Affiliate Marketing and Building Successful Links

As trends in successful marketing go, affiliate marketing is one of the strongest strategies for use as a successful Internet marketing tool. Numerous companies have made the transition from physical storefronts to Internet businesses. Now, they are tapping into affiliate marketing in order to drive traffic to their websites and business to their virtual doorstep.

Once a website has been created with all of the appropriate bells and whistles, it is time to start considering the implementation of a few good links to build success. Search engines seem to be attracted to websites that contain strong links within them. Therefore, having a number of good links on your website can help to attract those fun-loving, web-crawling spiders that get websites so much attention.

The positive aspect of link building is based upon the concept that search engines give importance to those websites that have a great many good links attached to them. This means that the greater the number of viable links your website has, the more likely it is to garner attention from Google as long as everything else about your website is up to par.

However, just throwing any old link on your website isn’t going to be enough to capture the attention of search engines. The links need to be clean and good. How does one go about the business of getting good links for a website? Perhaps one of the best ways is to trade links with other website owners.

Typically, website owners can reach agreements with other website owners to trade links. Each website owner simply agrees to post the other’s link on their website in exchange for having their own link posted on the other owner’s website. Following this strategy with numerous website owners will eventually lead to the creation of a strong network of links.

Another reliable method that can be used to create strong links is to visit and post information in the forums of other websites. Although you might need to sign up for a free membership to post in a particular forum, it is well worth the small investment of time. All you need to do is to post useful information along with a link to your website in response to a question or comment made by another forum user.

Additionally, you can post content by way of blogs or articles on a variety of websites. Even if you do not receive financial remuneration for this content, you are going about the important task of building strong links that will prove more useful in the long run than any small monetary compensation you might have received. Not only do you get the added benefit of drawing attention from the search engines, but more likely than not, you are also going to draw attention through the links themselves.

The primary purpose behind all of this link building is to drive traffic to your website. Once you are able to establish a strong flow of traffic in your direction, you are ready to go about the business of looking for a number of advertisers to include on your website.

Intro: Creating links for your website is an excellent way to draw more traffic in your direction. Whether you actively contribute to other websites in an effort to build links or you trade them with others searching for the same reasons, building a strong network of links is essential to the success of your website and affiliate marketing strategy.

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Building an online business takes many hours of planning, designing and promoting.  From the very beginning of the Internet until now, the most effective way to attract targeted visitors to a site has been the search engines.  When your customers are searching for ideas or products, you want to be there - listed on the front page.  Search engine optimization is one way you can secure your spot on the front page of search engines without spending a fortune.  Here are some great optimization tips below.

To Better Optimize for Search Engines, Know Your Market

Before you begin the optimization process, you should carefully study your market.  Who are your targeted customers?  What do they look for in searches?  Are they looking for products or simply free information?  Once you know who your target audience is and what they’re looking for, you can design your site accordingly.

Research Keywords and Key Phrases

Do research using online tools to find hundreds or thousands of keywords and key phrases that are directly related to your products or services.  You need to know the most popular keywords of your field or specialty so you can incorporate them into your site.  If you’re not sure how to do this, you can hire a search engine optimization firm to help with this project. 

Some search engines, such as Overture and Google, provide a keyword research tool for advertisers.  Even if you don’t pay to advertise through the paid search engines, you can still use these free tools to find popular keywords.  When searching for keywords, type in a main word to get other suggestions.  You’ll learn how many people have searched for the popular terms.  Also, you’ll see related keywords that you may or may not think of on your own. 

Keywords that are not very popular, but have a steady stream of searches (50 to 300 per month) are worth your focus as well.  It’s often easier to get listed under these keywords than the most popular ones because competition is less.  Your focus should be on targeted traffic, not traffic volume.  What good is one million visitors if none of them are interested in your products?

So, your first goal is to build a list of keywords that are targeted for your niche market and have a decent flow of traffic in the search engines.  You should also record popular keyword phrases as you find them.  Phrases are used in the search engines now more than ever because surfers have learned the time-saving benefits.  A phrase can be used to narrow a search and render results that are more relevant to the subject.

Once you create a list of targeted keywords, there are four main areas where these keywords and phrases should be incorporated.

1)  Metatags - Be sure to include keywords in your title, description and keyword sections of your metatags (within the raw HTML code of your page).

