The One Forum You Must Join As An Affiliate Marketer

So you are into affiliate marketing and have built your website. You are looking to increase your websites traffic and enhance your profile online.

If you have read my previous posts, you know by now that forum participation is a very viable option.

But not all forums are created equal. You have only 24 hours in the day so you need to use your time effectively.

The following criteria should be applied when choosing the forums you are going to register with

• Niche specific. Your forums of choice should iseally be in the niche you are targeting
• Large membership base. Obvious really. The higher the number of members, the greater the number of people that will come across your posts
• Good search engine ranking
• Backlinks. You want to participate in forums that allow you to have a signature that contains live links to your website. That is backlinks that do not have a 'no follow' tags
• A few marketing experts as moderators

For one such forum follow this link.

If you can only join one forum then this forum is it

The link again

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How To Find A Profitable Niche

You will hear many affiliate marketers in the affiliate marketing niche say that your niche should be an area that you are interested in or an area you are passionate about.

There is another and better way!

Find a hungry market and make that your niche.

I say it again, first find a hungry market then make this market your niche. This is the rough summary of how to discover lucrative niches.

The problem with plugging in to your passions is, in a lot of cases, you will end up trying to create a market that does not exist.

Yes you can eventually make some money from this and a very small handful of people have had phenomenal success with this, but the truth is for the majority, they are still hitting their heads against a brick wall.

Why do you think the statistic, 90% of affiliate marketers do not make a viable living online, comes from.

There are several ways to find a profitable market. This is beyond the scope of this post but watch out for later posts in which I will share some techniques with you.

Meanwhile, take a look at this free membership site. Comes with a large amount of training videos for affiliate marketing beginners.

Here is the link again

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How To Discover The Webpages With Back Links To Your Website

By now you understand the reason for doing all that article marketing and forum participation is to generate backlinks to your website. The backlinks, if the do not have 'no follow' tags on them will contribute to your page popularity in the search engines.

To assess your progress you need a way to assess how many live baclimks you have pointing to your website.

By the way, the number of backlinks pointing to your website is your link popularity.

Once you know how many links are pointing to your website, you need to drill down further and take a closer look at the sites generating these links.

In this post, I will only cover how to find out your link popularity but in a later post we will go over the things you need to analyze on these linking sites websites


Before I go into it, I just want to tell you guys that link popularity is crucial to your website's ranking in the search engines.

Although Google, Yahoo and MSN do not give away their ranking algorithm, experience and wiser marketers than I have suggested that Ranking is related to content and link popularity.

Get link popularity right and you could be in that covetted number 1 spot for your keyword.

So, How do you assess your link popularity

• Search engines: I recommend Yahoo for this. I'll explain why shortly. Anyway load the Yahoo search bar and type in link:Your site's url and press enter. Use the domain.com, http://www.domain.com/ and http://www.domain.com/ variations. The results returned often vary with what form of your URL you type in. This will turn up the websites linking to you. Problem with Google is they do not display all the sites whereas the Yahoo search bar gives a more robust list. Even with Yahoo, some links may be missed out but it gives you a general idea of how well your linking strategy is working.
• Software: You can get a more accurate assessment of your link popularity by using special software that is designed for this particular purpose. Now you can go out and pay some to build the software for you or you can buy one of the many available on the market. Now, the software I use and recommend to you is a little pricey but, for my business, was well worth the investment. It does the following

1. Discovers you link popularity
2. Tells you whether the links are contributing to your your ranking or are no follow links
3. Displays your anchor tags. These are the terms that are used to link back to your website
4. Displays the page rank [Google and Alexa] of the site linking to you.

• If that was all this website does, it would already be worth the cost. But it has a whole load of other functions eg article submission, link exchange, gfinds authority sites in you niche. To learn more about this software click SEO Elite.

For the newbies, you are probably wondering why it is important to assess your link popularity. Simply to help you focus your efforts on activities that yield a result.

