The Affiliate Reporter

Writing an Article

jim@theaffiliatereporter.com (Jim Saunders) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:33:45 +0000

Articles can drive a considerable amount of traffic to your site and improve your web sites search engine ranking. Informative or entertaining articles will keep the readers interest and improve the chances that they'll return. After getting a general idea of what topic you want to write about the next thing to do is keyword research. Use the main keyword you are targeting in the article title and a couple more times in the article body.

The quickest way to write an original article is to follow a routine, having a system for researching and writing articles will save a lot of time. Generate four key points with the keywords based around the following:-

Attention- The article title and first paragraph need to get the readers attention, often something controversial will suck them in for example a title like "Has Your iPod Exploded Recently" will get the attention of iPod users. Ensure the article is closely related to the title or no-one will read past the first paragraph if they feel they've been baited.
Interest- The second paragraph needs to keep the reader interested, if we stick with "exploding iPods" then this paragraph would explain what could possibly cause an iPod to explode.
Desire- Again staying with the iPod theme by using the third paragraph to cover the solutions to the exploding problem.
Action - If you've managed to keep the readers attention this far then they are likely to follow your call-to-action, direct them to a solution.

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A service like Wordtracker Labs Keyword Questions can help generate ideas around the keyword you are using. Once you have four points the basic structure is done, expand on each point and build each into a paragraph. If you get stuck at this point as I often do try searching for your entire point or keyword in the search engines and gather ideas from the results.

If writing original articles seems like too much work then rewrite a Private Label Rights article. How much of the PLR article to rewrite is up to you there is no rule however as with an original article using the right keywords is important. When rewriting PLR articles ensure they make sense and stay on topic.

Website Optimisation Tips for Article Marketing Success

jim@theaffiliatereporter.com (Jim Saunders) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:00:02 +0000

Article marketing has long been viewed as one of the best strategies for online business. This initiative can help to build reputation, as well as providing hyper-links to your site for the article readers, who may well represent partially qualified leads. The Internet thrives on the presentation of quality information and well written articles can be your organisation's key contribution. The major search engines value good articles highly, and it's essential that you compose focused and optimised material for your project.

Once you have compiled your comprehensive list of appropriate keywords for your niche, you should prepare articles accordingly. Write very informative pieces which include your keywords and make sure that they are distributed to relevant and powerful article directories and other repositories around the web. Anchor text-based hyper-links within the article resource boxes should point back to the landing pages, as specified, on your website.

You should remember that you need to focus on your website development, as well as your article composition and distribution, as this is equally important within the overall picture. Your website must be adequately optimised to enable you to get the most out of any article marketing campaign, and to ensure this you should concentrate on several areas:

1. Understand that the primary reason why people visit your page is to seek information. You should not spend too much time on fancy presentation, complex graphics and flash animation, if it detracts from the overall message.

2. The layout of your site must be easy to understand and navigate. Visitors must be able to progress from point to point or page to page without any confusion and there should be a logical progression when it comes to presentation of information.

3. Ideally, you should present a separate page for each keyword that you focus on during your article marketing campaign. In this way, the search engines will match the keyword contained in your article's anchor link with the keyword optimised on each page.

4. Ensure that the content of the page is directly related to the content of the article. Keep in mind that the reader of the article is being encouraged to check out this site through the actual content of the article itself. He or she should be able to continue this process of discovery, which may be leading them further into your sales funnel!

5. To make sure that the search engines recognize the landing page you have specified as relevant, you should make sure that you:

* Put the exact keywords in the title of your page, as well as in the description.

* Repeat the keywords in the body of the content on the page. It is suggested that you do this to no more than a density of 1%, ie 5 times within 500 words of content, so that it appears natural.

* The H1 tag is very important and the keywords should appear here too.

* Specify the keyword and related keywords (sometimes known as secondary keywords) within your meta-data keywords tag.

