a risk-free way to ensure that you are paid for all of your efforts.

Pay Dot Com
http://www.paydotcom.com

PayDotCom is similar to ClickBank in that it only features digital products. One of the key differences between PayDotCom and Clickbank however is that when promoting products through PayDotCom, it's up the merchant to pay you, and this is done primarily through Paypal.

With ClickBank, you are paid by the company itself based on their payment schedule (every two weeks for paper check or weekly via direct bank transfer).

Link Share Services
Link Share is an ever-growing affiliate marketplace and with it comes a great variety of lucrative and high paying affiliate opportunities.

You can create your Link Share account at http://www.LinkShare.com

Choosing Products To Promote 1 - Affiliate Rockstar

2011-07-07T18:00:00.000-07:00

Choosing Products To Promote

Choosing quality products is an important part of every affiliate campaign, because you want to make sure that you are setting up campaigns around products that are likely to convert.

This means that you need to spend time carefully researching and evaluating products in order to create your "affiliate swipe file".

When it comes to choosing a niche, there are two methods that will help you get started:

1) Choose a niche that is evergreen
2) Identify demand and profitability based on existing competition

Take down notes of possible products and niche markets that look interesting to you.

Then, search for related forums, groups and blogs to determine what people are looking for, how big the market is and what is currently in demand.

Then, investigate keywords to determine how much competition is in the marketplace as well as how many searches take place each month for specific keyword phrases relating to each niche market.

If you plan to promote digital products, the best place to start looking for quality products is through ClickBank, available at http://www.Clickbank.com

ClickBank is the largest online marketplace for digital products, and you'll be able to quickly pinpoint hot sellers by browsing through their many categories.

ClickBank.com offers detailed statistics and information regarding each specific product making it even easier to quickly evaluate the profitability of potential campaigns.

Here is what these mean:

$/sale: The amount of money you earn for each sale.

Future $: Average rebill revenue.

Total $/sale: Average total $ per sale, including all rebills.

%/sale: The percentage of the product sale price that the sale represents.

%/refd: Fraction of publisher’s total sales that are referred by affiliates.

grav: The measure of how many affiliates are promoting the product.

For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks Clickbank adds an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added.

The Gravity indicator will tell you how well a product is selling. So a gravity score of 100 means a product is potentially selling better than one with a gravity score of 20.

When it comes to gravity assigned to any specific product, a gravity of 70 or higher is usually a good sign that the product is still in demand, and being actively promoted by other affiliates.

To take things a bit further, you can use free services such as www.CBTrends.com or www.CBEngine.com to further evaluate each product, in terms of performance, demand, and the number of affiliate marketer's that are promoting it (which is always a good indication of how profitable the market is).

Next Choosing Products To Promote 1 - Affiliate Rockstar

Introduction To Affiliate Marketing Rockstar

2011-07-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

Introduction To Affiliate Marketing

One of the most lucrative aspects of affiliate marketing is in being able to build an online income even without a product of your own.

While information development is an incredibly profitable market, when you're just entering the world of online business, affiliate marketing simplifies the process, while giving you the opportunity to gain hands-on experience without having to deal with the multiple tasks and responsibilities associated with being the developer or merchant.

For example, as an information product developer, you're responsible for all customer support inquiries and requests, and you need to spend time updating your product, working on keeping it consistently fresh and current based on market demand.

It's your job to satisfy customers, to handle refund requests, and to consistently work to optimize conversion rates.

As an affiliate marketer, however, you never have to spend any time on the product development, delivery or support issues, and instead, can focus on developing profitable campaigns that jack in commission payments 24 hours a day!

Your only job is to develop highly targeted campaigns that promote high quality products and then build powerful traffic campaigns that funnel in red-hot prospects who are interested in purchasing the products you promote.

Then, cash your commission checks and rinse and repeat the process!

Affiliate marketing is not only incredibly simple to get involved in but it's a very rewarding experience.

It gives you the freedom to choose as many different niche markets as you wish, exploring countless opportunities and learning the ropes as you go. What other way can you "earn as you learn"?

So, now that you know just a few of the reasons why so many new marketers begin their journey into online business as affiliate marketers, let's take a closer look at what you can do to join the ranks of successful earners!

How To Make Money With An Amazon Review Site

2011-07-07T17:51:00.001-07:00

How To Make Money With An Amazon Review Site

By becoming an Amazon affiliate, you’ll gain instant access to thousands of products in over 50 different markets that you can base your review site around.

From music, to movies, books and even electronics, toys (and in some countries, food!), there is no shortage of products to promote.

You can create an Amazon review site just by using the same HTML review templates that you are already using, or you can once again; use Wordpress as the foundation for your site.

You will need an Amazon Associates account before you can choose products to promote, and you can sign up at:
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com

Amazon makes it very easy to set up review pages, including:

Create an aStore
AStores feature various products from hand-chosen categories, so you can really customize your astore to appeal to specific niche markets.

All you need to do is log into your Amazon Associates account and create your store by choosing either specific products or complete categories. You then integrate a snippet of code into your blog or HTML page and your aStore will appear instantly!

Create your aStore:
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/astore/main.html

Create Links & Banners
It’s easy to advertise Amazon products by building banners and links for various products, and then adding them throughout your website navigation as well as within your content pages. You can earn up to 15% of all purchases made during a visitors shopping session.

Create Banners & Links:
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/promo/buildlinks.html

Use Widgets
You can build powerful Amazon widgets quickly right from within your Amazon Associates account. Widgets are interactive mini-applications that bring Amazon functionality to your website.

Check it out: https://widgets.amazon.com/

Pay Attention To Stats
Make sure that you take advantage of the “Reports” section within your Amazon Associates account.

It will provide you with important information regarding your earnings, as well as extensive data about the activity of your Amazon links, aStores and campaigns (including traffic details, conversion rates and more).

Stats: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/promo/reports.html

Creating Your Review Website 2

2011-07-07T17:49:00.000-07:00

Creating Your Review Website 1

You can also purchase review packages that come fully loaded with pre-written reviews, but you’ll want to take the time to edit the content so that it reflects your own opinions, while being able to offer your visitors with unique, quality information on the products and services they are interested in.

If you really want to make the most money possible from your review sites, you absolutely need to research markets, verify the viability of niches and know, with certainty, what people are interested in, searching for and willing to buy.

Without proper research, you have little idea as to what products or services you should include within your review site, but more importantly, you aren’t sure WHAT people are entering into the search engines when searching for these products.

This is where niche and keyword research comes into play. By defining the most popular keywords used by your target audience, you can incorporate them into your reviews, content and websites to attract organic traffic from the search engines. Your review site will be thoroughly optimized and VERY targeted towards hungry buyers.

(Plus, you can swipe commissions by piggy backing off of successful marketing campaigns that others have created!)

For example, you decide you are going to include the ClickBank product “Acne Free In 3 Days” in your review site. You know that people who are likely to purchase this product are suffering from acne and want a quick and pain free solution.

You’re able to define WHO your market is.

In order to optimize your review, you will want to include the product name AND author name in both your review and your review title, so that your page quickly ranks in the search engines, and is directed towards people who aren’t just searching for an acne cure, but who are interested in this specific product.

By including author names, website URL’s and product titles in your reviews, you are able to create laser-targeted pages that will boost your position in the search engines, while making it easier for you to “swipe” commissions from people who are already interested in the product but need a bit more information or reassurance before making the purchase.

Each review should always include relevant keywords, but to better optimize your site, include SPECIFIC keywords involving the products and services you are writing about.

You start by visiting http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and entering in your primary keyword.

