Beginners Affiliate Marketing - Learn The Basics

There are many steps to take when you are trying to make money online through affiliate programs. The most tedious and most important step will always be the marketing aspect. Beginners affiliate marketing should begin with knowledge. Read everything that you can to find out the different paths that are available.

As an affiliate, there will be millions of products and services to choose from. You should always choose a product that is in a similar niche to that of your websites.

A website that is based on technology should not have ads and affiliate programs about curtains and bedding. You can choose to display shoe ads if your website is about shoes, or you can select products that will go well with that topic such as clothing and accessories

Whatever you choose as an affiliate program, always try to start with a product that you have used. As an affiliate marketer, you are recommending these products to your visitors, and they will not be pleased to find out that the product is subpar after they have purchased it.

You want to suggest a product that you know and love. By telling your website visitors about the honest experience that you have had with a product, the more they will grow to trust your word. Always be honest with your customers. As large as the internet is, it is still small enough and a few bad reviews about you and your website, can travel quickly and destroy your reputation before it has even begun.

A great way to receive and keep new visitors, is with a free offer. When free products are available, other websites will at times link to that web page so that they can tell their own visitors about the great deal. This helps you to get back links as well as new visitors who may decide to check out your website. This can help you to gain new visitors as well as repeat customers.

A well made site can become self sustaining in a short amount of time. This means that you will be able to simply add new content, done by yourself or through a freelancer, while you do other tasks, such as setting up more affiliate websites. You should always keep an eye on all of your web pages, to update and to make sure that there are no problems with your site or server.

While you are still learning, it is best to start with one affiliate program before moving to others. Trying to do, too much too soon can be a recipe for disaster. Put all of your efforts and concentration into making your first affiliate program a success.
Once you have learned how to put your skills into effect, your beginners affiliate marketing techniques can move on to new websites, blogs and affiliate programs.

With the knowledge that you have gained through your first website, you can begin to apply the same techniques to duplicate your previous success. However, you should always remember to check back with websites, ebooks and blogs, so that you are kept up to date on the new affiliate marketing techniques that are available.

Free SEO Tips the Pro's Charge For

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) both the bane and boon of many a person's existence. It's a known fact that the best way to get traffic to your website is by simply having your site show up in the first page or two of the major search engine's results. Visitors that come in from those search engine results pages (referred to as SERP) have two main things going for them. They are more likely to buy, and they didn't cost you any money to get there. Getting your site onto those first two pages can be a struggle, and people are always watching what you are doing and gunning for the top spot. You have to keep aware of all of the latest tactics and methods and measure yourself against your competitors.

Yes, competitors. Many people aren't aware of the competitive nature of SERPs positioning, but it is. Keep in mind that you are ranked in comparison with the other sites in the results. If the search engine thinks that your content is more relevant, then you rank higher, if it is determined that your content is less relevant, then you fall in the results. If they know what they are doing, the other sites showing up for the searches you wish to rank high in are watching you, and the other sites on the first two pages to see what they are doing, and if they are rising or falling.

So how do you ensure that you can rank well against the other sites out there and rise in the SERPs? Well, for starters, let's assume that there are only three search engines, because frankly, Google, Yahoo, and MSN (in that order) represent the majority, the vast majority of searches. And Google represents the vast majority amongst those three. For the purposes of this article we'll focus only on Google. If you do right by them, what you do will be good for other search engines as well.

Before we go any further it's important that you understand the nature of SEO. It is not an exact science. The exalted minds inside the Googleplex do not share their secret sauce with the unwashed masses. The reason for this is simple: if they revealed exactly how their logic works, it would be exploited--this has happened before. The methods for performing SEO are based upon the trial and error of many, many internet users as they worked out what works, what doesn't and what will get your site unindexed - or worse: banned.

This is important. There are good and bad ways to optimize your site. The bad ways are called 'Black Hat'. Sure, they may work for awhile, and some Google can't (or doesn't bother to) pick up automatically. However you can report a site to Google as using Black Hat SEO tactics and Google will remove that site from the index (meaning it won't show up in search results). Removing a site from the index is usually only done for a certain amount of time and can be appealable. Banning is far more severe and banned sites are often gone for good with no way to get Google to add it back to their index. Beware of a lot of things that seem shady. If you think they are shady, chances are that the folks at Google will think so too and if one of those other sites in the SERPs wants to rise up and they visit your site and see your shady tactics, they won't hesitate to report you.

