The secret is out; affiliate sites are a great way to make money online. But like any juicy secret, once it gets out there’s no stopping the fall out. In this case the rampant success of some internet entrepreneurs has caused a flood of affiliate sites. This influx has created a more competitive market that demands greater creativity from everyone that wants to excel in it. That’s why it’s not enough to just do the minimum and hope for the best. In order to stand out from the crowd, it’s going to take a few strategic moves that will boost the selling power of your site.

Content

The content of a site is more than just words and pictures. Content is really, at its core, about what the site has to offer. And I mean beyond just the products and services they are selling. There are so many reasons that content can make or break a site. That’s why the phrase “content is king” has become cliché in record time. See, content attracts links, links affect rankings, and high rankings bring traffic. But it’s even more than that. Content establishes credibility, demonstrates authority and generates buzz. Or at least it can and it should aim to.

Content creation can be a highly effective method of increasing the ways in which a customer can come into your site. If you have focused all of your time and energy on strictly ranking your homepage or landing pages for major keywords, you’ve missed a very large boat. According to Google 20-25% of searches are brand new, which means there is a very large portion of the population that is coming up with queries that don’t fit our keyword molds. That’s why it’s so important to try to think like the researching user. What are they looking for? Create that page and give them a place to land. Drawing visitors in is the fist step, and the more nets you have in the water the more fish you can catch

If you are seeking to elevate your affiliate site to the next level, consider offering more. Not more product or not signing up to more programs. I mean more free, quality information. From infographics, to videos, to widgets and games, people need a reason to call a site a destination. If you can give them that reason, they will come.

Usability

A great affiliate site not only has compelling content that brings in and keeps visitors. Successful websites also focus on the other most important aspect of the user experience; usability. Yes, this is a broad term, but it generally refers to the ease with which your site can be used and navigated. Usability research and modification is also a process which will never really be finished. There will always be information to track, user behaviors to analyze and changes which can be made to improve performance.

There are thousands of little ways usability can be improved. But there are a few major elements which are at the crux of it. First if you don’t have one, do yourself a favor and add a search function to your site. Most users would rather use a search bar than spend time trying to dig for what they want. However, if you happen to find a preponderance of visitors using your search function it’s likely an indication that your navigation needs work. It’s important to have each area of your site clearly labeled and whenever possible, singular in purpose. The more specific each page, or series of pages, can be the more accessible they become.

The other major usability issue to address right off the top is dead ends. Broken links and pages which that don’t lead a user logically to an end point can be a huge deterrent. There are so many free broken link checkers online that there really is no excuse for broken pages. Search engines and people hate broken links so do yourself a favor and clean them up. And while you’re at it, for the times when someone does reach one of these pages, create a custom 404 which is helpful and keeps the visitor on your site.

Finally, make sure you have plenty of clear and accessible call to actions. Whether the desired action is “buy now”, “sign up” or even just “read more” make sure that they are every where. Keeping the end goal front and center of every part of your site will help increase the chances that your visitors will actually wind up doing the action you want.

Branding

This part is one of the real defining elements of a great affiliate site. Is there a brand associated with this site? Does it conduct itself as a real legitimate business or a fly by night operation? Just because you don’t directly offer products or services, it doesn’t mean you can’t aren’t a real company. It doesn’t mean you have to be only a doorway to another site. If you implement the right strategies you can become your own brand without ever laying hands on a product.

Branding incorporates a lot of different elements, a logo, consistent themes and professionalism to name a few. The purpose of creating a brand is to identify and convey your voice and point of view. It also creates an entity which is distinctly memorable and unique. With an affiliate site in particular branding can be a huge advantage. Branding breeds recognition, which is something many affiliate sites struggle with. By focusing on building your site into an entity which is branded you make yourself more memorable which elevates you beyond the status of just another storefront. By establishing your site as brand with a distinct image and unique perspective you can not only increase your following but improve your overall credibility.

We are so far past a point where offering products for purchase qualifies as a reason to visit a site. Everyone is selling something and the proliferation of spam and web garbage has created an audience that expects more. Users have dwindling patience for websites which are not comprehensive. If you cannot provide education and/or entertainment in addition to what you are selling you are limiting your own opportunities to attract visitors. If you are getting regular traffic and not constantly monitoring behavior patterns for usability flaws you are probably losing business. And if you haven’t actively worked at establishing a brand you are not maximizing the potential of your business. By instituting these three power boosts n your affiliate site then the good news is you have a lot to gain. The bad news is you have a lot of work ahead of you.