You will quickly learn how popular different keywords are, how competitively targeted they are, as well as being given alternative (long-tail) keywords that you could use in your reviews for easier ranking in the search engines.

Here are a few other keyword tools worth checking out:

http://www.WordTracker.com
http://www.WordStream.com

Once you have chosen your niche market, it’s time to create a swipe file of potential products that you can include on your review site.

You want to pay attention to both the quality of the products you are promoting, as well as the price range, based on what your target audience is comfortable spending.

Tip: If choosing products from the ClickBank marketplace, you can use http://www.CBEngine.com to create a snapshot of the top products selling in various niche markets.

Creating Your Review Website 1

2011-07-07T17:48:00.000-07:00

Creating Your Review Website

In order to set up a review-based website, you will need a domain name and hosting account. You can register a domain name at many different registrars including www.namecheap.com and www.moniker.com, but you’ll want to do your best to choose a domain that incorporates relevant keywords from within your niche market.

You want your domain name to demonstrate to potential visitors exactly what your website is about so that you can rank within the major search engines and attract targeted visitors.

Examples: ElectricGuitarReviews.com – GolfClubOverview.com etc

Just make sure that your domain is keyword-rich, easy to spell and clearly demonstrates the focus of your site. You want people browsing through the search engines to be able to identify your site as being one that offers the exact information they are searching for.

When it comes to hosting, there are thousands of hosting providers online, but one of the most affordable service providers is HostGator, found at http://www.hostgator.com

Host Gator is not only easy to use but they are extremely affordable, and when just starting your review site, you can set up a “Baby” account and later upgrade once your site has grown.

In order to develop your review site, you will either need to know (or learn) a bit of HTML in order to construct or customize review pages and templates, or you can use a combination of Wordpress and Review Site plugins to create powerful, interactive review websites without the fuss!

Here’s all you need:

1) Copy of Wordpress – http://www.Wordpress.org (you want to download the self hosted option)

2) Copy of WP Review Site – http://www.WPReviewSite.com

WP Review site is a Wordpress plugin, so you can upload the plugin into your Wordpress directory and activate it from within your admin panel.

You can then customize it to suit your preferences, including template, layout, and even the style of reviews.

Note: You can create review based websites without WP Review Site just by using Wordpress, uploading a basic theme and categorizing your reviews, but WP Review Site will help optimize your site and minimize your workload, so if you can afford to grab a copy, I recommend you do so!

You can also purchase ‘ready made’ review templates as well. These are HTML templates that are easily customized with any HTML editor such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage.

Here a few resources to help you out:

http://www.nichereviewlayouts.com
http://www.ReviewTemplates.com
http://www.KillerReviewTemplates.com
http://www.nichereviewtemplates.com

Review Site Generator:
http://autoreviewsitegenerator.com/

Next Creating Your Review Website 2

Cater To Hungry Buyers and What does this mean to you?

2011-07-07T17:46:00.005-07:00

Cater To Hungry Buyers

One of the greatest things about review sites is that you are able to target people who are on the verge of buying. They want to make informed buying decisions and they do this by reviewing comments, feedback and testimonials from websites that have personal experience with the products and services that they are interested in.

What does this mean to you?

It’s a LOT easier to make money with visitors who are actively searching for specific products, and who, for the most part, have ALREADY made up their mind to buy the product but simply need a bit of reassurance before making the purchase.

So, without further delay, let’s begin!

Creating Profitable Affiliate Websites

2011-07-07T17:45:00.001-07:00

Creating Profitable Affiliate Websites

One of the easiest ways to make money online is by developing a detailed, honest and straightforward review website for your niche market.

A review site offers important information to buyers, such as giving them a breakdown of the product or service, including personal testimonials, feedback as well as getting your visitors involved in posting their own comments and experiences.

One of the greatest aspects of a review site is that it can fit into literally any niche or market online.

From Amazon affiliate review sites, to developing review sites around the television programs, movies and music that you love, you can build a very profitable business online, all powered by targeted review websites!

Choosing Winning Products part 2

2011-07-07T17:43:00.002-07:00

Choosing Winning Products part 1

If you plan to promote digital products, the best place to start looking for quality products is through ClickBank, available at http://www.Clickbank.com

ClickBank is the largest online marketplace for digital products, and you'll be able to quickly pinpoint hot sellers by browsing through their many categories.

ClickBank.com offers detailed statistics and information regarding each specific product making it even easier to quickly evaluate the profitability of potential campaigns.

Here is what these mean:

$/sale: The amount of money you earn for each sale.

Future $: Average rebill revenue.

Total $/sale: Average total $ per sale, including all rebills.

%/sale: The percentage of the product sale price that the sale represents.

%/refd: Fraction of publisher’s total sales that are referred by affiliates.

grav: The measure of how many affiliates are promoting the product.

For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks Clickbank adds an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added.

The Gravity indicator will tell you how well a product is selling. So a gravity score of 100 means a product is potentially selling better than one with a gravity score of 20.

When it comes to gravity assigned to any specific product, a gravity of 70 or higher is usually a good sign that the product is still in demand, and being actively promoted by other affiliates.

To take things a bit further, you can use free services such as www.CBTrends.com or www.CBEngine.com to further evaluate each product, in terms of performance, demand, and the number of affiliate marketer's that are promoting it (which is always a good indication of how profitable the market is).

There are many other affiliate networks and marketplaces worth exploring, with many offering a combination of both digital and physical products.

Here are a few to help you get started:

Amazon Marketplace
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/
I suggest using Amazon to locate products primarily with a higher price point, as their payout rate is set at only 4%. Personally, I use Amazon only for products priced at $200 or higher to make up the difference in the low-end commission offer.

Still, the Amazon marketplace is a great way to monetize extra space on your website or blog, and with their extended affiliate options, such as being able to integrate an "astore" into your website, you're given a lot of flexibility as to how you can develop affiliate campaigns.

Tip: You can monetize your feeder sites with Amazon modules and plugins, just by logging into your Amazon Associates account and exploring their 'extended' options.

Commission Junction
Otherwise known as “CJ.com”, Commission Junction has been around for many years and is known to pay on time and provide unbeatable support.

They also feature hundreds of merchants across the board spanning thousands of niche markets.

You may require approval prior to being able to participate in select affiliate programs, as Commission Junction provides merchants the opportunity to pre-approve affiliates, but the application is extremely simple and you can expect to receive a response in a matter of a few hours.

http://www.CommissionJunction.com

Share A Sale
http://www.ShareASale.com
ShareASale.com has grown into an extensive affiliate marketplace, and since all merchants are required to retain a cash balance of funds used to pay affiliates, it’s a risk-free way to ensure that you are paid for all of your efforts.

Pay Dot Com
http://www.paydotcom.com

PayDotCom is similar to ClickBank in that it only features digital products. One of the key differences between PayDotCom and Clickbank however is that when promoting products through PayDotCom, it's up the merchant to pay you, and this is done primarily through Paypal.

With ClickBank, you are paid by the company itself based on their payment schedule (every two weeks for paper check or weekly via direct bank transfer).

Link Share Services
Link Share is an ever-growing affiliate marketplace and with it comes a great variety of lucrative and high paying affiliate opportunities.

You can create your Link Share account at http://www.LinkShare.com

Here are a few resources to further help you find and evaluate potential niche markets:

NicheBot:
http://www.nichebot.com

Google Trends
http://www.Google.com/trends
Google Trends reveals the current popularity of a search term (keyword) and provides you with related resources (including articles, blogs and news).