Yeah, it's a bit unfair, but it's the world we live in. Google's not alone in this--the other search engines will do it too.
Now that we've got that out of the way, let's dive into the two ways to optimize your site.

On Page Optimization
This is what most people think of when they think of SEO. In reality it is the less effective of the two methods, though as Google improves its ability to determine real content from fluff it is getting more valuable. A bit of history first.

Back when people started realizing that they could make or break their business by where they came up in the SERPs, they started adding all sorts of content to their sites to improve their ranking. The most common of these was the meta keywords. These are words that are placed in the code on a website that tell the search engines what the site is about. Way back when the 'net was young, the search engines believed these keywords. They don't anymore. People abused the keywords system by putting their competitors names in them, or by even putting completely bogus words in. A site looking to sell more jeans would put Britney Spears in their keywords to get people to visit them inadvertently. Needless to say, keywords play very little importance anymore. I have gotten sites to the #1 position on Google without using keywords at all.

As the search engines got wise to the whole bogus keywords thing, they started looking at all of the content on a website. They can only read text, so images and animated graphics (like flash) were ignored. People learned tactics to place all sorts of text on their site that was invisible to users, but that the search engines (looking at the source code) would see. So search engines started to distrust the websites themselves.
You're asking yourself how they can know what a site is about then. They asked themselves the same question and came up with an obvious answer: they can't. But other humans can. This is called 'Off Page Optimization' and is covered in the second type of optimization.
They never really disregarded the webpage entirely, but they lowered its importance in their overall factoring of a page's importance and relevancy. However, as their savvy increases and they have more computing power to analyse content, search engines are starting to consider the page's content as being more and more important. They can often discern the difference between human generated and computer generated text, and can tell if the content on a page is relevant to a particular topic or not. As they do this more, the page itself will continue to get more important.

There used to be a lot of tactics and tricks to get the search engines to pay more attention to your page, but the number one tip is now this: Write human readable content (don't try to write it to load it with terms and keywords) that has value and real relevancy. Make sure that you do use the words and phrases you think people will search for, and do use them more than once, but don't go overboard. Bolding and using larger fonts (and H1 tags) will help as well, but don't overdo it. If you make your page look too wonky it will not work for the second type of optimization.

Here's a quick rundown of things to make sure you do.
Make sure the page title is descriptive - make it different with each page if you can:
Use the meta description tag and make it good - this is what most search engines show as the blurb about your site on the results page.
Don't worry alot about your HTML formatting. Search engines are used to reading crappy HTML and they don't care too much.
Make sure you use your keywords in your copy more than once.
Do bold them if it works in your content

If you can make it work, use an H1 or H2 tag. If you are comfortable with CSS you can make the text in them smaller (this is becoming less and less important).
Make sure to use alt and title tags on images. It lets the search engines know what the image is about and can cause your images to show up on the Google image search. Use title tags on your links. It will help the search engines know more about the page you are linking to and improve relevancy. Don't put too many links to other sites. Links out lower your page's importance.

Off Page Optimization
This is also called 'Off Site Optimization' which is a misnomer. Search engines care little about 'websites' and care more about 'web pages'. The reason for this is that they don't link to a site, they link to a page. So what is this mysterious type of SEO you ask? Well, if you read the on page part above you will have learned that Google and the other search engines decided that they couldn't trust the page itself too much as too many people put fake content on a page to generate traffic. So they decided that the best way to know if a page was relevant was to let people do it for them.

How do they make this work? Well, they simply look at who links to you and what their page is about. If your page is about sewing, and another page that Google knows people like is also about sewing and it links to you, then your page is probably not misrepresenting itself. This is the driving force behind what is called 'Page Rank'. Page rank is essentially a calculation of the importance of the pages linking to you vs the relevancy of your content to those pages. If a page about banking links to a page about peanut butter, then chances are that the search engines won't assign any importance to that link, but links between pages of similar content have high importance.