Sarah writes about branding and marketing for a website that creates logo products. She has worked in online marketing for several years and loves challenges of promoting websites and making money online.

© Make Money Online

If you consider yourself an advanced affiliate marketer you may be on the lookout for the latest and greatest tools to use for your online business. Having the proper tools and services to use to your advantage can increase your profits and make you a much more efficient marketer.

Once you’ve learned the ropes with affiliate marketing and making money with the internet, it’s time to move on to bigger and better things—like making more money and finding more lucrative opportunities. One of the best ways to scale your online business to create more income is through using useful and innovative tools that will take your marketing efforts to entirely new levels. Many marketers understandably avoid these tools, and for good reason. A lot of the “top” programs and services can cost a lot of money and be a questionable investment. That being said, let’s take a look at some of the top online tools for increasing profits and growing your affiliate marketing business online.

Traffic Travis – A great free SEO tool to use is Traffic Travis. This free tool was rated on Cnet.com with 4.5 out of 5 stars and is an excellent free alternative to other expensive SEO programs. This software will give you a good idea of the search volume certain keywords get in each search engine (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) and will generate as many keywords as you like from your “seed keyword.” The software is completely free to download and use and is one of the better free keyword research tools online.

Affiloroma’s Affiliate Tools – At Affiloroma.com there are a wide variety of tools to take advantage of that aren’t just limited to either SEO or keyword research. This site offers a variety of tools that will help you check what backlinks your site has or even help you generate PPC ads. The site has premium features so it does cost money for most of their tools but for the access to multiple high quality tools you get on this website the price tag makes it a complete steal.

SEOmoz.org Tools – Another well known and highly reputable SEO website that offers tools to use is SEOmoz.org. This website offers a few free tools and several paid tools that you can use to better optimize your site and get better rankings in the search engines. There are programs that allow you to monitor and track your rankings, view backlinks and see how difficult a potential keyword is to rank for. The free tools on the site are worth trying out but the premium tools offer far more value and data. If search engine optimization plays a large role in your affiliate marketing efforts then getting your hands on these tools is a great idea.

Keyword Elite 2.0 – Another great keyword research tool that can be considered a competitor of Micro Niche Finder is Keyword Elite 2.0 This software program actually does multiple things aside from just basic keyword research and can give you valuable information on how to dominate certain keywords. For any PPC advertisers it also shows you the past successful ads of your competitors and their advertising history. The fee for this software is one time and it’s a great all-in-one option for PPC advertisers.

Market Samurai – Another top keyword research tool that does cost a fee to use is Market Samurai. This is considered by most as another great keyword research tool and competition measuring tool for seeing what keywords and niches can be easily dominated with little work. While this tool does cost money to use it gives you far more valuable data about the keywords and niches you’re targeting, so it virtually pays for itself over time. There’s a trial version of the program you can try out to see if it’s right for you before purchasing it.

As you become more advanced with your affiliate marketing you’ll likely want to use more and more of these tools until you’ve got a pretty good “arsenal” at your disposal. If you can afford to it really is best to have a variety of these services and tools to use so you can get the benefits of each individual one. If you’re uncomfortable with paying money for a tool you’re not sure you’ll use then taking advantage of some of the free services and programs is a great way to test the waters.

Make full use of the trial versions of programs to see if they work for you before committing to the monthly membership or full onetime payment. If you consider yourself an experienced internet marketer but you’re still wary of online programs and services then don’t purchase any service you aren’t completely sold on. There are complete beginners in affiliate marketing who make a fortune using nothing more than free tools and keyword research programs like the Google adword keyword tool. These programs do work well enough but for those who want to relieve some of the work load and get better results from their efforts paid programs and services should be used for the best results.

Jason Acidre is a Marketing Consultant for Affilorama, an affiliate marketing portal. They provide affiliate marketing education and advanced affiliate marketing tools for beginning and advance affiliates.

© Make Money Online

I’ve been professionally blogging for a little over a year now. In June of 2009, I was working full-time on my blogs for the first time. Whenever people ask me what the key to me going full-time was, I always give them the same answer: passive search engine traffic.

Search engine traffic is, for the most part, consistent and passive. Once you get about a thousand visitors per day, you’ll get about a thousand visitors per day. Every day. Whether you post or not. Search traffic is also valuable traffic — searchers are more likely to click advertisements, buy products, subscribe to newsletters — they’re more likely to make money.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a common myth in internet marketing and blogging circles that implies that you have to choose between making your readers happy and making Google send more traffic your way. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Here are a few ways to increase search traffic without ticking off your readers.