6. There is increasing evidence that Google is placing a lot of emphasis on synonism and latent semantic indexing. This means that they will be looking for the existence of certain words and phrases within your content, relating back to their large databases of information, so they can accurately judge whether your content is indeed relevant to your primary keywords.

As you roll out your article marketing campaign, there's a lot to concentrate on. Make the most of each article that you compose and distribute by ensuring that every element of your campaign is optimised. To ensure that you don't miss any of these essential steps, give some thought to taking on a Virtual Assistant to make the most of your online business development.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an accomplished Executive Virtual Assistant Service which helps companies of all sizes reach their commercial targets. Want to get more information about online business building success strategies that really work? Then why not Contact VMF Today at=> http://www.virtualmissfriday.com

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How To Become a Super Affiliate

jim@theaffiliatereporter.com (Jim Saunders) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:32:54 +0000

The humdrum existence of going to the office day after day doing the usual 9-5 shift is a trying task for those who have lived all their lives doing so. This is why the convenience of doing work at home under amazingly flexible working hours is a dazzling prospect to them. Doing work at home that is as fulfilling as having a career working for a computer on the 19th floor of a skyscraper is already a possibility in these modern times. This is because the jungle-like network that is the internet has given birth to a business that has given some people practically new lives doing nothing but so.

This particular business allows people to work at home under flexible working hours. There is no boss to scream around putting pressure on everyone about the deadline at hand. There is no clutter of messy paperwork that needs to be completed the soonest possible time. Conveniences such as these are experienced by those who are into affiliate marketing, the newest way to earn money without having to go through all sorts of routine found in regular employment.

Those who have been in the business long enough can attest to the fact that it is a lucrative business indeed, one that can actually give people things that they could not possibly possess or experience under ordinary circumstances.

The business called affiliate marketing involves an affiliate's promotion of a merchant's website. Here the website owned by the affiliate is made to advertise and market the website of the merchant through the affiliate program that they run. Whenever someone clicks on the merchant's website promoted by the one owned by the affiliate, the affiliate is given a commission. This is in recognition of his effort in helping the merchant make a sale.

The system involved in affiliate marketing seems easy, but it also takes a lot of diligence and perseverance for one to be able to penetrate it thoroughly. Those who want to get into this type of business should possess the necessary skills to be able tread through the industry with confidence and self-assurance. Still, other factors are needed by one to be able to really break in. Knowledge about the business at hand is very important as it dictates the actions that are to be done by people who are into it.

The leading figure in affiliate marketing is the super affiliate. He is basically an e-mail marketer who collects large databases of e-mail addresses through newsletters. Super affiliates are also those who know the business even better than affiliate managers as a result of their knowledge about the affiliate marketing industry inside out. Those who want to be super affiliates should know that becoming a super affiliate is not easy, because it takes a lot to be able to master the marketing craft.

Becoming a super affiliate means having one's own website and autoresponder. These tools will help a lot in one's facilitation of the business. Building one's own list is another. Creating a loyal customer base and taking care of it is one secret that successful super affiliates have. Making good customer relations is also important if one wants to be a super affiliate to reckon with.

Continuing to market to the people on one's list is another must if one wants to succeed as a super affiliate. Sending out quality content in lieu of ads is an advantage as products are marketed better whenever enough information is given about them.

Building traffic to one's own site is also one of the most essential points in the affiliate marketing business. Making one's affiliate links his own business will allow him to build a strong relationship with his customers, enabling him to market to them over and over again.

The most important thing one should remember if he wants to become a super affiliate is to treat affiliate marketing as a business first and foremost. If he is capable of doing this, then he will never have to go back to the humdrum existence of working the 9-5 shift. A career as a super affiliate in the business which will change his life forever could possibly take that unexciting job's place.

Affiliate Marketing A - Z

jim@theaffiliatereporter.com (Jim Saunders) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 05:02:59 +0000

Don't Make These Common Mistakes!

jim@theaffiliatereporter.com (Jim Saunders) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:31:03 +0000

Myths concerning affiliate marketing are appealing and attractive. People who do not know the entire system the wrong way round are prone to believing that it is something capable of giving them great fortune overnight. Stories concerning affiliates who earn tremendous amounts of money swim in their heads, and while these stories are as true as they can be, there are those who believe that they are going to have the same fortune once they indulge in this particular business.