There is also a nebulous thing that we know exists, but don't know how to quantify. It is the matter of how much a search engine trusts a site. Sites with high trust have their outbound links given more importance than sites the search engine does not trust. An easy way to determine if a site is trustworthy or not is to think about it yourself. The folks at the search engines are humans, they will trust the same sites you do and distrust the same sites you do (give or take a bit).

Untrustworthy Sites
Link/Banner farms - sites with nothing but links to various other sites. These used to work, but the search engines wised up and now having a link farm link to you will hurt, not help.
Sites with a lot of advertising on them - The search engines know that these sites are mostly computer generated and have no valuable content, and so don't pay any heed to what they link to.

Black Hat Sites - sites that use questionable SEO tactics aren't ones that you want linking to you. Google is suspicious of them, no reason to make it suspicious of you.

Trustworthy Sites
Directories - There are two types of directories. Automatic and Human verified. Google knows which are which and if your site is listed on a human verified directory (meaning that someone looked at your site and verified that your description and content match the category you chose to have it listed in) then it knows that your content is relevant to the description you gave. Find the directories for your market (just google things like sewing boston directory or whatever your niche/market is and you'll find some to list in.

News Sites - Many news sites allow you to post comments on them. Don't spam, but find some relevant articles to your site and post a few comments. Its not advised that you place your link right in the article (unless you think it applies) but rather have your link in your profile.

Sites with high page rank - This is key. There is little point having sites with no page rank link to your site with no page rank. You want sites with high page rank linking to you. Install the Google toolbar and select yes when it asks if you want to view pagerank. This will let you know how other sites rank and help you determine where to try to get links.

There are a lot of other tips and helpful bits of information out there and I'll be posting a few more specialized articles about them. While there is a lot of bogus software and ebooks out there that will literally tell you no more than what you have read above, there are some that will help you carry out the suggestions above. They'll suggest directories, give you reports on how well you rank against your competitors and many other things. Most you can do on your own, but they take time. Good SEO software should mainly remove the tedious, manual tasks involved in SEO and help you focus on more important things like niche research and adding actual, valuable content to your site.

Taking Your Blog To The Next Level

If you already have your own blog, or are thinking of setting one up, you've undoubtedly read one or more of the beginner's guides to blogging that frequent the Internet. Blog often and provide unique, fresh, entertaining, accurate, and relevant information. That's the content of virtually all of those articles, but this information is only going to get you so far.

The information they provide will help you drive traffic to your blog, as long as you stick at it, and some of the more in depth articles may even give you a basic shove in the right gold paved direction. However, there will come a time when you're ready to take your blog to the next level.

Wordpress And Why We Believe It's Essential For A Successful Blog
First off, I feel this has to be said - if you're not using Wordpress then it's highly likely that you're missing out. Wordpress has the biggest collection of plugins, themes, and other features of any blogging platform and, of course, it's free. Rather than spend money on using another blogging platform, save your dollars to pay for a custom design or get help with marketing.

What Plugins Do For You
Plugins represent the greatest time saving addition to your blog, as well as the greatest opportunity to add increased features and functions that will help you take your blog to the next level. To really succeed in blogging for money, you need to start treating your blog like any website owner treats their website. This means you have to look at it like a business.

A Small Selection Of Top Notch Plugins
Wordpress plugins offer a huge range of different functions and features that you couldn't otherwise obtain. We've listed a few of what we believe to be the more important here but there are many others:

Google Sitemaps - The Google Sitemaps plugin automatically creates an XML sitemap, which can be submitted to many of the major search engines. It will also automatically inform them (ping) when you add any new posts or pages to your blog.

Firestats - There are several in-depth stat packages available as plugins but our personal favorite is the Firestats package. It is crucial that you track and act on the stats for your website. Knowing how your readers found your site can help you with promotion and improve your profit levels by giving you a clearer picture of exactly what your visitors are looking for. It's also good to know the topics that are working out and those that aren't.

Social Bookmarking - The social bookmarking plugin adds the links to the bottom of your posts that lets readers quickly and conveniently bookmark a post with their preferred social bookmarking site. Some of these sites can help you generate traffic and even improve your search ranking.

All In One SEO - The All In One SEO plugin enables you to add a title, description, and keywords to each of your posts. These can help improve search engine results and make your posts appear cleaner in the search results. It can also be used to ensure that visitors are highly targeted.