User-Friendly Ways to Increase Search Traffic

• Keyword Titles. My favorite method for writing titles is to put the keyword at first, and then a normal title afterwards. For example, this post is called “SEO Blogging Tips: How to Rank Well Without Losing Readers.” The obvious first two words are keyword titles. Doing this means the keyword is still in the title first thing, and yet the title is still easy to read.

• Link Building. Link building is the crux of search traffic. If you have a lot of links, you’ll have a lot of search traffic. It’s unavoidable. And your readers will never notice it. Try to manually build at least 5 links per week through article marketing and guest post writing. It’ll pay off in the end, I promise.

• Internal Linking. Internal linking is probably one of the most underused SEO tactics by bloggers. If you have a few pages you’re trying to get ranked on Google, link to them constantly in your own pages. I have a set of nearly 10 posts on every one of my websites that I link to from most of my new posts. This insures that Google and other search engines realize those are the most important and desirable posts on the website — giving them more authority. There are plugins that make internal linking almost automatic.

• SEO-Friendly Sidebar. Your sidebar is an important place to link to your most important SEO pages. Have a special widget that links to your most important articles, and use only keywords for the links. This helps with internal linking, and insures that every page links to the important pages.

• Search-Only Ads. While this isn’t technically a tactic for getting search traffic, it’s certainly a tactic for monetizing search traffic better. Find a way to make advertisements show only for search-engine visitors — this means you don’t upset your regular readers with too many ads, and can still profit from the easily monetized search traffic. Have your cake and eat it too.

A 6-Month Case Study

I decided to launch a case study to see how fast I could get a website to the top of search rankings for a competitive keyword without sacrificing the user experience of the blog. I registered a domain about gold coins (the most popular way to buy gold for small-time/private investors) and began to follow the steps listed above.

I uploaded an article every day that targeted a keyword. I made the content user-friendly. I did the SEO-friendly sidebar, internal linking, and consistently built at least 3 real links every day. That was it. Nothing else.

Within six months the website ranks top 10 results on Google for “gold coins” — an extremely competitive topic that takes on almost every gold dealer in the nation, including hundred-million dollar companies. The site is also on page 3 of Google for just the keyword “gold”, which is effectually taking on every major investing, financial, economic, and news site on the Internet — almost every major money-related website has a section on their site about gold.

But the rankings didn’t happen because of any “guru” powers or “secrets” or any complicated positive-thinking philosophy. It happened because I followed the simple SEO blogging tips above. Content, internal linking, links = success. It’s literally that simple.

What other SEO blogging tips do you have to share?

About the Author: Shaun Connell is a full-time blogger and runs over 6 blogs, including a financial planning blog where he teaches readers everything from getting out of debt to learning how to make money online.

© Make Money Online

The Internet has created incredible opportunities for businesses of all shapes and sizes.  It has made it possible for small businesses to operate within a global marketplace, increasing the potential for profitability and success.  However, harnessing the power of the World Wide Web is not as simple as it might seem.  In fact, it can be hard to generate lasting success in the online environment.  While having a website is essential, the real goal is to generate traffic to that website.  Here, Forum Link Building can be of immense service to you.

The Need for Increased Traffic

Driving traffic to your website is the first step in attaining success for your business in the online marketplace.  Simply getting web users to visit your website once can be a chore.  However, you need to go beyond a one-time visit.  You need to establish repeat business and even increase your traffic flow.  For the average business owner operating on a definite budget, this can seem like an impossible task.

Link Building Service offers businesses the means to get around the problem of generating increased traffic flow without breaking the bank.  How is this accomplished?  Simply put, this website allows you to harness the power of user forums and direct that traffic to your website.  How is this beneficial to you, though?

Limited Outbound Links

One of the key benefits with this type of service is the fact that all links to your website are placed on pages with 5-15 outbound links.  This ensures that you are not “lost in the shuffle.”  When you place links on pages with a high saturation of other outbound links, it can be very easy for users to overlook your link.  However, with only 5-15 outbound links, there is no chance of this, giving your link better visibility.

High PageRank Forums

In addition, you will find that Forum Link Building places links only on high PageRank forums – those with a PR9.  This ensures that Google places a high value on those links, and that you receive the benefits associated with correct link weighting and valuation.

The Guarantees

While these are all key elements in boosting your company’s visibility and profitability online, the guarantees offered by Forum Link Building are the true keys to your success.  The company offers give guarantees of immediate interest to business owners and entrepreneurs.  These include the following:

The company will replace broken or removed links at no charge to you, for a period of 12 months after your purchase.

The company guarantees that all links will come from “do-follow” forums.  If a forum places a no-follow tag on your link, that link will be replaced at no cost to you.