It is true enough that affiliate marketing is financially rewarding. People who have gone through everything to be able to succeed in this business are reaping the seeds that they untiringly sowed. Many of them enjoy the kind of existence that was not possible for them to have had under ordinary circumstances. Having gone through the A-Z of affiliate marketing, however, these people are the ones who know that while such business is lucrative, there is absolutely no easy money in it.

Ignorance of this fact is one of the main reasons why there are people who fail miserably in the internet business. There are those who believe in myths concerning the easy money involved in systems such as affiliate marketing. They do not know that there are those who have wasted time, effort and too many resources in trying to pursue the life of ease that they believe this business will give them. And so they go into affiliate marketing armed with nothing but myths and fantastical notions of wealth swimming in their consciousness, never realizing that they bound to make mistakes that would prove to be their downfall.

What may be the reason why in businesses such as affiliate marketing, many are called but few are chosen? Perhaps the answer lies on the fact that many affiliates make mistakes that result from their ignorance of facts concerning how the entire business runs. affiliate marketing is not as simple as an affiliate promoting a merchant's wares through his website and getting paid for it. It is also about knowing the market and the customers at hand.

Discovering what the most common mistakes affiliates make can perhaps dispel the gloom about myths surrounding affiliate marketing by correcting some wrong notions about it. It might also be able to make those concerned understand that like any other business, there are dos and donts involved in this one if they want to make each of their steps count. The first common mistake affiliates make is their lack of knowledge concerning principles involved in their business. This refers to the affiliate's knowledge of search engines in particular.

affiliate marketing involves advertising, and advertising through the internet could not have been better without the existence of search engines. What every affiliate has to do is to make these search engines his best friend through studying search engine optimization closely. This way, he is able to know what to do in connection with building a better website to ultimately use for his business.

The second is that affiliates make the mistake of stuffing their sites with banners that do not provide enough information about the product at hand. The best way to battle this mistake is to provide good content hand-in-hand with such banners. It is important for customers to know and understand the features of a product, and good content will be able to help them realize this goal.

The third is that there are affiliates who make the mistake of promoting only one product. Consequently, customers are not given enough options to choose from. There is also the risk of generating fewer sales as compared to having more options for customers ponder about. It is always better to give them a few better alternatives than to give them only one.

The fourth is that there are affiliates who make the mistake of promoting too many products. As a result, customers are confused and end up beyond making a choice. It is perhaps good to give them only the best choices. This is because it is ultimately up to them to judge which one is the best for them to patronize.

All in all, affiliates that are doomed to fail in this business are those who do not exert enough effort to understand everything involved in the industry that they are in. Knowing their path step by careful step will prove to be beneficial to them, as there is no other way to succeed than to go through any path slowly but surely.

Why Search Engine Optimization is a Big Waste of Money

jim@theaffiliatereporter.com (...) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:28:56 +0000

It probably seems rather odd to launch a new blog on Search Engine Optimization and have the first post be written about it being a waste of money. I should probably support this opinion by throwing out a bunch of impressive numbers with lots of comma's that I dug up during my hours of research, but to be completely transparent, I really didn't do hours of research to write this. I could also talk about the amount of money spent on Search Engine Optimization each year and of course show its effectiveness with a really cool 3D chart, but charts and graphs generally irk me.

I have chosen instead to write from my own experience as the owner of an SEO company as well as a client...as a student of some of the most well known SEO guru's in the industry as well as a teacher. Many of you are going to agree with what I have to say throughout the course of this and many of you won't...and both of you are welcome and encouraged to leave your comments!