The title should be written as a compelling headline because it will be the title of your search engine listing in most cases.  Limit the title to 15 words or less.  The description will be listed under the title in the search engine results, so make it appealing as well. The keywords help the search engine to determine what your site is about, so be sure they are all targeted.  List keywords in a row with a comma and space in between.  Other punctuations or capitalization are not necessary.

*Example:  web design training, learn web design, course, beginners web design, web, design, training, computer training, learn graphic design, graphic design training, graphics course, graphics, course, graphics for beginners

2)  Site Content - Incorporate keywords and phrases into all your content, whether it’s an introduction, article or product page.

3)  Links - Use keywords in your link text from page to page as much as possible.  These are noticed by the search engine spiders, so it will help to create links with popular keywords included in the linked text.

*Example:  Click Here for Site Promotion Tips  (keyword is “site promotion tips”)

4)  ALT Text in Graphics - All graphics and clipart should contain ALT text.  ALT text appears as a title for the graphic.  For example, a clipart image of a cat with a ball of yarn might be used on a site about knitting.  Instead of using “Cat with Yarn” as the ALT text, use “Knitting Made Easy” or something similar that uses your related keywords.  Search engines use ALT text along with your content and links to determine the keyword relevancy of a site.

Maximize Content

Content is invaluable to your site’s success.  Every page of content (articles) you create provides you with a brand new opportunity to be recognized by the search engines.  If you create five different Web pages with five different articles - all relevant - you now have five unique pages you can submit to the search engines.  Maximize the listing potential of each page by following the four “keyword” steps above for each and every content page.  Never assume a page will be recognized - optimize every page thoroughly!

Final Tip

Be sure every page on your site looks neat and professional.  It doesn’t have to be fancy, but should be well-organized and easy to navigate.  This might not affect your search engine rankings, but it will determine how long your visitors hang around.

Use the tips above as a guide to gain popularity with the search engines and start building your successful online business today!

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Practical Tips to Protect Yourself against Online Fraud

Internet marketers are in the business of selling products and services online. Perhaps, you are selling books, electronic gadgets, or appliances online, you might even be selling digital products such as e-books and music downloads, but whatever the case, one thing is clear, internet marketers run a serious risk of becoming victim to fraud.

The potential for fraud in the internet is quite high; this is because credit cards and other electronic transitions are being conducted on a daily basis. Accepting credit card payments, for example, is essential for any online business to function. However, there are quite a large number of people who reported losses due to chargeback cases.  There are a large number of internet marketers who find out everything about link building, search engine optimization, and other promotional strategies to make their online venture a successful one. While all these factors are important, they should also realize that all the efforts they put into building their business will be for nothing if frauds just happen to them all the time since they loose money instead of making it.

One of the most important aspects you need to look into when you are online is ensuring that the padlock on your browser is active

Ensure that the padlock icon is found in you browser and not on the page you are seeing itself.

You should also know about the different scams in the internet

There are many types of these; among them are pop-up fraud, phishing, and spoofing. All these are used to get your personal information.  Trojan horse is another thing you need to be worried about, it can live on your system for an extended period of time once it is in your computer.

It is also essential for you to clear your cache even after you have visited any secure website to prevent the risk of any dangerous file from getting hold of your personal information

You should also log off after you had banked online or conducted an important transaction.

You should also run anti-virus scan and anti-malware scan on your computer regularly

Malwares include dangerous files such as spyware and adware that you monitor your browsing habits while you are connected to the internet. Performing regular scanning will ensure that your computer does not contain unwanted files that can compromise your security.

Do not download programs from sources you do not trust

If you received an e-mail from an unknown sender that has attachments, it is important for you not to open these types of files. It likely contains harmful files that can compromise your system security and steal information that can be used for fraudulent activities later on.

Upgrade your operating system regularly

This will ensure that you have maximum protection for your computer because the newest operating systems do not have the vulnerability that was present in the previous software.

Always keep your password a secret

Do not give your password to unknown sources, in fact; don’t disclose it to anyone at all. It is also recommended for you to change your passwords constantly to prevent malicious files from knowing what it is and then sending the information to its server.

Disregard questionable e-mails

These are the type of e-mails that asks for your username and password to access a website. Ignore these types of e-mails. In addition, it is important for you not to open any files that end with .xe or .pif because these are known to be executable that will install itself on your computer without your permission. However, you should also be aware of the source of these files, sometimes these files can come from reputable sources but this does not happen very often.