Trend Watching
http://www.TrendWatching.com

Compete
http://www.Compete.com

Amazon Best Sellers
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books

Yahoo Buzz
http://buzz.yahoo.com

CB Analytics
http://www.CB-Analytics.com

Choosing Winning Products part 1

2011-07-07T17:43:00.000-07:00

Choosing Winning Products

Choosing quality products is an important part of every affiliate campaign, because you want to make sure that you are setting up campaigns around products that are likely to convert.

This means that you need to spend time carefully researching and evaluating products in order to choose winners. Your ability to generate commissions and convert visitors into buyers depends on the quality and brand of the products you choose.

When it comes to choosing a niche, there are two methods that will help you get started:

1) Choose a niche that is evergreen
2) Identify demand and profitability based on existing competition

One of the most important things you can do is first evaluate and identify niche markets that encompass three major elements:

1) You can easily identify exactly who your audience is.
2) There are motivated, active buyers in the niche market.
3) You are able to penetrate the market with your campaigns.

There’s no sense in trying to find an untapped niche market. There are few of them out there and those that exist would take a lot of work in order to penetrate. Then, you’d have to condition buyers, research angles and test out different campaigns and approaches before you determine what was successful.

Forget about that! It’s always easier to make money in niches that are already proven to be profitable, because if you do that, you’ll instantly maximize your chances of building a successful campaign.

Evaluating markets doesn’t have to be difficult. Your primary objective is to determine the viability of a market based on existing demand and buyers.

You do this a number of different ways, including by researching the number of products in the market versus the demand / size of the customer base. In most cases, you’ll be able to determine the viability of a market, (or even a specific product) in a matter of minutes just by using a combination of market research with search engine research.

You always want to conduct as much research about your markets as possible so that you can really understand what your target audience is interested in and create compelling campaigns that ‘speak their language’, essentially communicating directly to your target audience.

You want to know:

- What people are currently buying
- Where there are any potential market gaps for products you could create
- How much of a demand exists in the market
- What your customer base is most interested in, concerned with, needing help with.

In other words, pay attention to who you are selling to before you determine what you are going to sell and your campaigns will be successful.

It's likely that you've already got most of the research you need right in your own memory bank. Think about the general health market and then dissect it so that you have 10-15 health related niches to evaluate.

Health – General / Broad Market

Segments include:
- How to lose weight
- How to prevent /cure acne
- Gout
- Menopause
- Pregnancy

Rinse and repeat this formula with any broader topic and you'll likely find a handful of desperate markets.

Relationships – General/Broad Market

Segments include:
* Get your ex back
* Avoid Divorce/ Repair Marriage
* Improve Sex Life
* Pick Up Women / Men

These are desperate markets that consist of highly motivated prospects who are anxiously looking for a solution or answer to their problem.

Keep in mind that the best markets consist of buyers who are looking to relieve their pain whether emotional, physical or mental.

Take down notes of possible products and niche markets that look interesting to you. Then, search for related forums, groups and blogs to determine what people are looking for, how big the market is and what is currently in demand.

Then, investigate keywords to determine how much competition is in the marketplace as well as how many searches take place each month for specific keyword phrases relating to each niche market.

Next Choosing Winning Products part 2

Introduction To Affiliate Money Machine

2011-07-07T17:40:00.000-07:00

Introduction To Affiliate Money Machine

One of the greatest things about affiliate marketing is that you can literally start making money online in a matter of a few days, even a few hours.

You don't need a product of your own, or even a website. All you need to do is know how to choose winning products, set up powerful campaigns and drive targeted traffic to your pages, generating a steady stream of commission payments.

And with affiliate marketing, you aren't restricted by niche or market because you aren't creating the information products! You're simply profiting from other people's work, and in many cases, vendors will offer as much as 50% commissions, meaning that you will earn just as much as they do without all of the work!

With affiliate marketing, you can develop a series of campaigns focusing around digital products, physical products or a combination of both.

Physical Products
Such as books, physical delivery courses, DVD's, Videos, Equipment and more from marketplaces like www.Amazon.com

Digitial Products
Such as ebooks, reports, video tutorials, training or coaching lessons and other digital products from marketplaces like www.ClickBank.com

Being an affiliate marketer means that you have the freedom to choose what markets or topics you're interested in, and can cover as much ground as you have time for, or you can focus only on markets that you're passionate about or personally interested in.

As long as you carefully evaluate the profitability of a market and you've determined the demand is there, you can hit the ground running!

Affiliate marketing is not only incredibly simple to get involved in but it's a very rewarding experience.

It gives you the freedom to choose as many different niche markets as you wish, exploring countless opportunities and learning the ropes as you go.

What other way can you "earn as you learn"?

But there's one problem with affiliate marketing, versus selling your own products:

You have to wait for your commission check to arrive!

For the most part, waiting a couple of weeks for your commission payment to land in your mailbox, or bank account isn't a problem, but what do you do when you need fast cash, and simply can't wait for your earnings to arrive?

That's where the Affiliate Money Machine comes into play. With this report, you'll learn how you can generate fast cash from a variety of affiliate programs that are set up to deliver automated payments.

I'll also show you exactly how to develop a system designed for long-term success, so you're able to make money quickly, while also being able to generate steady paychecks for years to come.

Affiliate marketing offers you the freedom and flexibility unlike any other business model, and if you truly want to be successful, you need to know exactly how to take advantage of this incredible opportunity so you're covering as much ground as possible, while leveraging your campaigns so they work double-time.

So without further delay, let's create your powerful affiliate marketing system!

Web 2.0 Social Networking

2011-07-06T09:36:00.001-07:00

Web 2.0 Social Networking
By using Web 2.0 social networking, you can announce and spread the word about your affiliate product. Instead of sending them directly to the vendor’s site, you can use Squidoo, Hubpages and other social networking sites like Ning and Scribd.com to Presell the product through writing articles and converting them into mini websites.

Instead of advertising the vendor site, you will advertise your intermediary site and use it to list build and follow up through an autoresponder.

The easy way to list build is take a picture of one of the aWeber or GetResponse forms using a program like Snagit, and upload the picture and make it a clickable link to a squeeze page.

You can build a squeeze page using Weebly.com which has a drag and drop interface that makes it extremely easy to build web pages with autoresponder forms embedded in them.

You then have people click, go to your landing or squeeze page and fill out the form. On the landing page, you can further outline the benefits of the product you are promoting.

Traffic Sources Facebook, Myspace, Squidoo and Hubpages Advertising

2011-07-06T09:33:00.000-07:00

Facebook and Myspace

Often overlooked and very good places to advertise are Facebook and Myspace. While I wouldn’t advertise the How To Make Money Online e-books, they are great places to advertise other digital products.

If, for instance, one of your products is Jamorama from Clickbank, it is a “learn to play guitar online” service that is made for young people, is done totally online and would make a great Myspace advertisement.

Squidoo and Hubpages
If you don’t have a website and you want to have an intermediary page that gives more information and pre-sells the product more, you can use either Squidoo or Hubpages. They are free to build, takes about 60 seconds and requires no HTML ability to use.

Tons of people build Squidoo lenses using articles that expand on the products and services that they are promoting.

In this way, a person doesn’t click through your link straight to the pitch page of the vendor and only think that you are trying to sell them something.
Through the use of these intermediary sites, you can add value to the product or service with a personalized set of information that is tailored to make the product more understandable.

If you decide to build a Squidoo page for your affiliate product, most people will do a review of the product or write an article outlining the benefits of using/reading/listening to the product. In this way, it is more personal and less salesman-like.