Forum Link Building will provide link placement by the deadline specified in your order agreement.  If any delay occurs, you will receive two free bonus links for each day of delay beyond the agreed upon date.

Link Building Services guarantees that all links will adhere to Google Guidelines and forum rules.  If any link is found to be not in compliance, it will be replaced at no cost to you.

Finally, the company guarantees that your backlinks will all appear natural to search engines.  The frequency with which your links are built will ensure that search engines like Google see these as a natural part of website growth, further enhancing your benefits.

Finally, if you are dissatisfied with your results, Forum Link Building offers a money-back guarantee.

In Conclusion

Linkbuilding is an essential ingredient for online success.  However, it can be easy to get it wrong, leading to reduced visibility, or even being blacklisted by search engines.  Forum Link Building is the best way to ensure that your website enjoys increased traffic, allowing you to benefit from the 30,000+ visitors per month generated through forum links, without worrying about the problems that can occur with other linkbuilding programs.

© Make Money Online

The last year has been pretty far from comfortable. In fact it’s been a year of hard work, determination, failures, successes, hair pulling frustration and confusion. And I think many beginner marketers who are trying to make money online can relate to this.

However, when you come through the other side of the initial baptism of fire, this making money online “thing” all becomes very clear! You develop a system that you know works, and you can replicate that system to scale your income up to heights previously unimaginable.

In this article I’m going to share with you the exact system that I am using today to create a full time income online in the hope that it’ll help you avoid a lot of the pains that I went through to figure it all out!

My Six Step Process to Making Money Online

I’m going to give you a high level overview of how I make money online and then I’m going to break each step down, one by one, to give you a greater insight. Here’s the system:

1. Find a hungry market
2. Create a web site
3. Build a qualified list of names and email addresses
4. Build a relationship with the subscribers
5. Promote genuinely useful products to the email list list
6. Scale the system up by driving traffic to the web site

And that’s all there is to it. Of course when you break it down to a lower level things get a bit more complicated:

Step 1 – Finding a Hungry Market

I have to say that this is arguably the most important part of the whole process. If you can find a hungry market then you don’t really need to be great at selling and people will still purchase from you.

I liken this to coming across a crowd of thirsty people in the middle of the Sahara desert…You could charge $40 for a glass of water and they’d still buy from you.

Ideally you want to find a crowd of people who have a problem with an emotional attachment, have money to spend, think about the problem more than once per day and like to talk about their problem (in online forums for example).

The three main markets in which there are a plethora of profitable niches are “health”, “wealth” and “relationships”. Human nature dictates that consumers will always look for ways to improve their situation in any of those three markets.

Step 2 – Create a Web Site

Many people think that creating the web site is the most important part of the process. Personally, I think it’s the least important. Sure, you can’t live without a web site, but the match between the hungry market and the offer are much more important than a web site with fancy graphics.

That said, you do need to have a web presence. The only web sites I ever build are “squeeze pages” – they are called this because the aim is to “squeeze” the visitor into entering their name and email address into an opt-in form. Which brings me nicely onto the third step…

Step 3 – Build Your List

If you think about it from a logical point of view then we, as marketers, should always be striving to improve the revenue per visitor to our web site. Why? Because free traffic is hard to get and the higher your value per visitor the more chance you have for running profitable paid advertising campaigns.

Building your list is one of the biggest revenue per visitor multipliers. By building a list you are creating an ever increasing pool of targeted prospects who you can reach at any time.

The marketing rule of 7 dictates:

”that a prospect needs to see or hear your marketing message at least seven times before they take action and buy from you. Now the number seven isn’t cast in stone. The truth of the Rule of Seven is you can’t just engage in a marketing activity and then be done. Marketing must be an on-going process in order for it to be successful.”

In making money online terms, this means that the majority of visitors to your web site will not buy straight away. They will likely need to build up some sense of familiarity with the product you are trying to promote first. Building a list allows you to generate that sense of familiarity in a very effective way – in fact, my conversion rate went up over 300% when I first created an email campaign at the back of my web site.

Step 4 – Build The Relationship With Your Subscribers

If a friend of yours recommended a product to you and then a random guy off the street recommended a different product – which one would you purchase? Of course you’d take the advice of your friend…Why? Because you feel you can trust him/her.

It’s a similar concept online. A recent study showed that the biggest conversion killer is actually distrust. Often, consumers believe that they are going to get scammed by being sold a rubbish product and it stops them from making the purchase.