Being an internet marketer or being engaged in any online business for that matter is quite difficult at the start. As you can see, running an internet marketing business is not as simple as it seems. Protecting your website alone takes a considerable effort; this is in addition to promoting and maintaining your website to ensure that potential clients continually visit your site to buy products or services from you.

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Passion = Authority

If you choose a niche market that revolves around one of your passions, you are going to be able to choose the best products to promote. Subsequently, you will be able to sell more of them because you are an authority on the subject upon which they’re based. This is common sense. Basic Affiliate Marketing 101.

If you find a winning niche - stick with it until profits no longer improve

Problems can arise, however, when you focus too much on one niche. Though you should give every marketing campaign your best in order to achieve the success that you want, you should not give any one niche your all for too long. Diversification is a crucial aspect of effective affiliate marketing. Not just diversification in niches or products, but diversification in marketing as well. What you should aim for is having several areas from which you are receiving income. This way, if one of these sources “dries up” then you won’t suddenly be faced with such a drastic reduction in income that you are scrambling for ways to replace it. Have you ever been laid off from a job and then spent sleepless nights wondering how you were going to pay your bills until you found another one? This is the feeling that you want to avoid with your affiliate marketing business.

You might say that this is all well and good for those who are firmly established as successful blogging affiliate marketers, but what if you are still trying to make your first dollar in this field? Of course, you don’t want to start off by going in twelve different directions. That’s a surefire formula for failure. Once you get established with a certain niche and the related affiliate products and then find a successful marketing strategy, though—which can admittedly take a while at first—don’t assume that you’ve arrived.

Use your first success as inspiration to not only market in different niche categories, but also to be creative about future marketing. If you are successfully promoting digital products through article marketing and PPC advertising, consider promoting web hosting as an affiliate using the same techniques that enabled your prior Adwords and Yahoo PPC successes.

Forgive me but

To blatantly use two clichés in one sentence; instead of putting all of your eggs in one basket, have a few irons in the fire. Do it gradually, though. Only add another branch to your affiliate marketing when you’ve made sure that the last branch is strong. Plus, don’t go crazy with the diversification. Make sure that you don’t diversify so much that you can’t handle the upkeep on all of your marketing ventures. Unless you are that type-A personality who lives to work, you don’t want to exhaust yourself putting in long hours every day of the week. Every time that you add a new branch to your affiliate marketing, see how things go for awhile before starting on a new affiliate adventure. Diversity in your affiliate marketing should always be about working smart

Here’s the Gold

Thanks for reading this far now here’s a tip to make it worth your while: As a successful affiliate marketer I can tell you that you may have to test-market hundreds of products just to find one where you can be profitable in the Adwords arbitrage game. So here’s the shortcut-  choose a product to sell that you absolutely know will be successful. How do we do that? Well lets brainstorm here, which products and affiliate networks do we think are likely making new millionaires all the time? Im waiting …

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How to Avoid Search Engine Optimization Scams

You may have received emails from Search Engine Optimization companies who are offering to have your website placed on the first page of search listings, or even within the top 10 sites in the rankings. This sounds like a great offer, and would be an excellent boost to anyone who has recently developed a website and wants instant results.

As with most things in life, however, if it sound too good to be true, it probably is. Use the following guidelines to avoid signing an expensive contract that may not deliver quite what you expect.

Check References

Whether you want to have your home painted, rent a vacation villa, or have your website optimized, it makes sense to ask others about the services they use and what their experience has been. Ask the SEO company for references which will include sites they have optimized, and the keywords they have optimized those sites for. Follow up the references by contacting the site owners and ask them if their SEO company has provided the results they promised. You don’t know whether the sites provided for reference are owned by friends of the SEO providers, so search for the company name in a search engine and see if they are mentioned in forums etc.  A little research at this point can save a lot of heartache later on.

Make them Work

Verify what keywords the SEO company will optimize your site for. Any company will be able to have your website achieve a top ten ranking for ‘hairdresser in myverysmalltown’, but they’ll have to actually work (and be good at it) to achieve a similar ranking for ‘business’ or ‘US loans’, Their guarantee will be useless if they are based on optimizing for keywords that have little or no competition.

White vs Black

White is hard work and will have them talking freely, Black is highly secret and you’ll get a quick short answer.