How to Getting Traffic To Your Site - URL Display and URL Actual Method

2011-07-06T09:30:00.000-07:00

URL Display and URL Actual
One nice thing to remember is that you can put your Clickbank ID and URL in the Destination URL section of the advertisement. In the Display URL, you place the actual website URL of the affiliate products vendor.
Example:
Display URL: www.memekperawan.com
Destination URL: http://xxxxxx.perawan.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=MEMEK
That word “?tid=MEMEK” on the end of the Clickbank ID is called a traffic tracking device which allows you to track how your campaigns are going. Both Clickbank and Adwords will allow you to track your advertising campaigns so that you can make a decision about what’s working and what needs to be changed.

To track within Adwords, you will need to choose a keyword that you want to track in Adwords. Click on Edit Keyword Settings. Then you have a URL that you can add a tracking ID to which in this case would be “?tid=MemAd1” for Memek, Ad #1. You only have 8 letters that you can use, so whatever you decide, it should be easy to understand and decipher.

How to Getting Traffic To Your Site - Ad Variations Method

2011-07-06T09:27:00.000-07:00

Ad Variations
When you have your keywords in hand, go to Google and search on those keywords. Put the keywords between quotation marks and watch what comes up on the right hand side. This will give you great ideas on how to word your own advertisement.
Look at what ad is in the top spot 3 spots. Look at the titles they are using and see how you can word your advertisement similarly so that you get good clickthroughs.

Then when you put together your initial ad, make some variations and track how many clicks each ad is getting. Keep the ad that performs the best.
When you are just starting out with Adwords, keep your bids low. Bid as little as $0.05 cents per click where you can, and just make sure that you get on page one of the search results.

Look towards doing advertising on websites only and forego the search results, because it is counted in 1000 impressions at a price and your money can go a longer way.

How to Getting Traffic To Your Site - Adwords & Contextual Advertising Method

2011-07-06T09:24:00.000-07:00

Adwords & Contextual Advertising
Advertising with Google is easy and deceptive to newcomers. Easy, in the fact that it is very easy to use; deceptive because if you aren’t very careful you could lose a lot of money trying to get advertising that makes you money.

Here are some techniques so that you can use the Adwords system and make money.
The site is located at: http://adwords.google.com

You can sign up for an Adwords account by clicking the Start Now button and filling in your information. Sign up for a standard and not a starter account. Adwords is pretty easy to use. Many people will want to start out with 100s of keywords and will take everything suggested by Adwords keyword tool.

Avoid this method and stick with a few terms that are laser-focused on your product or service.
Use the Adwords keyword suggestion tool or other keyword tool like MicroNiche Finder, Nichebot and Keyword Elite to find about five or six terms that are tightly related to your product.

You will want these keywords/keyphrases to be low competition, high traffic words. The software just mentioned are designed to find keywords like this for your product.

You will want to drill down on your keywords. For instance, if your product is about dog health, don’t just look at the keywords “dog health” and dogs.
Look for things like “relief for dogs from fleas”, “best dog food” or go into a specific breed like “cocker spaniel health”, or “best dog food for beagles”.

While you will get fewer visitors based on these keywords, the ones that will arrive will be very interested in your product. When you look at products, you will want to take this into consideration as well.

List your keyphrases and base your advertisement around these keyphrases. You will ideally want to get them into the title of your advertisement as well as in the listing for Adwords to use when listing when your ad will appear in the search results and on people’s websites.

Use the Adwords keyword suggestion tool here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Select keyphrases that are relevant but not very competitive. Remember, that although you may only get 100 visits a day from a keyword, conversion rates are 1-2%, so that will usually equal a sale.

This is why you don’t want to promote a product that is much cheaper than $30. If your commission is 50% to 75% of $30, that is $15.00 to $22.50 on each sale.

It has been shown that affiliates will convert on average 1% to 2% per 100 visitors if they have done adequate keyword/keyphrase research.

It will generally convert the same on a $30+ item as it does on a $15.00 product. The amount of money you earn will only change due to the commission level and price of product.

How to Getting Traffic To Your Site - Pay-Per-Click Advertising Method

2011-07-06T09:22:00.000-07:00

How to Getting Traffic To Your Site - Pay-Per-Click Advertising Method

If you don’t have a website, landing page or place to send prospective traffic, pay per click or PPC advertising is an excellent method to drive sales via your affiliate link.

Again, you will want to use discretion so that you don’t wind up losing more money than you gain in sales.

The largest PPC outfit is Google. Those little advertisements that you see on people’s websites, plus on the side of the search results are called PPC advertising.

Advertisers pay a set amount per click in order to appear on sites. It is considered contextual advertising, because the advertising is related to the information being presented either in the search results or on the website. For instance, you won’t get an advertisement for ice cream on a site about auto parts.

How to Getting Traffic To Your Site - Video Promotion Method

2011-07-06T09:21:00.000-07:00

Getting Traffic To Your Site

Video Promotion
While most people will tell you to use pay-per-click advertising, article marketing and building a website, here’s a shortcut method to get your started and quickly. Videos can get you into search engines fast.
Use one of these tools to get started:

Camtasia Studio has a 30 day free trial
CamStudio which is free and located at http://camstudio.org
Jing that works on the Mac or PC
Web Cam
Sony Movie Studio
Movie Studio 9

Now that you have a selection of products, a website or direct links to a vendor’s website, it’s time to promote. First, you will want to get into the video arena.
I know you probably weren’t expecting that. But, people are video junkies, and if you want to get people engaged, you will need to go where the traffic goes.
Creating videos is one sure-fire way to get traffic to your site. Creating a video is not as hard as you think. It’s easy and fun, and will get you into the Working with Camtasia can be a little daunting, but it will pay for itself in spades if you take the time to learn how to use it.

If you need to go free Jing is the second easiest way to record from screen to video. If you’re good with Powerpoint, you can create a slide show, narrate it about your site and simply read from a script. These are the easiest type of video to create, and when used correctly, they are traffic bringers.

Set your monitor resolution to 800x600 for recording. Record your videos at 800 x 600, resized to 480 x 360 with SmartFocus. You want them to be quick, and talk about the product you are promoting.
The bottom third is very important in videos. You want to tell them about your domain name or the domain of the affiliate site. If you don’t have a site of your own, go to SnipUrl where you can put in your affiliate link, and it will give you an output.

For instance, if your affiliate product is for Maverick Money Makers, and your affiliate link is http://XXXXX.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net, your SnipUrl will be www.snipurl/MaverickMoney.
The SnipURL can go in the lower left part of your video, and remain there for the duration. As you talk about your website, all you need to do is use SnagIt to capture pictures, which you put in your Powerpoint presentation and capture as video.

Add a couple of transitions, and you are in the video arena. These short video reviews are what you upload to all of the video sites.

Things to remember:

Make sure that the name of the video is your longtail keyphrase or product name plus a word like deals. (ie. Salmon deals, Rolex watch deals)
Make sure that the keywords and keyphrases are submitted and enclosed in quotes as well as without quotes.
Make sure that you submit them with the URL leading back to your website
In the information section, be sure and put your website, or SnipURL if you don’t have a website that leads back to the affiliate product.

CB Engine - Newbie to Profitable Affiliate

2011-07-06T09:18:00.000-07:00

CB Engine - Newbie to Profitable Affiliate

CB engine shows you the new products and is an excellent tool to use if you want to focus on the new product releases. If you are going to work with Clickbank, which is a good first step into the affiliate arena, CB Engine should be one of the sites you bookmark and use.

It has a Brand New Products list, re-listed products with a ton of information to help you make an informed choice about the products you want to promote.
Each product, new and re-listed, have graphs and visual representations about the health and viability of the products.

