Friday 16 May 2008

Links That Will Hurt Your Site

Backlinks are the backbone of search engine optimization. And we as affiliate marketers are encouraged to build as many backlinks as we possibly can.

The need to generate backlinks has lead to the evolution of black hat SEO and all it's trappings and I will tell you this, some of these black hat methods are innovative. [Innovative, though they may be, blackhat is highly discouraged here.]

The power of backlinks is so great that people can sell links from their high page rank web pages for a respectable sum of money

In your quest for backlinks to your money making sites, a note of caution.

SOME LINKS WILL HURT YOUR SITE.

Google's aim is to deliver high quality results to people who use their search engine. And they will protect this at all costs. They are therefore constantly on the look out for sites that do not appear natural in their spectrum of ranking characteristics especially backlinks

Backlinks to your site should be from websites in a relevant niche and should occur naturally.

So here are a few examles of backlinks that could hurt your site

  • Bad backlinks 1: link farms. I really do not care how craftily you build your link farm, The big G will eventually find you out and heavily penalize you.

  • Bad backlinks 2: porn sites. We all know the large amount of traffic porn sites get and it may seem like a good idea to try and divert some of that traffic by putting a link on the site. However unless your site is in some way related to the porn industry, don't do it.

  • Bad backlinks 3: Abnormal backlink patterns. A website that suddenly gets 200 backlinks in one day or backlinks all from the same website or IP block just is not natural. Something is up. And if you think that Google will not notice this, you can forget it. When building backlinks to your site maybe through forum participation or blog commenting, add only a few links a day in a steady and natural manner

  • Bad baclinks 4: Irrelevant niches. I don't have any evidence that links from unrelated sites can hurt you but i am not sure that backlinks from sites that are not relevant will help your cause either. You could spend that energy on links that do matter

I know that there is a lot of debate in the affiliate marketing forums [ if you are not a member of a forum you need to join one now. There is a wealth of information, mostly good in the forums. You can find a really good big traffic forum by clicking here. It's free to join], anyway to get back on point, there is a lot of debate on what links can hurt your website and some people actually say that they do not believe that some inbound links can hurt you.

All I say to this is this, is safeguard your money making sites and be careful in choosing site you get your backlinks from

Thursday 15 May 2008

Writing A Winning Sales Pitch

With niche selection covered and traffic generation under your belt, the next thing you need to focus on as an internet marketer is increasing your website's conversions.

After all, traffic + No conversions = No income

Now to have conversions the content of your sales copy has to touch your reader in some way. It has got to be something that he or she can connect to

A few sales copy methods that work are

Address their anxieties: If you are marketing an internet marketing product, your prospects will probably have concerns about hype and false promises. So a good place to start is to acknowledge the hype in most marketing sales pitches and tell them why this one is an exception

Their Aspirations and beliefs: Whatever niche you are into, you need to research your market, find out their demographics and discover what the aspirations and beliefs of that particular market are. Then in your sales copy, address those aspirations and beliefs directly.

Success Stories: If you have a good success story in your chosen niche, then this could be great for your sales copy. Especially if it is along the lines of an ordinary day to day person achieving some desired effect by doing X, Y and Z. This has been very successfully and widely used in the affiliate marketing niche. And despite the wide spread use, it still manages to secure sales

That's it for now

If you are yet to build your own website then click on free video training on website building to get your training videos

Till next time

Sunday 11 May 2008

Monetize Your Niche Sites | Banners

So you have a niche specific website that is getting a ton of traffic. And you have decided that you want to make some money from it.
The question is are banners an option.
Yes and no is what I would say.

The problem with banners is that a lot of web users, in fact the majority, have developed banner blindness. They just don't see banners any more.

But you can still make money from banners. If you think about it for a minute, the big sites eg Yahoo home page, use banner advertising to generate revenue. But they use this with some skill.

The best use of banners is to have a niche specific site with lots of really useful information. Your content must pre-sell the product your banner is advertising without actually overtly promoting it or even mentioning it by name. Then you put a banner that advertises a product that will cater to the specific needs your content discusses.

For example if you have a webpage about downloading movies, and you have talked about the problem of downloads e.g hard disc space. You have discussed how you have to delete things to accommodate your downloads and how much of a pain it is. You can then put a banner on that page advertising, cheap external hard drives with a gazillion gigs of space.

You put a niche specific, problem solving banner on your page that has the ideal solution for problems you have highlighted on your page

The other problem with banner advertising is there are so many products you can promote in any particular niche.

You have a niche specific website that is getting a ton of traffic. It is tempting to just through loads of banners on the page. Don't do it. You just end up cluttering the page and your conversions will go down.

Also you must have visited those sites that have great content an then put the money making banner at the end of the page, where they are least likely to see it, let alone click on it. The best position for your banner is ABOVE THE FOLD

Clean page with a single niche specific banner in a prominent place is the way to go

Saturday 10 May 2008

Get Your Free Cool Affiliate Marketing Tools

Just came across this cool giveaway

Just click on Cool Tools and sign up for your free affiliate marketing tools

Or go to the webpage below

http://www.affiliatemarketingintro.com/Recommends/CoolTools

The site closes in 9 days

Till next time

Saturday 3 May 2008

Website Not Making Any Money

Hi,

So if you have been following this blog since it started and have been applying the principles i have taught you, you should be making some money with your website by now, either with affiliate products or with adsense.

If you are not making enough money to offset the cost of your domain name and website hosting by now i.e 5 months down the line, YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING WRONG!! It's as simple as that really

So you have to think about your niche selection, website layout, SEO, adsense ad placement [by the way you can go to some adsense tips to get some basic information on adsense], traffic generation techniques, time and effort you invest and decide where you are going wrong

And fix it.

I have two students that joined me at about the same time. One was really motivated and worked on her website every single day, I know this because of the number of questions she had. The other, well lets say he was not so motivated. The first student has made enough money to cover the cost of any investments she made while learning, so now her business has cost her nothing and is putting money in her pocket. The other student, well I've stopped investing my time in him, because he does not seem to want to invest time and effort in his business.

The point of my story is this. think the biggest reason why some people do not succeed in affiliate marketing is because they lack the motivation, the drive to invest in the business every day, to keep learning and working at it till they get it right.

Till next time