How To Effectively Promote All Your Affiliate Programs
Signing up for affiliate programs is easy, but turning them
into a paycheck is another story. According to a recent
survey, the average affiliate signs up for 48 programs a
year, but makes less than $100 a month. Those are not
inspiring statistics.
The difficulty for most affiliates is three-fold:
1. They don’t know how to promote
2. They don’t know how to promote multiple affiliate
programs
3. They don’t know how to drive traffic to their websites
The top affiliates have mastered these three points
already. They’re clearing thousands, sometimes tens of
thousands of dollars a month. If you’re looking for a
simple way to join the ranks of the super affiliates, these
three steps will point you in the right direction.
1. Promoting An Affiliate Program
When you sign up for an affiliate program and you get the
standard affiliate link with the megalithic long string of
digits, don’t promote it. It looks very unprofessional,
people are conditioned to ignore affiliate links, your
affiliate commissions are being hijacked, and you’re
losing sales. You need to combat these problems in 1 of 2
ways.
At the very least, you cloak or redirect your affiliate
link using a page on your website. But better yet, set up a
page on your website that offers useful information on the
topic you’re promoting. Write a simple product review or a
review of the industry with links to the affiliate program
you’re promoting. And don’t forget to always offer your
visitors a way to join your list.
2. Promoting Multiple Affiliate Programs
Two of the simplest ways to promote multiple affiliate
programs are using an affiliate information portal like
Affiliate Showcase, or professional blogging software like
WordPress Pro. Links to both these resources can be found
in the resource box at the bottom of this article.
Affiliate Showcase is a portal website that allows you to
professionally present all your affiliate programs from one
clean layout. It comes in a FRE’E and pro version and
dramatically increases your affiliate commission rates.
WordPress Pro is a plug-in for the FRE’E WordPress blogging
software. It allows casual users to turn themselves into
powerhouse marketing machines in a matter of minutes. The
software gives you the power to tag key word phrases with
your affiliate links. When you post an article on your
WordPress Pro enhanced website, your keywords are
automatically hyperlinked to your affiliate website. Every
single article or post on your website becomes a super
sonic selling machine for all your affiliate programs – you
set it and forget it. This software is magic. When you visit
Catalin’s site, click the play button on the audio player.
Catalin has the coolest accent.
3. Driving Traffic To Your Website
This is one of the most important functions of marketing.
You can have the best website in the world, but if you
don’t have traffic coming in through the doors, what’s
the point of having a website? My favourite, unorthodox way
of generating traffic costs $10, but it’s worth thousands
of dollars.
Mark Flavin has designed a system that generates traffic
for your website, but more importantly, it generates sales.
It’s a plug and play, automated, set-it-and-forget it
system that takes you a few minutes to set up, but costs
next to nothing.
When I first read Mark’s work, I have to admit, I thought
he was a bit off his rocker. He talks about marketing
techniques that we all know don’t work or are way to
commonplace. Things like classified ads, banners, pop-ups,
AdSense and reprint rights, at first glance don’t strike me
as extreme traffic generators or profit makers. But with
Mark’s twist, I was actually able to make these things
work!
It reminds me of another Mark’s comments once upon the
day. Mark Joyner once said that he could take tons of
“cheeseburger traffic” and feed it to a good converting
site to pull a very healthy profit. Don’t knock it till
you try it.
If you’re still a struggling affiliate, take the time to
update your toolbox with a few of the simple, but powerful
tools you now have access to. What you do today affects
your incom’e tomorrow. Make it your mission to do
something.
© Copyright Terry Telford
Author: Terry Telford
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Mobile device news
Top Selling Clickbank Ebooks in a Nutshell
Affiliate marketing has changed a lot about my life. In fact, it has made my
present life possible. Do I live in a mansion and drive a Ferrari? No, not
yet. And most of the people that claim that they accomplished this in three
months are either lying about some of the details or need to lay off the
crystal meth. Affiliate marketing takes some work and some areas of it are
highly competitive. But the more you know, the easier it gets. And the more
you do it, the more you know.
When you first start, you must start with the faith of a convert, because it
may be a while before you get results or even “get it”. But after that point,
after the first few sales, the bug will have bitten you and there is no going
back. While specializing in one certain product or niche for a while is the
best way to start, specializing in only one form of marketing is not a good
idea. Keeping up with the latest twist on getting your message to potential
customers is a must, but paying upwards of forty dollars for it and then
having to wade through PDF pages to find the meat you were looking for is a
waste of time.