There are a couple of ways to go about finding out more about the product or service you are about to promote. First, you can buy the product.

Whether it’s digital or tangible, buying and experiencing the product will usually make you a better promoter. However, with 10 products, that can become a bit pricey, so you may want to buy a couple products that you can afford, and look over the sales pages only of the remainder.

When looking over the sales or pitch page, you will want to think in terms of being a prospective buyer. Ask yourself some basic questions:

Does the page, headline and opening paragraph grab your attention.
Is the page easy to read in terms of colors, graphics and layout of the site.
Is the message being presented clear and concise and easy-to-understand.
Are there highlights of important facts, headlines to break up content and pictures that are relevant to the topic matter?
Does the page lead you to the logical conclusion where you want to buy the product?

All of these things are important and will make or break you when people come through your referral link. Having a page where you want to buy the product will generally translate to high sales conversions.

In that way, the traffic you drive to the product site stand a higher chance of buying in the end. If the page left you with a ho-hum, whatever feeling, it is probably quite possible that visitors arriving at the site will have the same reaction.

As you go about promoting your affiliate products, make sure that you keep track of the products that are converting well, and the ones that are not. When you have a hot product that goes warm and then cold, you need to be ready to get rid of it.
Earlier I told you not to get attached to a product or service. This is why. You have to know when to get rid of it.

Look at the choices you first made on Clickbank and ask yourself the questions from above. Are there any products that you might want to get rid of now?

CB Trends - Newbie to Profitable Affiliate

2011-07-06T09:17:00.000-07:00

CB Trends - Newbie to Profitable Affiliate

The popularity, price and commission paid of the product is very important.
When it comes to popularity or gravity, unless you are already a Super Affiliate avoid the products with very high gravity (125+), because it means that the market will be highly competitive and the chances of you making sales will be decreased accordingly.

This applies only to Clickbank and not the other commission driven organizations.
In order to find out if a product is good to add to your affiliate arsenal, you will want to check it out at CB Trends (www.cbtrends.com) which is a free service that shows visual representation of what is on the Clickbank marketplace site making it easier to understand.

There are some useful tracking tools that give you an easy way to see what is happening with the products you choose including:

Popularity of the product
Earning per sale
Percent per sale
Gravity
Referrals
Commission

If you take the visual representation, combine it with what you see on Clickbank’s Marketplace, you will have a good idea of whether the product you’re thinking about promoting is a good one.

Out of the 10 products that you pick to promote over time, you will want at least 6 of them to be popular.
You want to mix it up so that at least half of what you’re promoting is more competitive. The rest of the products should be up and comers, those products that are newer and building in the Marketplace.

Clickbank Marketplace - Newbie to Profitable Affiliate

2011-07-06T09:16:00.000-07:00

Clickbank Marketplace

1. Sale Price: ($/Sale) This is the amount that affiliates are earning for referring customers. The amount earned is kept by Clickbank accounting and pays out every two weeks to the affiliate.

2. Percentage of Sale: (%/Sale) This is the average percentage commissions earned per affiliate per sale.

3. Referral %: This is the percentage of sales that people you refer

4. Gravity of Product: The gravity number is important because it shows the popularity of the product over time. Every time the product is sold or a new affiliate joins and uses the link the gravity of the program will change.

Build Up To About 10 Products To Promote - Newbie to Profitable Affiliate

2011-07-06T09:14:00.001-07:00

Newbie to Profitable Affiliate

Build Up To About 10 Products To Promote
As an affiliate, you will want to build up to about 10 products, so that you can mix up the top performing products and add the latest releases. While you should like what you’re selling, don’t be wed to it.
What may be a hot seller, may cool off and if you follow trends, you need to be able to move on. You don’t want to add all these products at once, and build slowly as you get more experienced.

Because you don’t want to overwhelm yourself with products, pick your products carefully. Choose popular products because you want to have top performing products.

Here are some things to remember when you are selecting products.
When you search for new products to promote from Clickbank, there are certain things that you are looking for.

First and easiest is the selection of the category that you want to work with. For instance, each affiliate products has some information that will help you make a good decision.
The three sites you will want to use to ascertain if a product is a good seller and a possible product you will want to promote includes:

Clickbank Marketplace – www.clickbank.com
CB Trends – www.cbtrends.com
CB Engine – www.cbengine.com

Researching Your Products - Finding a profitable niche

2011-07-06T09:13:00.000-07:00

Researching Your Products

Pick a niche product and start to research if it’s a viable topic or subject. Whether you want to go with Clickbank products or with other affiliate products, you will need to do your research.

Finding a profitable niche should be the very first thing you do when starting in affiliate marketing.

You want to have a product that is Hot! If you find a product that isn’t very hot, don’t expect to make any kind of money with it.
The reason I picked the Maverick Money Makers is because it is a hot item. People are interested in the niche, and it’s marketed well, presented in a professional manner, and has tools for its affiliates to use to make money.

To find out what are people looking to buy:

Amazon Best Sellers – Amazon.com
Pulse.ebay.com
Terapeak.com
Amazon.com Bestsellers

Amazon gives you a quick and easy way to find out what’s hot and what’s not on their site. It is a clear indicator of what the buying market is looking for, making it very easy for your to put yourself in the path of oncoming web traffic and make sales.

If you sign up with Amazon’s affiliate program, you can sell all of the products on the site, and with the Bestsellers section, you will know for sure that certain products are selling. They even give you a Top10 list for each category so that you can use that to make articles, reviews and blog posts.
Ebay Pulse tool: http://pulse.eBay.com

This is a great place to find out what the hot products are because if a person is typing it into eBay, they are typing it into Google and Amazon. Ebay Pulse gives you a real-time look at what people are looking to buy.

You can log into eBay and do a search on the completed items. It will tell you what people are selling, how many have sold and the average price.

Look for items with bids, and this is a great way to get an idea of what people are looking for.

Terapeak is another great way to do things www.terapeak.com
Go to Hot Research, sort of like eBay pulse. It will give you a listing of what’s hot on eBay. You can then drill down and it will give you an idea of some of the different auctions that are going on. If there are bids, this is a good item to become an affiliate for.

Hot Research > Hot Searches and then Search
Good average price above $30.00, with a good commission rate of no less than 40%, the higher the better. Also, don’t go for the very high end products that are priced at above $125 dollars.

The ClickBank Marketplace 101

2011-07-06T09:12:00.000-07:00

The ClickBank Marketplace 101

Clickbank has been in business since 1998, and has built their network to one of the largest retailer of digital products. With over 10,000 digital products, it is one of the premier affiliate networks.

It is easy to use, easy to join and there are products in a ton of different areas from pets to electronics.

In order to earn commissions, all you need to do is take your affiliate ID and you get a link which you can use to send customers to. When they click on your link, it will record your commissions when they buy the product.

These affiliate networks generally require that you have a website that is related to the affiliate program you want to sell.

However, that’s not impossible to accomplish, and you can get one at www.blogger.com, www.typepad.com, www.wordpress.com and the like.