This is why I focus on providing real value to my subscribers for free. Every time I send an email with free material to my subscribers I make sure there’s so much value packed in the content that they’ll be truly thankful and grateful for having received the email.

The “power of free” is massive – the more you give up front, the more you’ll get back in return when you promote a paid product.

Step 5 – Promote Genuinely Useful Products

I’m now at the stage where I can promote genuinely useful products to my list. These products can be ones that I’ve created or other people’s products as an affiliate for a commission.

I always make sure that I do my due diligence on the product before I promote it. The last thing I want to do is alienate the buyers by promoting rubbish.

Taking this a step further – I like to build up what’s called a profit funnel. This is a series of products ranging from low value to high value that I promote at relevant stages in my email campaign to my subscribers. A complete profit funnel can really increase your value per visitor tremendously.

Step 6 – Drive Traffic!

Now the system is in place all I need to do is drive traffic to my web site.

In the first instance I’ll drive traffic for free to see how well my offer converts. I’ll often make tweaks to my email campaign to try and improve conversion. Once I’m happy with the conversion rate I will work out my value per subscriber and per visitor.

With these figures I can then go and find paid advertising sources (such as banner ads and pay per click) and test them over a period of a couple of weeks. Once I’ve found a good source of traffic and an ad, it’s simply a case of scaling up across different sites and networks for increased traffic.

Once you’re at this stage, it’s simply a case of increasing the traffic to grow your income.

This is POSSIBLE!!

When you read this article it seems like a lot of work but actually it isn’t as much as it sounds. You can do the entire process in the space of 4 weeks before moving onto your next hungry market. Remember, this game is all about baby steps – take one step at a time and that way you don’t feel intimidated by anything.

Just a year ago I was completely new to all of this. If I can do it then so can you!

If you’d like to learn step by step how to make money from internet marketing then visit here: http://www.fromzerotowebsite.com and I’ll teach you myself personally for free.

© Make Money Online

Finding the right web hosting option in the modern world can be more than difficult.  With the explosion of webhosting companies, conducting due diligence and determining which company actually offers you the best price, the best uptime and the most flexibility can seem an impossible task.  If you were to undertake such a task on your own, it certainly would be impossible to accomplish this.  However, WebHostingRating.com gives you the means to get around this seemingly insurmountable problem.  What does the website offer?

Top 10

One of the first things that visitors will notice is the “Top 10″ rankings.  This initial page gives you, the visitor, immediate access to the 10 best-rated companies for website hosting.  These short, sweet ratings give you access to a considerable amount of information right from the start.  For each company reviewed, you will find their rank in the global hierarchy, as well as the provider name, the price of the hosting package, the amount of hard drive space offered, the bandwidth allocation and a ranking for the company.

However, you will also find a checkbox labeled, “Compare.”  Clicking this box beside two or more web site hosting companies will give you the ability to compare the offerings from those companies side by side.  This ensures that you are able to make a sound decision regarding your hosting needs.

Web Hosting Ratings

In addition to the Top 10 rankings, visitors to WebHostingRating.com will also find that they can organize the rankings in a number of other ways.  For instance, you can choose to search for Linux hosting providers, for Windows hosting providers, reseller hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated server hosting and collocation hosting.  This functionality ensures that you are able to find exactly the type of hosting you need.  As not all companies have the same hosting needs, you must be able to find the right hosting package for your requirements.  The variety of hosting ratings gives you the ability to do just that.

Search Host Catalog

Those hoping to make an even more in-depth venture into the world of web hosting can make use of the Search Host Catalog function.  This allows you to search for hosts via a number of different criteria, giving you the most comprehensive list of possible options.  The criteria you can use to search includes location (North America, Europe, Asia, etc.), as well as hosting type (Linux, Windows, etc.) and price.

Utilizing this tool, you will be able to easily locate numerous providers within your price range, geographic area and hosting type.  Once you have these listed on your screen, you can browse through the options one at a time, or you can opt to compare them side by side to make a detailed comparison of your options.  This will result in the best possible fit for your needs in a hosting company.

CMS Web Hosts and Knowledge Center

In addition to offering you the ability to compare standard web site hosting options through the features listed above, WebHostingRating.com also gives you the ability to compare CMS web hosts by hosting type, such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and vBulletin.  Of course, this is not all – the company offers users a wide range of in-depth information outside of direct comparisons.

The Knowledge Center gives you access to news and articles detailing advancements in the industry, how-to articles and quite a bit more.  In addition, you will find video tutorials designed to help you get online as quickly as possible, as well as buying guides that will help you make the best possible purchase decision for your needs.