Most of the top selling ebooks on online marketing from Clickbank are filled
with fluff to make them seem worth forty dollars. Of course, some newbies may
need step by step screenshots showing how to upload Wordpress to your web
host, but most of us already interested in affiliate marketing know how to do
this. We want the two or three pages that give us the technique.
The basics of affiliate marketing can be told in only a few sentences. Find a
product to promote. Get as much targeted traffic going to your affiliate link
as you can.Cash your check.But the details of how to get the targeted traffic
can change a three figure check every couple of weeks into a four figure
check. In fact, a paragraph or two in that marketing ebook you just purchased
may be worth two or three times the cost of the book. But finding that
paragraph in the book is impossible.
I’m the checklist kind of guy. Give a list, not a novel and I will figure out
the rest. I don’t need screenshots. I have been doing this for a while.
Basically when it comes down to it, most of the top selling Clickbank
marketing books cover PPC Advertising, Linking, Adsense, Niches, and Blogging.
We will hit Adsense first. This is not a good first choice for a newbie. Yes,
it has its places and you can make money. But those that make the day job
quitting type of money only from Adsense are few and far between. Many begin
with a site that gets a lot of traffic. Adsense is great for well-established
sites. But the amount of software it takes run run an “Adsense Empire”
starting from scratch is crazy. Lurk a few marketing forums and you will find
out that most of the gurus who make big bucks this way buy 100’s of domains
at a time, have software to auto install their sites, and then use article
spinning software to add content to their sites. And then they have to worry
about getting banned. Not a very stable way to start.
Linking is pretty simple. Join social networks and bookmarking sites,
especially the more popular ones and be active. Don’t just add links to your
own site, but add useful links along the way and become known as a finder of
good links. Then mix your links in. Write articles and submit them to article
directories. Write press releases and submit them if you have any little
tidbit of knowledge that seems newsworthy. Comment on blogs whose theme
matches your own site’s. Participate in forums and add your link to your
signature. http://www.stephanmiller.com is a great resource for finding sites
to get links from, listing hundreds of sites in each of these categories.
You have to learn to spot niches and with a virtual warehouse of products to
promote, its hard to narrow down what you want to promote. Start with
yourself. When was the last time you were looking for something online and it
took you forever to find it. When you found it, you may have inadvertently
found a perfect niche. When you are done with yourself, check out your family
and friends, especially those ones who use the internet but hate to because
they can never find anything. And if you have no friends and never buy
anything online, what are you doing trying to sell anything. No, just joking.
A lot of the guru’s say to use keyword tools to find niches. Great! But where
do you start? You can check out what’s selling on on sites like Amazon which
lists a sales rank for the products on it’s sites. Or go to http://www.
stephanmiller.com/17-niche-finding-sites/ for even more ways of finding
niches. Then you use the keyword tools to find the real niches that have very
few competitors.
Most of the blogging ebooks are rather simple and sometimes the writer didn’t
even edit the book before he sent it to the “press”. I looking at you Rob
Benwell. Basically, start as many blogs as you can handle, write a lot, and
use the keyword tools you have at hand while you are writing your posts to
create content the search engines will love. Other than that, use linking
techniques.
In conclusion, many of the ebooks you will find on Clickbank are overpriced
and “not worth the paper they are printed on”. There are some good ones there
that have stood the test of time. But many are hyped to the top by people
trying to make a quick buck, like me :). You are better off buying the latest
Idiot’s Guide on SEO and that’s no lie or just lurking forums until something
clicks for you. You can waste a lot of time collecting ebooks that is better
off spent actually making money.
Author: Stephan Miller
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Netbook, Tablets and Mobile Computing
SEO – 8 Basic Uncomplicated Steps
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an important piece to the internet marketing puzzle. A search in Google will show 128 million results which goes to show the importance placed by many in this area. All these can be quite hard to fathom for someone who is totally new to SEO and its many concepts such as white hats and black hats.
Instead of diving into the more comprehensive and complicated part of SEO which even for me is an ongoing learning process, I would like to share the simple basic steps I’ve learnt so far along the way. Just by doing this, I believe you would be so much better off than millions of bloggers who doesn’t, thus dramatically improving the search engine driven traffic to your blog or site.