You can also sign up with very reasonable hosting services that provide one click installation of your blog site where you can start posting articles and blog posts related to the product or service you apply for at one of the larger networks like the ones listed below:

Clickbank is a Fast Start, Needs no website and pretty easy to be accepted into this program.
www.clickbank.com

Need to have a website, makes sure that it’s established with an About Us, Contact Us and Privacy page on the site. Should have a few weeks of posts at the very least.
www.shareasale.com
www.cj.com
www.linkshare.com
www.amazon.com
www.ebaypartnernetwork.com
www.pepperjamnetwork.com
www.datafeedr.com
www.goldenCAN.com
www.rubiconproject.com

Wait at least 90 days before putting Adsense on your site. To ensure that you will be accepted to the Adsense program, it’s best not to apply until you have an established site to show them.
www.adsense.com
These two are secondary and shouldn’t be considered until you’ve got your sites up and running for a few months.
www.azoogleads.com – CPA network
www.cpaempire.com

Before you apply to any of the other sites, you need to have a real site. You will want to blog on the site for at least two weeks, one blog post per day.
If you aren’t a writer, you will need to hire a freelancer. Go to Elance.com, rentacoder.com and the like to find a writer. You can hire a freelancer fairly inexpensively who will deliver you blog posts to add to your site.

Start small and apply what you learn as you go - Affiliate Marketing 101 – The Basics

2011-07-06T09:10:00.001-07:00

Start small and apply what you learn as you go.

Avoid being overwhelmed out of the gate. You want to learn, apply it on a small level and then scale up when you feel you have the basics under control.
While you are doing this, you will start to make money. By staying focused, I mean avoid the multi-tab distractions. You can open a ton of websites in browser’s nowadays.

If your plan calls for answering email between a certain time and certain time, avoid reading emails before that time. Tell yourself, it will still be sitting there waiting for you at.

Change the way you think about money - Affiliate Marketing 101 – The Basics

2011-07-06T09:09:00.000-07:00

Affiliate Marketing 101 – The Basics

Since you are reading this e-book, I will assume that you are interested in making your fortune. Before you can even contemplate picking an affiliate program to join, you will need to make some basic changes in your thinking.

Change the way you think about money.

You’ve got to really change the way you view money and you want to begin to feel like you deserve to be wealthy. While this concept seems simple, many people don’t feel like they deserve money.

As a result, their activities reflect their feelings of lack of worthiness. Instead of coming home from work and hitting the computer, reading an ebook, taking action on a plan, they will instead come home, sit in front of the television and time will pass.

Instead of becoming a veteran internet marketer, they will become the master of television watching.

People who feel like they should be able to make lots of money online will naturally make a lot of money online. This is not some spiritual mish-mosh, although I feel that spirituality is a part of everyone’s journey. However, that is not what I’m talking about when I say people can make lots of money.

The most important thing to remember is that if you feel like you deserve lots of money, you will take the actions to make it happen.

It takes some basic things to be successful at affiliate marketing:

Stay focused
Pick a niche product to start with and then START
Read this e-book and then take action.
Make a schedule and then stick to it.

Basics of Affiliate Marketing 2

2011-07-06T09:05:00.000-07:00

Basics of Affiliate Marketing Part 1

Clickbank is an affiliate network in that it is a whole bunch of vendors and affiliates all working under the umbrella organization called Clickbank.
Through Clickbank, products and services are bought and sold, accounting goes on within the network and commissions are calculated per product sold. Before we go any further, let’s look at what you can potentially earn from one product.

For example: You promote and sell on Clickbank product called Maverick Money Makers: Get Paid For Life!. It sounds like a pretty exciting product, right?
Well, it has the highest payout of any Top 10 Clickbank Product and is the Top Converting product offer online. It pays out at a 50% commission level.

When you look at it’s pitch page, it is endorsed by some pretty heavy weight people including CNBC, As Seen On TV, Small Business Opportunities, Fox News, CBS News and Readers Digest.

As an affiliate, you will earn 50% of the $97 dollar price tag, and it’s repaid on a monthly basis.

So, that means that for every person who signs up through your affiliate link (which we will get in a minute), you will be paid $44 each month as long as that person stays signed up.

What do you think if you simply stuck with this affiliate program and reached their magical 100 referral mark. That’s $4400 per month for promoting only one product.
Are you beginning to see how lucrative affiliate marketing can be?

Think about how much you could make if you found 10 affiliate programs like this one? This is not only possible, but not that hard to accomplish if you know how.
Look on Clickbank and find 10 things that you think you might want to sell.

Make a list because as you learn more, you may want to revise it, and you may find that your choices are golden.

Basics of Affiliate Marketing

2011-07-06T09:04:00.000-07:00

Basics of Affiliate Marketing
The concept of affiliate marketing is a variation on the outside sales position except that it all happens in cyber-space, and there is no door-to-door component.
Think of yourself as the salesman, one of many, for a specific product or service and you’ve mastered the basics of what is an affiliate.

People have all kinds of products and services that they want to sell online.
Part of the process to become successful is to have a large amount of traffic that is interested in what you have to offer. The way you can accomplish this is by having salesman or affiliate promote your products.

When a sale is made, you share the earnings with your affiliate/salesman through commissions.

Successful affiliates make a good living by promoting products and services of other vendors in order to make that commission.

For the purposes of this e-book, I will focus on one of the easiest affiliate networks to get started – Clickbank and list the others with a brief look at the larger networks. Once you learn how an affiliate network like Clickbank works, you will be able to expand that to other larger networks that have a myriad of different products and services that are commissionable.

Clickbank is one of the largest, oldest affiliate networks out there online. Clickbank sells only digital products, is extremely easy to learn how to use and has a ton of vendors just waiting to snap up a good affiliate.

There is no waiting time to become a part of the Clickbank affiliate family, and the commissions are much higher than the other networks, with some commissions going as high as 75%.

Next Basics of Affiliate Marketing 2

POOR QUALITY TRAFFIC - 5 Killer Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

2011-07-06T09:02:00.000-07:00

POOR QUALITY TRAFFIC - 5 Killer Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

Sometimes you may try a bit TOO hard to get traffic to your sites. You might end up focusing too much on getting a large quantity of visitors, and the quality of the traffic might be too low or untargeted.

While it’s great to have a large number of visitors to your site, it’s much more important to make sure the traffic is quality traffic. By quality traffic, I mean traffic that shares a few traits.

Traffic should be:

Targeted to the niche.
More than curious, but directly interested in the topic.
Willing to purchase something in the niche.
Able to purchase something in the niche.

The traffic should be well-targeted to the niche of your site. You might be able to get a few thousand visitors from social bookmarking sites to your website about marine aquariums, but these visitors may be only vaguely interested.
You might buy 10,000 random visitors to your marine aquarium site for $9 on eBay, but chances are most of those visitors will NOT be interested in aquarium fish!
But if you got that traffic from targeted keywords via PPC, or if you got the traffic from search engines or a banner ad on a related site, those visitors would almost certainly be interested in aquariums!

Targeted traffic can be elusive. Sometimes it’s pretty difficult to get targeted traffic to your site. If you’re in an extremely competitive niche, you will probably find it fairly hard to get a nice quantity of visitors.

Most of the time it’s just a matter of:

Getting backlinks from quality, RELATED sites.
Writing articles on the topic.
Submitting your site to related directories.
Buying links on related sites.
Spending time working on SEO.
Targeting long-tail keywords with little competition.
Focusing more on quality than quantity.

Search engine traffic is some of the most targeted and high-quality traffic possible. You should aim for getting at least 50% of your traffic from search engines, if possible.

Why is search engine traffic so targeted?
Well, because people who are searching for something are obviously interested in the topic.

Let’s say you are at a social bookmarking site and you see an interesting article about a recent archaeological find. Out of curiosity, you click the link and read the story. It’s an interesting story, but only because it was a little strange and unusual.

On this site, they are advertising a series of books and videos about ancient civilization. Would you buy? You might. But chances are you wouldn’t. That single interesting story probably would NOT be enough to get you to buy this product, unless you just happened to be interested in the topic already.