So, what exactly makes SEO a waste of money? Well, if your primary goal is to get a top 10 listing on Google, you can accomplish that fairly easily with little or no effort. You don't need to pay an expert to do it. All you need to do is find a keyword phrase that doesn't have that much competition, write an article or two using it, make sure it's in the title of your page and create a handful of external links using that phrase. Tada! So how come the phone still isn't ringing?

It is because there are so many other important aspects to Search Engine Optimization that go beyond keyword research and placement but are often overlooked. In most cases, it is because your goals are off. Most companies focus on a top 10 listing or doubling traffic, neither of which is a guarantee that business is going to improve. At the end of the day, what do you want the outcome of your campaign to be? I would think that it is to grow your business, correct?

If that is your goal, then it is clear that there is more to Search Engine Optimization than just your ranking and traffic. You need to consider all of the following:

Ideal Client: If you aren't clear on who your ideal client is, then how will you know what they want? Suppose you run a salon and your target audience is "anyone with hair." How will you be able to connect with your visitor when a young woman has completely different needs than an older man? Yet, they all have hair.

Design: You can drive tens of thousands of visitors to your website, but if the site doesn't have the look, feel and quality that the visitor is expecting, they will not do business with you. Try launching a bank website with really bright colors and pictures of bank vaults, gold coins and stacks of cash everywhere and let me know how it goes.

Keywords: When you are clear on who your ideal client is, put yourself in their shoes and learn what they are searching for and how they search for it. Someone looking for a plumber to redo their bathroom is going to search in a completely different frame of mind than someone who came home to 2 feet of water in their basement.

Content: Writing quality content that will appease the search engines at the same time that it inspires the reader is the key. If you cram your keyword phrase in the text enough times, you may get a good ranking but when your visitor reads your text you may come across as illiterate.

Solutions: Provide solutions for your visitors rather than patting yourself on the back all over your site. When someone does a search online they are either looking for the solution to a problem or the answer to a question. if you site is focused primarily on you and what you have done and what your credentials are, you aren't solving the visitors problem and they will leave the site and find someone that will. Think about it. If you throw your back out and go to the chiropractor, do you want him to ramble on about where he went to school or do you want him to fix the problem?

These are just some of the things we will talk about on this blog. As a reader, my request to you is that if you have an opinion, share it. This blog will work well with me talking to you, but it will work so much better if we all talk to each other!

CEO and Visionary of Sound-n-Vision (http://www.sound-n-vision.com), an Internet Marketing Firm specializing in Professional Website Design and Search Engine Optimization, Marc D. Ensign is also the author of Psychological SEO (http://www.psychologicalseo.com ) and teaches seminars on SEO, Web Design and Social Media.

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Affiliate Marketing Basics- Easy Home Business

jim@theaffiliatereporter.com (Jim Saunders) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 07:49:27 +0000

Is your bank account telling you to find an easy home business to start? We can probably all use a bit more money! Let's talk about an easy home businesses start using the affiliate marketing business model, and the basics of how to do it.

If you currently have a website or a blog you can add affiliate products and increase your income quickly. There are literally millions of products waiting for you to sell as an affiliate marketer.

If you do not have your own website or blog, you can still get started as an affiliate marketer fairly quickly. This is an easy home business to start because you can join affiliate programs very quickly, and it doesn't cost any money.

Your main emphasis has to be to find a market that you want to be in. If you approach your home business from a market standpoint, you will always have plenty of products to sell as an affiliate marketer.

One website that is excellent for providing ideas on affiliate marketing is AssociatePrograms.com. They have been around for over 10 years and have an archived Library of articles and training that anyone can learn from.

You should hop over there and spend a little time coming up with ideas on starting your own home business as an affiliate marketer. Again put the emphasis on the market that you want to be in and try to find something that is interesting to you.

Another thing that you probably should do is go ahead and set up a PayPal account. You will find that many affiliate programs will want to pay you via PayPal, and it's also an excellent payment processor if you need to sell anything and get paid.

One other thing to do is join Clickbank.com. They offer an excellent information affiliate program that will give you access to thousands of eBooks to sell on a variety of topics.