Ask the SEO provider what techniques they will use to optimize your website. If they are guarded about giving you this information, it may be because they are using techniques that will provide short term benefit, but will give you major problems when they are discovered by the search engines. Avoid companies creating doorway pages that redirect visitors to your site, or buys links to your site on other sites.

Some companies will use your payments to buy advertising or sponsored listings on search engines. They will say they are fulfilling their contract, however they are using your money to buy advertising space you could have bought yourself. They have not truly improved your search ranking.

Any Additional Services

Find out what ongoing services the SEO company will provide, usually for a monthly fee. Will they carry out a link exchange program? This is valid where links are exchanged between related sites, and provide true added value. Ask whom the link exchange will be with. Avoid link farms and other sites set up purely as a link exchange utility. Search engines see these sites as disrupting the delivery of true search results, and consider them to be bad company. It takes time to manage the exchange of links with reputable sites – will they do it?

“Me and Google are like this.. XOXOXO”

Don’t believe an SEO company has a special relationship with Google, or special openings into other search engines, no matter what they say. Search engines guard their objectivity jealously, and would not want to lose their reputation by promoting your site unfairly. If the Search Engine Optimization company promises you special treatment, stay away from them.

Achieving and maintaining good ranking positions in search engine results takes continued time and effort. It is not a once-only exercise that can be charged for, and then forgotten about. Search engines promote sites which show evidence of long term continued development and organic growth. A site that makes a big impact and then sits unattended will not have a long term future.

Search engine optimization is achieved by hard work and long term commitment to building a website. Only work with companies that will use fair and reasonable means to promote your website. Any other quick-fix options will damage the reputation of your website, and cost you money to have that damage carried out and then put right.

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Over time I’ve found myself “filtering” through these practices, supposedly leaving only the most time efficient ones left. I knew they all worked “a bit”, but just didn’t result in fast enough growth. The problem that arose is that I realized writing content is by far the most useful thing that can be done. This realization makes the other tasks seem pointless and ineffective, which left me in a constant struggle to keep creating new content all the time.

Despite the fact I’d learned a valuable lesson about how I should be spending my time, it was impossible to write posts all day long and I actually became less efficient than when I was a beginner. Writing all day is of course impossible for everyone (or at least its impossible to keep it at a high standard all the time) and resulted in feelings of burnout and wasted hours pondering starting even more blogs on topics I had ideas to write about.

Solution To The Marketing-Writing Balance:

Outsourcing content creation solves everything.

You can keep marketing all day long as long as there is enough new content to promote, but writing decent quality content all day long cannot be done. Therefore if you outsource content creation and only spend 20% of your time writing, the other 80% can be spent marketing what the hired writers have written. Personally I can write quite happily for about 20% of the day, but it would be crazy to spend the other 80% marketing what I’d written, that ratio needs to be flipped around! Outsourcing content so you have several blog posts each day to promote flips the ratio.

You could say that writing is effective when its enjoyable and marketing is enjoyable when its effective.  In terms of applying that to blogging, writing content should be the first thing to outsource and marketing can be done all the time by you as the main administrator of a blog network.

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Getting onto the Top Buzz pages for each category is very easy and only takes a few votes even on a “non major site” like Blogging Fingers with a topic that isn’t especially highly searched for, but those pages send very little traffic (at least the business page does). We are talking less than 100 uniques with 59 votes! (see part 1 for details)

How To Get To The Top Of Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! tells us what their main ranking factors for Buzz submissions are (see part 2 for a list of them). All you have to do create a post that fits their description.

Look at the top search results for the last few days

You can find the the top 10 search Yahoo! phrases on the Yahoo! Buzz Homepage, which are are updated hourly. When blogging about one of these hot topics remember to use the keywords Yahoo! displays, almost as if you are SEOing the post to rank for them in a normal search engine, but with a catchy news worthy title.

What if my blog doesn’t cover any of the most highly searched for topics?

A very large number of bloggers (including myself) do not own any “mainstream” blogs where the content would naturally fit the categories on Yahoo! Buzz. This presents a solvable problem.

It’s pretty obvious a blog on a mainstream topic helps, but there are ways around this such as the technique Dosh Dosh calls the mullet:

“You can either put the link bait on a page whereby it is displayed to all visitors or place it on a secondary page that is only visible or available to visitors coming directly from social media sites.”