© Make Money Online

There are few topics hotter than making money from the Internet, today.  In fact, a quick Google search will yield an amazing number of results.  However, a quick perusal of those results will show you that most of these so-called experts simply want to charge you money for the same content, repackaged and re-titled.  Isn’t there a better option?

Information Comes at a Cost

Actually, Make Money Online is a far better solution for those who want to find out how to generate a considerable income from the Internet.  Where others want you to pay upfront for unverified, duplicate information, you will find that things are very different with Make Money Online.  How does this resource differ?  In reality, you will find several key differences here, all of which add up to a winning experience for you.

Information at No Cost?

As mentioned, one of the largest drawbacks with finding a way to earn money online is the cost.  Whether you’re purchasing a membership to a training course, an eBook or a video tutorial, you’ll be asked to provide cash up front.  If you don’t pay, you can’t access the content.

However, once you do pay, you will find that the information is basically the same from course to course and book to book.  This is one of the key differences with Make Money Online – there is no cost.  This powerful resource brings a wealth of viable informational sources together and aggregates them in one spot for you to access – for no cost at all.

Viable, Powerful Tools

The old adage, “You get what you pay for” might come to mind here.  How can the information contained in a free website be of any real value?  If everyone is out to make a buck off of those seeking a way to earn money from the Internet, why would this website be any different?  Below, you will find a screenshot of the website, which clearly indicates the diversity of subjects covered here.

The topics covered here range from affiliate marketing programs to harnessing the power of AdSense and WordPress.  If you don’t know the top markets in which to make money, never fear.  The website also offers you a detailed list of the top markets in which to get involved, as well as the secrets to developing real success as an online entrepreneur.

Ongoing Tools for Greater Success

Of course, powerful, well-written guides and tutorials are not the right option for everyone.  Therefore, Make Money Online offers a unique resource for those seeking success – the School of Making Money Online.  This resource allows users to develop their skills, and then learn how to apply those skills in a real world setting.

Classes are broken up into simple segments that mirror the education process in the physical world.  Students begin in “elementary school,” then “middle school”, “high school” and, finally, on to “college”.  This natural, logical progression of education ensures that students are able to learn the skills needed, why they matter and how to apply them in a real-life situation.

In Conclusion

The Internet offers an incredible diversity of options for those seeking to earn an income.  However, it can be difficult to learn just how to go about generating that income.  Defining the areas that offer the best possibility for compensation, how to get involved in those areas and the skills needed for success all require a considerable investment of time and effort on your part.

Make Money Online simplifies the entire process.  Rather than making prospective students pay for information that might or might not be relevant, Make Money Online offers free access to powerful resources, all of which play an important role in ensuring your success.

© Make Money Online

When it comes to affiliate marketing there is a lot of room to make mistakes. We all hear about beginners coming into the internet marketing industry and blowing thousands on PPC, purchasing lame products and putting all of their eggs in one basket—leaving them flat broke and frustrated in the end. That being said what are the 5 deadly affiliate marketing mistakes you’re most likely making? Let’s take a look at some of the most common and “deadliest.”

1st Mistake: Picking the wrong niche.

Regardless of how you’re sending traffic, if you send the most targeted visitors possible to a sales page in the wrong niche you won’t generate sales. There are certain markets you should aim for and if you find yourself in a niche where the sales pages and products just aren’t converting, you may have yourself a dud. The good news is you can easily remedy this by picking a different niche that is full of desperate buyers. For example pick something broad and where people absolutely need a solution. Things like weight loss and hair loss related products convert very well for this exact reason.

2nd Mistake: Forgetting to track and monitor ROI.

If you’re running a campaign on Google Adwords or another PPC network you’ll want to make sure you’re tracking every last click, impression and sale. Knowing exactly how well your traffic is converting into sales is critical for staying profitable and not running yourself into a hole. For example if you send $50 worth of traffic to a sales page and lose half of it to one $25 sale, you’ll need to take this into consideration when tweaking your campaigns. Always track and monitor your business model for maximum performance.

3rd Mistake: Forgetting to build a list.

This is one of the most common problems that are seen time and time again. Regardless of the niche you’re in you should build a list so you can profit from it multiple times instead of just the initial sale you make. Having a mailing list is as simple as putting up code on your sales page or blog and capturing leads—it’s the simplest and one of the deadliest mistakes you can make.

4th Mistake: Poorly written and formatted sales copy.

If you’re selling things via a blog or traditional sales page it makes no difference—good sales copy is the only thing that matters. If you’ve only tested one sales copy you could be leaving money on the table so split testing various copies is the only way to know which will convert best and make you the most money.