From here on out you need to think like a business person. For example, whenever possible purchase products from your own affiliate marketing website.

You will earn a commission for purchasing from yourself. Plus it gives you the opportunity to experience the products that you're going to be selling.

This is one of the real basics that successful affiliate marketers do. They know everything about their product and then pass that on to their customers.

In summary, affiliate marketing is a very easy home business to start. And it's an excellent way to make money selling products on the Internet.

David Ogden is an established online marketer who specializes in practical website resources and advice that have helped many people like you start their very own home based business. He can help you launch your very own money making website today, ready to take orders and pull in massive profits for you right now, guaranteed! Want to make money online now? Internet Business Training Program Copyright - David Ogden

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Top 5 Tips On How To Avoid Affiliate Marketing Disasters

jim@theaffiliatereporter.com (Jim Saunders) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:02:03 +0000

Copyright (c) 2009 George Lazoryszak

Because affiliate marketing continues to have a high failure rate it should make you want to step back and analyze what successful people are doing. One way to do that is to consider things that do not work when it comes to affiliate marketing.

Here are my top five tips to help you avoid affiliate marketing disaster.

1. Choosing the wrong market to start an affiliate business in is a sure fire way to affiliate marketing failure. One thing we do know today is that it is easier to sell a product in a market where people are already spending money.

It is somewhat amazing that some of the top markets never have reach saturation. You see people starting new websites and begin making money almost immediately in certain niches such as weight loss or diet, sports such as golf, work at home, health, and many others.

You can stand a much better chance to succeed if you choose affiliate programs to represent in these types of niches.

2. Not focusing on a specific product initially can create a disaster for you as well. There are many affiliate websites that have so many products on them that they never make a sale.

Initially you are better off to focus on one product and create a profit from it before adding more products.

3. Be sure and get one website up and running profitably before adding another. This is a common mistake affiliate marketers make where they jump around from one to another and never ever make money in any of them.

4. Using the website provided for you by the affiliate merchant is a big mistake too. There are many different reasons for this, but the main one is you are not going to differentiate yourself from your competition when you use the same website everyone else has.

5. Not using landing pages and sign-up forms is another common mistake you see affiliate marketers make. The most successful affiliate marketers do understand the importance of building a list for future follow up regardless of the niche that they are in.

An email marketing list is an asset you can continue to tap into for many years to come. Therefore you want to build as large of a list as possible, and get to know your subscribers before you expect them to purchase from you.

If you see a failing affiliate marketer there is a pretty good chance they are not doing these five things. If you want to avoid affiliate marketing disaster follow these five tips and watch your affiliate business grow.

Summary: Because affiliate marketing continues to have a high failure rate it should make you want to step back and analyze what successful people are doing. Here are my top five tips to help you avoid affiliate marketing disaster.

i have thoroughly researched the internet to locate the best business ideas and opportunities that will enable you to start... http://vur.me/lazor1/mp

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Online video marketing: Getting Video Article Page Views Cheat The System Details Here!

jim@theaffiliatereporter.com (Jim Saunders) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:00:02 +0000

Online video marketing is a exploding online marketing resources but do not try to cheat the system! Cheating will only lead to you getting banded from the online video sites such as Youtube, Metacafe, Myspace, Dailymotion, Revver, Crackle, Veoh, and Yahoo video. Then all your efforts converting your articles to video will just be a waste of time. Ok your probably thinking what is the right way to increase your video page views? We are going to discuss just that in our article today.

When you start to optimize your metadata tags for your video article do not ad keywords, or keyword phrases that are not used in your article video. Also do not use keywords or keyword phrases in your description metadata tags that are not used in your video. This will get you in trouble too. And lastly do not use words in your video metadata tags that are not relevant to your video article. Folks if you think about it, this is just common sense. I know when I do a search on say google and when the screen populates with results I do not want to click on a site and find that is not relevant to what I was searching for. It is no different when you search for relevant videos articles. I expect to see videos related to what I was searching for. All cheating does is reduce your online credibility and get you banned online. Then what are you going to do?