Now, let’s say you were extremely interested in ancient civilizations. You get on Google and you search for “ancient civilization” + “recent discoveries”. You find this interesting article, and you read it.

Now you see the ad for the book and video series. Would you buy? If you didn’t already have it and you could afford it, there is a very good chance that you would, because you’re already highly interested in the subject!
This is the kind of traffic you need to get. You need to get traffic that is already interested in a topic. While getting some extra traffic is nice, you should try to focus more on TARGETED traffic.

PAYING TOO MUCH FOR PPC ADS - 5 Killer Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

2011-07-06T08:58:00.000-07:00

PAYING TOO MUCH FOR PPC ADS - 5 Killer Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

Many affiliate marketers use pay-per-click traffic from sites like Google AdWords to send traffic to their affiliate links. It’s a great idea if you have the money to spend, but it’s not easy.

PPC is actually pretty difficult to use if you don’t know what you’re doing. There are dozens of different ways to screw up a PPC campaign, and if you’re not careful, you could end up spending far more than you make.

Another worry with PPC traffic is the fact that your affiliate checks will take a while to come. You may not get paid before your PPC account comes due. If this happens, you’re on the line personally for the bill. If you can’t pay it, you could lose your account!

There are several ways to make sure you pay as little as possible for your clicks:

Choose long-tail keywords that are very closely related to the product you’re promoting.
Bid for product names rather than just keywords.
Be careful to avoid unprofitable keywords like “free”.
Group keywords into related groups.
Make sure your landing page is very high quality.
Make sure your landing page is easy to navigate.
Don’t send traffic directly to affiliate links.
Try to get visitors to opt-in to an email list before you send them to your affiliate link so you can market to them over and over.
Watch campaigns closely and weed out unprofitable keywords.
Monitor sales and eliminate products that don’t convert.
Make sure your ads get a high CTR on AdWords. The higher your click-through ratio, the cheaper your clicks will be.

You have to be sure that everything you do on PPC is tracked and monitored carefully. Since you are spending money for every click, you must make sure those clicks are as profitable as possible.

If you can set up named campaigns or use tracking codes in the affiliate programs, you should do so. This will help you see exactly how much traffic you’ve sent via PPC (as opposed to other traffic sources) so you can test various ads and keywords.

PUTTING TOO MANY OR TOO FEW ADS - 5 Killer Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

2011-07-06T08:56:00.001-07:00

PUTTING TOO MANY OR TOO FEW ADS

Whenever you make an affiliate site, it may be tempting to put a ton of ads, assuming that the more ads you put on the site, the more clicks you will get.

This is a mistake. When you put too many ads, it will be harder to get links to the site, and people will also be more likely to hit the back button without viewing your site at all.

Think about it for a moment. When you visit a website that has a large number of ads, what is your first inclination? For most people, they assume that the site was made solely for the purpose of making money. They will usually leave if there are too many ads.

Some people make the opposite mistake. They don’t want to “bother” their visitors, so they put very few ads. They may make the ads so small that they are practically invisible. In this case, they will get very few clicks, thus making very little money.

You have to find a good balance. You need to make sure you have enough ads, and they are prominent enough to get clicked often, but not so intrusive that visitors leave immediately.

I like to use Google AdSense’s guidelines. They allow a maximum of three ad blocks per page, and I find that works well for affiliate banners, too.
I usually put one ad at the top of the page, another either in line with the content or in the sidebar, and another at the bottom. On some sites, I may also place a few text links in the content itself.

You should also make sure to showcase the ads in a way that makes them appear to be part of the site, but so they will also stand out. If you make them too obvious, the site will look ugly and spammy. If you blend them too well, they won’t be noticed.

You should test and track various ad types, sizes, and placements until you find a combination that gets you plenty of clicks, but also plenty of sales on those clicks.

POOR CHOICE OF AFFILIATE PROGRAMS - 5 Killer Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

2011-07-06T08:55:00.000-07:00

POOR CHOICE OF AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

When you choose an affiliate product to promote, you should be sure to choose one that you believe will convert well. You should also be sure the company itself is known for integrity, or at least doesn’t have a poor reputation.

It can be difficult to anticipate how well a particular merchant will convert. If you have the opportunity to choose between a number of different merchants for a single product, it won’t always be price that determines how well each one will convert.

There are many factors that determine whether someone will buy from a particular merchant. These factors may include, but are not limited to:

Whether they have heard of or trust the merchant.
The price of the item.
The price of shipping.
Shipping methods available.
Reviews of the product or merchant.
Customer service quality.
Site quality and usability.
Quality of the description and sales method.
Payment methods available.
Quality and quantity of item photos.
Many other factors.

Sometimes you may think you have a winning combination. You might find a merchant that has a very low price, low shipping, a great looking site, and a quality presentation, but it may not convert well. There may be factors you’ve missed, or factors you never would have thought of.

In this case, you should test other merchants. It might be that the particular item you’re promoting just doesn’t sell well. It happens! But it may also be the merchant, so you might want to test various merchants before you abandon a product completely.

You also need to look at other products. Sometimes a product just doesn’t convert well at any merchant, in which case you would just need to choose something else.
Occasionally you may choose an entire niche that is unprofitable. This doesn’t happen all that often, but it can happen. In this case, it’s best to sell the site for whatever you can get for it and move on to a more profitable niche.

Not building an email list - 5 Killer Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

2011-07-06T08:53:00.000-07:00

Affiliate marketing is a very simple concept. Almost anyone can make money with it very easily. But there are a few things you can do that can derail your efforts big time.

If you know these things before you get started, then you have a much better chance of making really good money right from the start. If you’ve already started your affiliate marketing efforts, you may be making these mistakes already.
But it’s never too late. You can start turning your campaigns around right now, and it only takes a few minor changes in most cases. In fact, just a few easy changes can quickly increase your income. Perhaps doubling, tripling, or even more the amount you make!

NOT BUILDING A LIST

Perhaps the biggest mistake affiliate marketers make is not building an email list. Building a list is crucial in most markets. You need a list of people you can market to again and again.
Unless your sites are particularly sticky (meaning people stay for a long time and come back often), you only get one shot at making money from each visitor.

If someone leaves your site without buying anything, that is a customer lost. They probably won’t be back to your site, so you’ve lost them forever.

But if you get them to opt-in to your email list before they leave, then you have the potential to market to them again and again. You will be able to send marketing messages out to them often, and you may get several sales from a single individual over the course of their membership to your list.

If you aren’t already building an email list, I highly recommend doing so. While not every niche is entirely appropriate for building a list, the vast majority of niches will work very well with email marketing.

You may want to give away a freebie as an incentive to get people to join your list. This might be a free report, or some sort of course that teaches them how to do something. This will help entice more people to join your mailing list.

Autoresponder Sample - Subject: How are Your Affiliate Marketing Campaigns Going?

2011-07-03T20:27:00.000-07:00

Autoresponder Sample - Subject: How are Your Affiliate Marketing Campaigns Going?

I just thought I’d check in and see how your affiliate marketing campaigns are going. Are you making any money yet? I’ve heard from a few people this week who are really excited about making their first real money online, and I am so thrilled to hear it! These kinds of stories just make my day!

If you’re not making any money yet, I’d love to hear why. What are you still struggling with? Are you still afraid of failure? Are you having trouble with a particular issue?

By now I’m sure you know of my affiliate marketing guide. I wrote it specifically for people who are just getting started or having a hard time making money online. If you haven’t picked up a copy, maybe you should do that right now.
I truly leave no stone unturned. I cover everything from niche selection, to how to get started with NO money and NO experience, to how to get more traffic and TONS more!