Related Entries - It's important to get traffic flowing around your posts because the more of your site a person views, the more likely they will be to click affiliate links or Adsense links. If your blog is entirely related to your business, they will be more likely to buy your products or pay for your services.

Adsense Deluxe - Don't let the name fool you. Adsense Deluxe provides a fast and efficient method of adding Adsense code to any post or page, with just a single tag, but it also does the same for Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads.

Comment Subscription - The big benefit of a blog is that you can often persuade interested visitors to keep returning to your corner of the net. The comment subscription plug in further enables them to sign up and be notified of any responses to comments they have added.

Monetizing Your Blog
If you want to make money from your blog and you have a reasonable amount of traffic then the methods of advertising you use will quickly become an important topic to you. There are a lot of different ways to monetize a blog, and it would be damaging of me to try and tell you exactly what method will work without knowing at least a little about your blog. However, there are some things we will willingly share.

Don't Sell Out - There's a temptation for those with more mature blogs to write a post and review an item, website, or service and get paid for doing so. Our opinion on this can be summed up in pretty much one word or two; "don't" or "do not". You might think that you can write a genuinely informative piece and be completely open and honest without your readers ever realizing what you are doing but it is highly unlikely that this is the case.

Sponsorship - Sponsored advertising is a great way to monetize some blogs. Generally speaking (and there are exceptions), the more specific the topic of a blog, the more likely this will prove to be a viable advertising solution and it may be easier to bag sponsored ads than you think. And, because this is Wordpress, there are plugins that help you do it too (AdServe is a good one).

Affiliate Data Feeds - Most affiliate networks have some form of data feed or affiliate feed. If you intend to promote affiliate programs then make the most of these, but ensure that the feed fits with your site. Don't just slap up a bit of code and expect it to miraculously turn your hobby blog into a multi-million dollar, award winning blog because it takes careful planning, ad placement optimization, and some trial and error to get the best results. Guess what? There are numerous plugins to use with the Amazon affiliate program and other programs so make the most of them.

Blog Networks
The final point we're going to cover in this, now extensive, article is whether or not you should join a blog network. A blog network is, unsurprisingly, a network of blogs. The overall aim and the method that connects the blogs differs with each network. Some may be connected by having different subdomains on the same main domain. Others may simply use the same banner. Similarly, some networks are established to bring profit to bloggers and (understandably) to the network owner. Other networks want nothing more than to promote a near state of hippie euphoria over one particular topic.

To Join Or Not To Join
It seems to have become a habit but we can't honestly tell you whether you should definitely join, or definitely not join, a blogging network. They work out for some by providing traffic, improving search rankings, and even helping out with the general blogging process. However, other blogs would fare better on their own, especially the more popular ones. Similarly, some networks are so powerful that they can generate thousands of hits to a blog instantly before you even submit a post, while your blog may carry a smaller network if you have good traffic levels.
The reason that a lot of bloggers do join a network is so that they can network with other bloggers. It provides a sense of belonging and can help develop blogging relationships. If you get invited or accepted into a particularly large network then you should consider trying it because it really can pay dividends but be warned that the large networks have pretty stringent guidelines that you must adhere to in order to be accepted.

What's Next For Your Blog?
This article covers some of the blogging factors that you need to look at when you consider taking your blog to the next level. Simply posting good content will often help you build traffic, but that's really all it will do. You need to monetize that traffic, and where possible, keep it returning over and over again. You should also employ some methods of further building your traffic, other than posting good posts.

Visual Marketing Strategies to Help You Rise Above the Crowd

You have a message to communicate to your prospective customer. Unfortunately, they're so overwhelmed by advertisements and other promotional information that the chances of your message getting across are slim to none. Indeed, studies show that the average consumer in this country is bombarded with nearly 3500 commercial messages a day.

So what can you do to make sure your target market takes notice? What can you do to make sure your organization is presented in the best possible light?

Speak Directly to Your Customer
Use delivery channels that allow for one-to-one communication. For example, it's more difficult to target a prospect or client through a mass media vehicle like television, versus direct electronic mail where your audience volunteers to hear from you. Untargeted, mass-marketing efforts are often disruptive to a prospect (think of the commercials you're thrown to when you hear the familiar, "right after these messages" from television game show hosts).
Media that allows you to communicate more directly to your audience, like variable-data printing (VDP), allow for the customization of text and imagery in print and electronic media. For example, with variable-data and digital printing, it's possible to retrieve an individual's area of interest from a database so that the photography and text in a brochure is tailored specifically to their needs. Always consider media channels that allow you to speak to your audience on their terms.