Another common method people try to cheat the online video sites and social media sites is by falsely inflating the video views part of the Youtube algorithm equation by using automated programs that falsely inflate the number of views a specific video has received. If you take a look at Youtubes terms of service it states "Use of any automated system that sends more request messages to Youtube servers in a given time period of time then a human can reasonably produce in the same time period , is forbidden." Folks trying to cheat the video sharing sites and the video search engine sites by inflating the page viewing numbers will flat out get you banded! And for good reason. It is morally wrong and flat out intent to cheat the system. We as online video marketers and social media marketers do not need these kind of people in our industry.

Now here are a few tips to get your video page views the right way.

1.0

Use keywords, and keyword phrase that are included in your video article in your metadata tags such as "title", "description", and "video tag".

2.0

Optimize your thumbnail. The thumbnail images are the first thing that attracts a searchers eye. Have you ever heard the saying, "a picture is worth a thousand words" ? Well in this case your video thumbnail could be worth a thousand page views.

Do not focus on long term promotions of your online video article. Getting video page views quickly will benefit your website traffic far more then any long term promotions. For Example just take a look inside Youtube at links like "rising videos", "top favorites", and "top rated" and take a look at how many video page views the videos that are listed here have. These are the lists you want your video articles to be listed on.

Well folks that concludes my article on cheating the video sites. I hope this information is useful. Have a nice day and the best of luck with your online video marketing efforts!

Find out more details on developing a useful social media marketing strategy when you visit my website cheating the video sites http://www.oldfishinghole.com/article-marketing-strategy.htm l Also if you are a article marketer like myself, Your article can now talk Revolutionary software turns your articles to video in 3 minutes! Take A Free Test Drive Today! visit the site above for details

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5 Helpful Affiliate Marketing Tips To Make Extra Money

jim@theaffiliatereporter.com (Jim Saunders) — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 23:28:20 +0000

With millions of affiliate programs to choose from there really is no reason why a person couldn't make extra money as an affiliate marketer. In this article we will take a look at 5 useful affiliate marketing tips you can follow to finally make some money of your own!

1. Start a blog on something you enjoy with Blogger.com and monetize it with the Google Adsense affiliate program. This is the simplest way to earn money because you are not selling anything.

You earn a small commission whenever a blog visitor clicks on one of the Google Ads. The more clicks you get the more money you will make.

2. Monetize your blog with cost per action programs. These are also known as pay per lead programs. You can Google search the words "cost per action affiliate programs" and find a handful of CPA networks to join.

Again this is an easier way to make money because you are not actually selling. You make money whenever your blog visitor completes an action such as filling out a short form.

3. Join "get paid to programs" and make money referring people to those. An example of this is InboxDollars who will pay you $10 dollars to join their program.

You get paid to read emails and you can also refer people to the program and make money when they join for free. Often times these programs are not thought of as affiliate programs when in reality it is very easy to get people to join and get paid for it.

4. Sell information products that solve people's problems. Join the ClickBank affiliate program and you will have access to thousands of digital information products you can make money selling.

If you are targeting the right crowd getting people to spend their money online is not hard. Information continues to sell because people are willing to pay for answers if they feel they will find it in the information you are selling.

5. Make money selling memberships to affiliate training membership sites. As more people look at the affiliate marketing business model for income streams they need training on how to properly do it.

An affiliate training membership site is an excellent place to find information on how to affiliate marketing correctly. Because you're solving a problem for affiliate marketers and earning a residual income for yourself, this makes for a good income stream.

These are five useful tips you can use to finally make extra money as an affiliate marketer. There is certainly a skill to doing affiliate marketing correctly.

However there are many advantages to using this business model. You just need to do a handful of things the right way to finally start making money yourself.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy my make money website with free make extra money help on how to make money online. http://www.Team-Schuman.com

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