I’m taking you step-by-step through the EXACT process I use to make money online. This is the same system that was taught to me by my friend all those months ago, and the same system that helped me quit my job while making three times more money!
I truly believe in this system. If it can work for me, it can work for ANYBODY. Honestly, it’s dead simple. You don’t even need any money to get started. If you have not one penny to your name, you can still make money online!

It doesn’t get any easier than this. I love waking up late, checking my stats, and seeing that I made enough to pay my car payment while I slept! Can you imagine what a thrill that is?

You can do it, too!

Click here to grab your copy of the definitive guide to affiliate marketing and start making money online TODAY!

Autoresponder Sample - Subject: Who is Your Inspiration?

2011-07-03T20:26:00.000-07:00

Autoresponder Sample - Subject: Who is Your Inspiration?

Most entrepreneurs have people who inspire them. They either have direct mentors they work closely with, or they have entrepreneurs they admire like Donald Trump or Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google.

My inspiration is my friend and mentor who got me into affiliate marketing in the first place. He was making about five times as much as I was in my day job, and I looked up to him like crazy! He took me under his wing and really taught me the ins and outs of making great money with affiliate marketing.

Because of his guidance and inspiration, I knew it was possible to make money with affiliate marketing, and I really believed it could happen for me, too. I figured if he could do it, I could, too!

Do you have anyone like that? Do you have a mentor who is helping you get started, or someone you really look up to and aspire to be like someday? Of not, you should!
I highly recommend looking for inspiration all around you. I personally look up to my friend and mentor, but I also regularly read entrepreneurship blogs and magazines looking for even more inspiration.

I find that when I read stories of “average” men and women making money with their own businesses, it gives me that extra motivation to do it. I’m no genius, but I like to think I’m relatively smart. I figure if average folks can do it, I should be able to do it, too!

I’m not doing any personal mentoring or coaching at the moment. I’ve just got too much going on right now. But I did put out a guide on affiliate marketing just to help out those who are just getting started or are still struggling with affiliate marketing.

It will guide you every step of the way, so if you need that extra help, you should pick up a copy today!

Autoresponder Sample - Subject: SEO and Affiliate Marketing

2011-07-03T20:25:00.000-07:00

Autoresponder Sample - Subject: SEO and Affiliate Marketing

A lot of people have been asking me why SEO traffic is so great for affiliate marketing. They want to know why a trickle of SEO traffic is often better than an outright deluge of social traffic.

Well, look at it this way. If you’re browsing a social site like StumbleUpon because you’re bored, and you see a link for a review of a massive plasma television that looks really cool, you might be willing to click the link to take a look at it. You might even think, “Wow, I’d love to own one of those… someday.” But chances are you wouldn’t actually be ready to spend several thousand dollars through that person’s affiliate link.

Now, let’s say you have decided for sure that you want to buy a plasma television. Maybe you don’t know which model yet, but you know you’ve been very happy with Sony products in the past. You go to Google and search for “Sony plasma television reviews”, because you’re looking to find out which of Sony’s plasma television has the best bang for the buck.

You come across an affiliate site that actually seems to have some unbiased reviews. They don’t seem to have actually USED all of the televisions, because they point out reviews on other sites and forums, and they mention “trying out the model in the store”. The site seems pretty legit and honest.

You would probably be MUCH more likely to buy from this site than from the link you picked up on StumbleUpon, because you’ve been pre-qualified. You are already interested in buying a plasma television, which is why you were looking for reviews in the first place.

Now, you may not be ready to buy at that exact moment. Maybe you still have to save up for the model you choose, or you have to talk to your significant other about it first. But you are so much more likely to buy than if you just “stumbled upon” the site through random browsing.

I explain more about this in my complete affiliate marketing guide. It teaches you everything you need to know to get started in affiliate marketing, including the importance of SEO in your affiliate campaigns!

Click here to get your copy now!

Autoresponder Sample - Subject: Problems with Affiliate Marketing

2011-07-03T20:24:00.000-07:00

Autoresponder Sample - Subject: Problems with Affiliate Marketing

It’s not unusual to have problems when you’re just getting started with affiliate marketing. If you are experiencing issues, don’t worry about it! Most people have some problems when they first start out!

I’m going to take to you about a couple of the most common problems. Hopefully you’ll be able to avoid making the same mistakes I did – and so many others do again and again.

First of all, the fear of failure is nothing new. Pick up nearly any magazine or book about entrepreneurship and you’ll probably read something about this horrible affliction.

To get to the bottom of the fear of failure, you have to figure out just what it is you’re afraid of. Some people are afraid of being embarrassed if they fail. Others are afraid they will spend a lot of time on something that doesn’t make them any money. Some just plain don’t like to fail at anything.

What you have to do is figure out why you’re so afraid to fail and tackle it dead on! If you don’t want to be embarrassed, do your affiliate marketing behind the scenes and don’t make a big deal of it until you ARE successful! If you are afraid you’ll spend a lot of time on it and you won’t make money, just take baby steps and do a little here and there. Once you make some money, it will boost your confidence. If you don’t like to fail, get over it! Everyone fails from time to time. (Just ask Ben Franklin about failure!) Ok, you can’t ASK him, but Google Ben Franklin and “failure” and you’ll see what I mean!

The other major problem new affiliate marketers have is they just don’t know where to start! There are so many ways to make money with affiliate marketing. How can you tell which one is best for you, or which would make you the most money?

Well, I have a guide that is meant just for newbies and those who are still struggling with affiliate marketing. It takes you step-by-step through everything you need to do to get started! I think you’ll really find it useful if you’re having trouble getting started!

Click here to get it!

Autoresponder Sample - Subject: Are You Making Good Money Online?

2011-07-03T20:21:00.000-07:00

Autoresponder Sample - Subject: Are You Making Good Money Online?

Ok, I know. Everyone seems to have a different definition of “good” money. For some, just making a little speaking money for movies or clothes is “good money”. For others, it’s not good money unless it can pay their mortgage payment or their rent. Still others define “good money” as something that can get them the good things in life like fancy cars and expensive jewelry.

No matter what you definition of “good money” is, you’re probably not making as much as you want. Am I right? Very few people on this earth are truly satisfied with the amount of money they earn. A lot of people these days are taking on a second or even third job just to make ends meet! If you’re one of those people, keep reading!

I was once in the same position. I was living paycheck to paycheck, sometimes having to get food from a food bank when my paycheck wouldn’t cover it. It was downright embarrassing. But I was already working 60 hours a week. I was killing myself 10 hours a day, 6 days a week! My one day off I was too exhausted to enjoy.
But a friend of mine told me he was making money on the internet. I assumed it was with something raunchy or bordering on illegal, but when he showed me what he was doing, I was absolutely astonished!

He was making simple websites and blogs, putting up affiliate ads, and raking in the cash all day, every day! Most days he didn’t even touch his computer except to check his stats. It was pure autopilot.

I thought he surely wouldn’t teach me his secrets. Why would he want the competition? But I was so intrigued that I blurted out, “I sure wish I had to guts to beg you to teach me how to do this.”

“Beg? Come on, man! Why do you think I told you about this in the first place? If you want to learn, of course I’ll teach you!”

Sure enough, he taught me everything he knew. It took me a few months, but I was able to quit my day job and I’m making over THREE TIMES what I was when I was slaving for a jerk of a boss!

And I can teach you the same things in my step-by-step affiliate course. You’ll learn everything my friend taught me that helped me quit my day job for good! Click here to grab your copy now!