Be Unique
Make sure your visual marketing is as distinct and individual as your organization. What's the first thing that comes to mind when you see (or hear) a commercial for an automobile dealership? There seems to be an unwritten rule that they must all be loud and overbearing. You know which spots we're talking about: 20 font styles with 20 different colors; flashing, flying and spinning video and graphics; and an extremely loud voiceover. Does the similarity of these commercials help one dealership stand out from the others?
The same holds true for visual communication efforts that use templates, clip art, or overused formats. You deserve a visual presence that is as unique as your organization. Don't follow the crowd--rise above it!

Keep It Clean and Simple
Keep the visual design of your communication uncluttered and approachable. Whether it's on your website, a company brochure, or a billboard, less is usually better. This is particularly true for communication that is introductory in nature. Until a prospective customer becomes interested enough to dig deeper and learn more, present your message in an easily digestible format--most people get overwhelmed when they are presented with too much information. A clean and simple design helps them more easily find what they're after.

Be Consistent
Use a family of typefaces, colors, backgrounds and graphic elements for your communication pieces. Be consistent in your identity marks--make sure your logo is consistent in its presentation, including any associated type treatment. Make it easy on yourself--there's no reason to reinvent the wheel for every new communication piece you develop.

Email Marketing Success-Optimization

It's a common trend that internet marketers do whatever they can do to get the e-mail address of the people visiting their site. Online, you have a really small window of opportunity to convert a visitor into a client and if they're not ready to buy whatever they're browsing on your site, it's a good idea to at least find out who they are so that you can try a different sales approach on them on another day. Just because they're not interested in what you're selling today doesn't mean you can't find something else to tickle their fancy.

There are many ways to do this such as:
- Offer a free report with information they'll find valuable
- Ask them to opt in to your newsletter or subscribe to your website for update
- Intrigue them with entry into a free draw for a prize.

Once someone has signed up for something you've got a valuable e-mail address that you can use to build your list of potential customers. Once you have that e-mail address, you want to be very careful with it because otherwise it won't do much for you.

How do you stay out of the spam filter?
It's a good idea to have someone confirm before you give away anything. Many will put in a fake e-mail address just to get something for free. You can require them to confirm by receiving an e-mail from you and clicking a confirmation link. Remind them to check their junk folder and if they mark your message as not being Spam, their email software could then automatically whitelist you so that you don't land in the spam folder in future. By requesting a confirmation, you also ensure that you are getting a real e-mail address.

Autoresponder software is a good investment for anyone marketing online. Buying into a package AutoResponsePlus or something similar will help you easily manage your mailing lists. The thing is, once you have a mailing list in place and a plan that includes autoresponders, you need to work on your email content and deliverability.

Each communication you make in future with prospective client should do two things:
1) The e-mail needs to offer them something valuable otherwise they'll unsubscribe. Give information or tips or helpful information that will have that person anxious to open future emails from you.
2) You need a call to action line at the end which will entice them to do something you want after they close the email. This could be to visit your website with a handy link, sign up for another service, refer their friends to you or even offer a purchase link so they can buy what you're selling.

Deliverability is definitely a key factor. You want to know that your e-mails reach their recipient's email box so here are a few things you can do to increase the likelihood of your target audience actually opening your e-mail. People are fed up with Spam and using all sorts of programs and techniques to ensure they're not having to sift through spam to get to the important e-mails.

People make use of domain keys and SPF records so that they aren't getting phishing e-mails by those posing as their bank or PayPal.

People use spam filters and this helps them build the trust in their incoming messages. Once you make it past that filter, you're set.

By getting yourself whitelisted, you can increase the likelihood of being delivered to an e-mail inbox instead of a Spam folder and by buying an autoresponder product that's hosted on your own server, you can more easily get past Spam filters because if you've done your bit to get whitelisted, you'll be trusted by your recipient's e-mail server which will increase the chances of your brilliant and persuasive copy being taken seriously