Say for example you are into forum participation. And you have spent hours on posting quality comments on forums with your backlink in your signature. How do you know which forums actually have your link and how many have the 'no follow' tag?

To learn more about link popularity and creating baclinks, click Link Popularity for a free guide

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How To Get Your Affiliate Marketing Articles Accepted By Article Directories

Previously we have gone over article marketing, bum marketing and how you can use these to increase traffic to your website.

But article marketing works only if you can get your articles accepted by the article directories

So how can you increase the chances of your articles being accepted with the article directories

Familiarise yourself with their rules: You need to read the terms of service of each and every directory you use. It is only then that you will understand the minor nuances that each directory has.

For example, Ezinearticles.com does not accept articles that contain an affiliate link. Having said that ezinearticles.com is one of my favourite article directories. Article there are indexed quickly and the link to your website is not no follow so it contributes to your ranking. Goarticles.com however allows you to include affiliate links in your article body or signature.

You will find that if you operate within the terms of service of the article directories, your articles will be accepted each and every time

Let's face it, the rules are not exactly draconian, they are pretty reasonable and it is probably because of these rules that article directories are still very useful for affiliate and internet marketers.

Article Structure: Structure your articles so that they are easy to read. Article directories do not like articles that are too long. Try and keep your article length less than 700 words. The flip side is that if your article is too short it will also get rejected. I find that my articles are 400 to 700 words long and have all been accepted by the article directories.

Also use white space. Single space between lines and double space between paragraphs

Keep the paragraphs short, three to four sentences and no more. This will increase the frequency with which your articles are actually read. You need readers to read your artilcle if you are to influence them to click on to your website.

In the same vain, use subheaders and bullet points where necessary. Don't over do it. Bullet points help break up you articles into easily digestable parts


SpellCheck: Very important. If your article contains typos or looks like you have cobbled it together using content generation software, it will not be accepted. Read your articl out loud to your self before submitting it to the article directory. Also use the spell check software on your computer. Microsoft word has a very good spellchecker. ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com also have a spellchecker

Hand submit your article: While this is not a must do, I highly recommend you hand submit your articles to the article directories. Some people use article submission software that will submit your article automatically to scores of article directories. I have no experience with this software and people that do claim to have some success with it.

Original articles: This is the most important point and somehow i left it till last. It is crucial that your articles are original. Either write your own articles yourself or pay someone to do it. Using PLR articles just will not do.

A great guide to article marketing and the bum marketing method can be found at http://www.affiliatemarketingintro.com/Recommends/BumNTS

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4 Essential Components Of Your Articles

Article marketing could significantly increase the traffic to your website and it is something that needs to be taken very seriously.

For you to achieve success with article marketing, there are 4 things you must include and pay attention to in your articles

• Keyword selection. You must identify the keywords that are most appropriate for your article. These are keywords that are searched for frequently in the search engines by people interested in your particular niche, keywords that are not too competitive, and that are used by people in a mind frame to take action.

• Keyword distribution. Your keyword must be included in the heading of your article. This is crucial. You also need to include the keyword early in the body of your article's content and often. Do not overdo it. There is the risk of being penalized for keyword stuffing. Also include other words that are often associated with your keywords

• Unique Content. For your articles to fly, you really need to have unique content on your pages. It is not enough to go out and get a bunch of PLR articles and paste them on your site. You need to write your own articles or pay someone to write unique articles for you. Also make sure that your article contains some useful content. Take this article for example, it tells you how to write article to succeed in article marketing. Now that is useful content. I find that 'how to' articles are the best article marketing articles. They just tend to take off and go viral quite quickly.

• Anchor links. Use your keywords as anchors for your links from your articles to your website. This will help drive traffic to your site and also help your search engine rankings.

Check out Articles for affiliate marketing beginners for more affiliate marketing tips

Low Hanging Fruit

Definition of low hanging fruit.
The term low hanging fruit refers to a task that is easy to accomplish or a target that is easily achievable.

How does the concept of low hanging fruit apply to the affiliate or internet marketer?