5th Mistake: Ignoring valuable up-sell opportunities.

If you’ve got a sales process where you’re going straight to the checkout page then you’re definitely leaving money on the table—big money. Regardless of what you’re selling your customer there is always something else you can promote to make a bit more money. Always split test and carefully choose what you up-sell but make sure you implement this strategy as soon as possible since every sale could be bringing in double, triple or quadruple the profit.

James Rey is a consultant for Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free training, education, and affiliate marketing tools to affiliate marketers.

© Make Money Online

If you’re a niche blogger like myself then you need to arm yourself with the right tools to make your online equity a success from the get go.

So everyone has been advising you to switch over to WordPress pronto because if Google would have a mistress … then WordPress would definitely be #1 ;-)

So you’ve installed WordPress (the best decision you could ever make).

Now what?

Well.

The next step is to get the following WordPress plugins installed and activated to help you start on the right track straight off the bat.

I’ve listed the following 8 plugins I use (via priority as I see it), which you can also use as a checklist, the next time you set up your blog.

Plugin #1: Cbnet Ping Optimizer

Advantage: The last thing you want, is for your blog to be listed in the spammer twilight zone.
Well guess what? Every time you update your posts there’s a very good chance your (new)blog is already sending out pings WITHOUT you even knowing it  and the last thing you want is all your SEO efforts going down the toilet drain right?

With the Cbnet Ping Optimizer plugin , you’ll be able to make sure your blog ONLY chatters with the rest of the blogosphere when YOU want it to.
After all.  A well behaved blog is a good blog ;-)

Plugin #2: Broken Link Checker

Advantage: From an SEO perspective broken links on your blog is a BIG NO-NO and you can be dead sure that your blog will be penalized if your blog is crowded with broken links.
With Broken link checker, you will be notified of broken links via the WordPress dashboard (=cool cockpit view once you’ve logged in) and link nirvana will be a thing of the past.

Plugin #3: WordPress Database Backup

Advantage: Creates simple backups of your blog which is a must if you don’t want to lose all your hard work in the event of gremlin infestation or worse.

Plugin #4: WP Super Cache

Advantage: What do you think a Google bot would say if it (re)visited your website and found a slow churning machine? Most probably: “Slow blog. No time to index it. NEXT !!!”.
With this plugin you’ll be able to speed up the loading of your websites and the Google bots will thank you for it big time the next time they come round for a tea party at your blog.

Plugin #5:  Google XML Sitemaps (Search engine Sitemaps)

Advantage: Creates a sitemap which is a layout of your website for smooth web crawlers. Make the bots’ lives easier and they will thank you for it. Big time.

Plugin #6:  All in one SEO

Advantage: From a search engine perspective this is a must have and gives you the power of page titles, meta tags, keywords and descriptions. You’ll even be able to configure them on a post by post basis.

Plugin #7:  All In One Webmaster

Advantage: As a webmaster there’s a good chance you’ve come across the Google webmaster tool. Yahoo has its equivalent the Yahoo site explorer and Bing the webmaster central.
This All In One Webmaster helps integrate the power of these tools from within your blog.

Plugin #8: Chennai  Central

Advantage: There’s a good chance you are hosting several blogs on several domains either  for yourself or family and the last thing you need is bandwidth problems.
Chances are you’ve come across sites with the following message : “User has exceed bandwidth for this month”.

Don’t let it happen to you. With Chennai central you’ll be able to control your bandwidth.

And that concludes my comprehensive 8  for WordPress plugins to install on your niche blog(s), so that the search engines will worship em.

Now get cracking :-D

About the authors: Xavier Lazos and Alex Jon Alavi are brother in laws with a passion to create bonuses for cool information products, that teach beginners and intermediates the ropes to dominating competitive buying niches that make money online. Their latest bonus is Alex’s Crazy DPA Experiment – A Unique Traffic Ultimatum Bonus

© Make Money Online

So, you’ve decided that you want to make money online, that’s cool but there’s just one problem. How are you supposed to compete with inferior knowledge, inferior skills and an inferior budget.

In order for a “system” that you’ve design to be profitable and easy to manage, it has to have two desirable features. a) it needs to be automated and b) it needs to convert visitors into buyers. This married to another very important aspect of Internet Marketing; the source of your traffic. Your traffic will determine how much success you have online.

There’s only one problem with descent traffic and that’s cost. The saturated arena of PPC is hardly a place to start. You’ll spend more than you make (without a doubt) and the truth is, you don’t need it. Sure it’s a good way of targeting your traffic, but there are much more cost effective ways of doing this and having the same results.