(emphasis is mine)

That way your loyal readers will not be alienated by an off-topic post. Some of the traffic will filter through and click links to your Homepage and other pages. Also getting on Page 1 of any major social voting site results in lots of bloggers blogging about you, which gains you lots of links to your story and more importantly to your Homepage.

Share the story using the Yahoo! email feature… in moderation

This is instead of sharing it completely under the radar. This way Yahoo! can see where at least some of the votes are coming from and so can trust your submission more. This is somewhat theoretical but too much sharing with the Yahoo! Buzz email feature could result in lower ranking for your story because it shows the story wasn’t good enough to make it on its own merit. It’s about getting the balance right!

Extra Yahoo! Buzz Tips

• Make sure your site is clean in terms of SEO, the older and higher ranked the better.
• Share the story quickly in roughly 1-6 hours. 12 hours is the default sorting so for most users stories older than 12 hours will not be visible at all!

Summary

Anyone can make it on Yahoo! Buzz, but that doesn’t mean its worth trying. From this small study is still unknown how much traffic reaching page 1 will send. Writing an off topic post can be very damaging to your readership and techniqes like the mullet are very time consuming. However, it is definitely worth experimenting with the Top Buzz pages for each category, which are easy to reach.

Read part 1 and part 2 or subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Yahoo! Buzz Ranking Factors

These are the known factors that influence how much Buzz a story can have.

• Number votes it receives on Yahoo! Buzz
• The popularity of related search terms on Yahoo! Search
• The number of times that content is shared with friends over email using the “Send” email feature that is available fore each story. It’s possible that this could be a “negative” ranking factor, where if you have to email it to lots of people for it to get the votes it may not be as a very good story, but then it could be better than having lots of votes appear out of the blue? (just a thought!)
• Moderators select content from the top of Yahoo! Buzz to appear on the Yahoo! homepage. This experiment is just about getting to page 1 of Yahoo! Buzz, not the main Yahoo Homepage as there is no control over that.

Yahoo! lets you submit content you find on Yahoo! Buzz directly to other social voting sites. This shows Yahoo! are trying to remain the “Internet’s leading starting point” by attracting users of other social voting sites to start at Yahoo! Buzz to find stories, many of which will be Yahoo! news stories anyway, which results in their promotion. Clever Yahoo!.

Explaining The Blogging Fingers Submission To Yahoo! Buzz

• The post isn’t quite mainstream enough (despite being one of the most mainstream and popular post on Blogging Fingers)
• Yahoo! Buzz uses their search ranking of a site as a factor, I suspect the Websites submitted will need higher rankings than Blogging Fingers to reach page 1, especially since Blogging Fingers is still suffering Google penalizations some of which Yahoo! may be enforcing too. In Yahoo!’s own words, “A great story on a major news site, (or) an extraordinary bit from an obscure site” can make it hot. So if your site is “major”, you can get away with your news being only great rather than extraordinary (excuse my cynicism!).
• Almost all the page 1 stories have a thumbnail image, the Blogging Fingers submission did not which could have hindered its progress. You have to have had previous success with Yahoo! buzz to be invited to have the thumbnail option.
• The votes definitely did help keep the position on the page, somewhat counteracting the “not a major site” factor. It was hot for upwards of 10 hours , the rest on page 8 where only hot for 1-7 hours.

There is lots more testing too be done with Yahoo! Buzz in different categories and also investigating the timing of the votes and whether there is such a thing as “power profiles”, where a vote from a highly used account is algorithmically worth more than a normal vote (like on digg). The Yahoo Buzz links contain the rel=”nofollow” tag so there is little reward for spammers flooding the site with lots of submissions for SEO purposes, although the submissions do rank very highly in the Google search results, often higher than the original story.

Timing Of Votes

The submission “went hot” with just 4 votes. That sent it to the page 1 of its category but not the main page. There is no way of knowing from this single test if having the 50 votes immediately after going hot would help increase the likelihood of the story reaching page 1 or if having them spread out through the day is better. Most of the 50+ votes came in “clusters” across roughly a 10 hour period.

Summary

Looking at the other Top Top Buzz stories there is so much variation in timing and votes it makes me increasingly sure that the Yahoo! search ranking/trust of a site is too big a factor for it to be worth it for the average blogger, but well worth it for Yahoo!.

Subscribe to the RSS feed to receive part 3, where I will use all the available information explain how you can make it to page 1!

Subscribe here

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