Kindly note that some of these steps are more towards those hosting their own blogs especially with Wordpress or Typepad.
Step 1
Sticking To One URL
Don’t split all your countless hours of promoting efforts into half by having both ‘http://www.yoursite.com‘ and ‘http://yoursite.com‘. Choose one and direct all traffic to this preferred domain of yours. All marketing efforts also should be targeted to only this domain. This can be done easily by editing your .htaccess file or via a WP plugin.
Step 2
Built Into Title and Meta Tags
Ensure that the keyword of your choice is included into your Blog Title and Meta tags located in the section of your blog source code. Here are some examples based on the keyword ‘online games’:
Step 3
Permalink For Your Posts
It simply means a URL that points to a specific blog post which is permanent. Picking the one that includes your keyword will help significantly rather than a short numbered permalink. The screenshot on the right will give you a clearer picture which shows the available choices for Wordpress.
Step 4
Choosing The Right Keyword
You can do so simply by using the free Overture Keyword Selector to get an idea the popularity of the keyword you have in mind. The screenshot on the left is an example of a highly popular keyword which many might overlook. By looking at that example, if you have a Tech blog and you make a post on ‘2000dpi copperhead gaming laser mouse’ with good keyword positioning, you can expect a huge surge in traffic once it is indexed by the search engines. To make it even sweeter, you can include an affiliate program selling that particular or similar product to that post.
Step 5
Include Keyword In Post
If you look at search engine results for your individual blog post, it also includes a short summary of the article itself. So make sure you use the keyword in you blog post without diluting the article. Do keep in mind that the main objective of your post is for your visitors to read and gain knowledge so quality content should always be your priority.
Step 6
Using ALT tags on Images
A lot of bloggers do not take that little extra time and effort to insert an ALT tag to the images they add on their blogs including myself especially on my blogspot blogs. All you have to do is include this code in your tag: alt=”keyword” which complete image code should look like this without additional attributes.
Step 7
Help Spiders Navigate
This is to ensure the search engine spiders crawl your blog effectively by guiding them using a sitemap. If you are using Wordpress, you can easily do so with a Google Sitemaps plugin. It is also important to track how your blog is being crawled by using Google Sitemap and Yahoo Site Explorer.
If your blog is quite extensive, you might want to tell the spiders which posts to exclude from being added to their database by using a robot.txt file.
Step 8
Link Building
Last but not least is building links to your blog. You can start off by submitting to directories and then exchanging links with related blogs pertaining to your blog topic. Bear in mind it is not the quantity but quality of links which will help you greatly in your SEO efforts. One of the best way to obtain links is writing good and useful content which others would want to share with their own readers.
Author: Daryl Lau
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital TV, HDTV, Satellite TV
Wordpress Plugins – 4 Essential Plugins For Your Blog
With over 7800 free Wordpress plugins listed on the official Wordpress.org site it is easy to be confused. Which ones do you need? If you install too many it will slow down the loading time of your site and result in people not bothering to wait around for your pages to appear. Here are 5 plugins that are essential for your blog.
Akismet
The Akismet plugin actually comes standard with your Wordpress installation. You will need to create an
account at Wordpress.com to get an API key to make it work. This plugin does an excellent job of keeping spam comments away. Akismet is intelligent and it learns from you over time. A very useful plugin.
All in One SEO Pack
Optimizing your site with this plugin is essential for achieving high search engine rankings. It is simple to setup and a popular plugin. Even for complete novices the All In One SEO pack makes the search engine optimization of your blog a cinch. For each page and post it allows you to create a title, description and keywords.
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin automatically generates an XML sitemap which helps the search engines to better index your blog. Sitemaps make it much easier for the search engine spiders to follow the structure of a web site and therefore index it more thoroughly. Everytime you add a new page or post to your blog it can automatically notify the major search engines.
WP-DBManager
Backing up your blog is vital. WP-DBManager allows you to backup your database and additionally optimize and repair it. A useful feature is the automatic scheduling option for those of us who are a bit forgetful when it comes to making backups.
So there are the 4 essential Wordpress plugins for your blog.
Author: Paul Delves
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Cellphone news