Did you know that only 5% of traffic on the internet is generated through search engines? This is a bold statement, but it’s true!  85% of ALL traffic online, comes from display marketing. You know, those irritating teeth whitening offers you see on almost every single page on the internet? That’s display marketing (also known as banner marketing or buying media).

So now you know where all of the traffic online comes from, are you sick of competing with 99% of other marketers out there for only 5% of the potential traffic out there? You don’t need to answer that because I already know the answer.

Buying media is a really good way of generating traffic and this is how it works.

Step 1 – Testing

Firstly, you’ll need to make sure that your landing page (if you have one – not required if your direct linking) is all set up and ready for testing. You can use Google Website Optimizer to do this, as well as StatCounter. This will give you a good idea of how much traffic you’re generating and how well each of your landing pages are doing (Website Optimizer is used to split test your offer).

Once you’ve done that, you may also another really valuable tool; ClickTale. ClickTale allows you to set up “recordings” of your visitors. You can watch (in real time) what they do on your site and evaluate the effectiveness of the various different aspects of your landing page, such as the copy or images etc. Once all of this is in place, you’re then ready to “flood” your offer.

Step 2 – Demographics

This is an often overlooked part of the average newbie’s marketing drills. You need to know who your offer appeals to (you’ll be surprised). Once you know who you’re targeting, you can then start to look for sites that relate to your market, product or service.

Finding out demographic data is really easy to do. You’ve got Compete.com, Quantcast.com, Google AdPlanner and Alexa.com. All of these sites allow you a small amount of demographical data, but it’s enough for a simple campaign. I would recommend getting the free SEO Tools Firefox plug-in by SEO Book.

Once you have found the sites you’re looking for, you can then start comparing the demographic data. Choose the site that has the nearest match and go with that one.

Step 3 – The maths

It’s important that you are aware of the potential earnings of your offer before you begin any sort of display campaign. You could work out (by looking at the traffic data in Compete.com) how many unique visitors a site has. From there you can work out how much money you can spend and still manage to be in profit.

You’re looking for at least a 200% ROI (return on investment) and initially, you’re going to use the most conservative figures to work out how much you can spend.

Let’s say that a site has 10,000 visitors a month. You should be able to convert 1% of this traffic to click on your offer. That leaves us with 100 people who see our ad.

If we, again using extremely conservative estimations, manage to convert 1% of that 100 into a buyers, that means you will make one sale. Now, you know, that if you sold X ebook for $20, that you can afford to spend $10 on advertising it (giving you the 200% ROI). That means that you can (in this example) spend $10 on 10,000 views.

Would you get excited now if I told you, you could get 1,000 views for as little as 5c? (No need to answer that one).

Step 4 - Approaching the sites with an offer

Now that you’ve done your homework, you know who and where you’re going to be sourcing your traffic from, and you also know how much you are willing to pay per 1,000 impressions. It’s now time to start approaching websites with offers for advertising.

This can be done in a number of different methods. You can either look for an “advertise here” link and follow the instructions, or you can contact the site owner directly with an offer. NOTE: some websites have 3^rd party advertising networks that manage the advertising on their sites for them, all you have to do if this is the case, is look near the advertisements on the page and find a text link that says advertise.

If you’re just starting out, it is advisable that you avoid the bigger sites as again saturation will kill your business, there are loads of websites out there that don’t make enough money and are always looking for other sources of income.

TOP TIP: If you find a site that only has AdSense on it, then you are going to want to promote on there. Here’s a simply formula to work out how much money a site makes using adsense.

For every 100 visitors to an adsense site, the site owner will make $1. All you’ve got to do is work out your potential profit, and try to beat the amount of money made by the webmaster of the site.

Step 5 – The Creative’s

This is the daunting part, finding the right banners to put onto the site. Luckily, you can outsource banners for a relatively small amount of money, either using the Warrior Forum (warriors for hire) or some similar service like elance.com or oDesk.com.

Make sure your banner has contextual relevance for your users (doesn’t promise more than the site can deliver or isn’t misinforming them) in relation to your offer.

Make sure your banner sticks out and ALWAYS make sure that you use different creative’s and test which one works best. Doing this will allow you (further on down the line) to have a fully automated proven money printing machine!

That’s it…

Now that you know about this secret method of pulling in traffic, it’s time you stepped out from the crowd of dazed newbie’s, stop paying extortionate prices for PPC, and start growing your internet marketing skills.

This form of advertising is the way to go. If you want more information on buying media, please visit Style (It’s Like Internet Marketing; Only Much, Much Cooler).

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