In affiliate marketing, you are trying to promote a product so as to get a commission. Now it makes sense that the higher the cost of the product and the higher the percentage commission, the better your business will perform. But this does not always translate well to real term marketing forces. You see the higher the cost of a product, the more resistant your prospect is to get out their wallet.

Think about it, how much time do you spend deciding on buying a $10 ebook. You read the sales page, you like what you see and you buy. Heck, it's only $10. Now say you find a $3000 computer that you really like. You read the sales page, study all the features it has, read the after sales service and then..... shop around, think about it, discuss it with your spouse and maybe next year we will buy it.

Also in affiliate marketing it is tempting to go after those highly sought after products that everyone else is promoting. Again because of high competition, the prospects of making a sale are very slim. Enter the concept of low hanging fruit. These are products that are not highly marketed, probably not very popular, very niche specific and attract very little traffic. However those who want it, want it. The commission may not be high but the chances of you clinching the sale are higher

A few successful low hanging fruit campaigns may be all you need to make a decent living online

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How To Increase Website Traffic Through Forum Participation

Back to our series on generating traffic to your website or blog.

Let us focus on forum participation. Here we will paint a few broad strokes on forum participation and in future posts we will go into the details of selecting which forums to post in and how to word your posts for maximum impact.

Forum participation has been around for a while. I will be the first person to tell you that this is not a new methos or a secret key.

Forum commenting is however a very useful method of

• Building your reputation online: If your posts are full of useful information and if there are some little known titbits thrown in, you will fast get a reputation of being 'One in theknow'

• Drive visitors to your website: Again if your comments are valid and informative, people will tend to click on to your website [don't forget to include a link in your signature] to find out more information from you

• Increase website ranking: A large number of online forums have no follow links. These are bits of html code that tell the search engine spiders not to crawlyour link. [Applies to Google spiders, not sure if this applies to Yahoo or MSN] Some forums do not have no follow tags. This means that if you identify these forums and post to them with a backlink to your site [again please use an anchor tag!!], the link will contribute to your ranking in the search engines.

A good place to start is at this very popular forum with affiliate marketers. You will recognize some of the names of people posting in this forum. Do not feel intimidated, your point of view is also valid.

Click here to visit the site

By the way, they allow you to post adwords style ads for your website. The number of times your ad is displayed depends on the number of useful posts you make.

Please do not try to spam the site. You will be quickly kicked out if you do

The link again is http://tinyurl.com/2rhv9l

Affiliate Marketing Tips: Keep Moving

Affiliate marketing newbies, this post is for you.

Perhaps you have been at it for a few months now, and are not yet making the income you dreamt of. So what do you do?

Do you through in the towel and tell yourself 'affiliate marketing does not work' or do you renew your resolve to make it work for you.

Now I don't know what niche or niches you are in but personal experience has taught me that this works

Affiliate Marketing Tip 1:The most important thing you can do as an affiliate marketer is to keep building your business. Keep working at it. The thing about working at building your business is that everything you do works together to bring some reputation to your site. You may not see immediate result, for example in the case of Search engine optimization, but the results will come. IF YOU KEEP WORKING. If you do not know about Search engine optimization click on On page search engine optimization , keyword optimization and Building website link popularity to learn more.

Affiliate Marketing Tip 2: Do one thing at a time. This is so important. So often affiliates are doing this and that and not really able to focus on any one thing. I advise that you take one thing, say search engine optimization, learn it, master it, apply it and see results from it before moving on to the next skill

Affiliate Marketing Tip 3: Learn as much as you can. There are many free training resources teaching different techniques in affiliate marketing. This Blog, Niche Traffic Sale is one such resource. Make use of these training sites, they are free to use and contain alot of really useful information. You need to keep learning and stay abreast with developments in this business. Another good training site is affiliate marketing guide for newbies which teaches the basics of affiliate marketing.

There are even free sites that give training in video format eg http://www.affiliatemarketingintro.com/Recommends/MB.

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