A New Dawn For America

It is just amazing

Yes the polls suggested it

And yes the campaigns alluded to it

But now it is a reality, it is just an amazing truth

The american people have by a landslide chosen an African American as their next leader!

You may not realize how ground breaking this is but a little look at history

First African American slaves arrive in Virginia in 1619 and slavery was first legalized in 1641.

Slavery carried on for 2 centuries and was eventually abolished in 1865 by the passing of the thirteenth amendment to the United staes constitution

The picture is of an african slave with keloids [raised scars] on his back as a result of whipping by his supervisor

The majority of the slaves came from the west coast of Africa

During the American war of independence, initially both the revolutionaries and the loyalists recruited black slaves into their armies.




However for a short period, George Washington put a ban on recruiting black soldiers. However due to man power shortages He lifted the ban in 1776

The loyalists promised there fighting black men their freedom but on losing the war, the americans declared all slaves 'property' to be returned



In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation, freeing all slaves in the southern states.

In 1865 the thirteenth amendment was passed abolishing slavery in the united states and the fourteenth amendment 3 years later granted full american citizenship to all african americans.

1870 saw the passage of the fifteenth amendment which meant that for the first time, African Americans men could vote.

Despite winning there freedom, African americans still had the battle of equality to fight

There was the era of segregation

Every thing from restaurants to water fountains to cinemas had the separate entrances and separate waiting rooms for black 'coloured' and white

In 1955, the practice was for black people to sit at the back of the bus and to get up and give up their sit for any white person that did not have one

Rose Parks was the third woman in records to refuse to give up her sit when asked to by the bus driver

This was not a woman of great social status but one who had worked as a domestic and a hospital aide

Living in a house that often witnessed a klan parade, it is not surprising that she became involved in the civil rights movement and was secretary to the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People [NAACP]

Her refusal to give up her sit on the bus in 1955 sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott which ran from December 1 1955 to December 20 1956

The Boycott was lead by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, a Baptist minister who achieved international renown for his civil rights activities

Dr. Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel peace prize for working for an end to racial segregation and racial discrimination through non violence and civil disobedience in 1964. At that time he was the youngest person ever to win the Nobel prize

On the steps of the Lincoln memorial on August 28 1963, Dr. King delivered a speech which has subsequently been labeled one of the greatest speeches of our race

In this speech he says

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Today, The American People elected an African American, Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States

Free Directory Submission Tool

Directory submissions for backlinks is a great way of getting traffic to your site and of improving your site's performance in the search engines using backlinks.

There are two things about directory submissions that however really irritates the affiliate marketer

1. It is so monotonous to submit your sites manually to the directories. And considering that if you are doing free submissions, it can take up to 6 weeks to get your listing approved, it really becomes a pain

2. Some directories use no follow links. Now this in itself is not a problem. In a later post I will give a list of directories that have given my websites Do follow links.

But please note that I am not saying that directories with no follow links are without value. Quite the opposite. I was surprised to find that some of my websites were getting some traffic straight from my links in directories. I don't even want to venture a guess as to what person uses directories to find a website in these days of the big G, but hey, it takes all sorts

Although there are rumours out there about Google possibly ignoring directory links in future when calculating a websites popularity, for now the links still count

I have found a free directory submission tool to help automate the process

But before I give you the link, here is a quick guide on how to get the best out of this tool

Load notepad or a blank word document or get a blank piece of paper


Identify keywords that you want to rank each of your pages for and write these against the URL of the webpage on the notepad.
So you should have a list like this

Webpage 1: Keywords a, b and c
Webpage 2: Keywords X, Y, Z
Webpage 3: Keywords d, e, f

I am sure you get the trend


Now for each webpage write 4 different titles that have one or the other keyword for that page in it

So now you have a list that looks like this

• Webpage 1: Keywords a, b and c
  Title 1 'Keyword a' made easy
  Title 2 A step by step guide to 'keyword c'
  Title 3 Is 'keyword b' a spam
  Title 4 10 things you must know about 'keyword c'
  
• Webpage 2: Keywords X, Y, Z
  Title 1 'Keyword X' and 'Keyword Y' 3 crucial tips for success
  Title 2 'Keyword Z' and your business
  Title 3 A guide to making money with 'keyword Y'
  Title 4 'Keyword X' a step by step guide

Next you need to write 4 descriptions per webpage. Remember to include your keywords in the description

Save this document

The reason you are doing this is to have a variety of links once you set up your directory submitter. This means that not all the links generated to your site are the same. Anchor text variety is something that seems to count when it comes to the Google bots

Oh I forgot to mention the directory submitter has a data rotator

One last tip. Because the directories will not approve your links on the day of submission, there is very little risk of your website getting a large number of links all in one day. Even if you submit to a hundred directories in one sitting

Anyway, enough fluff from me

Click here to get your free directory submitter

Till next time

How To Make Money With Google Adsense

Google Adsense has become a means of generating an extra income for Internet marketers. Some affiliate marketers opt to make Adsense their primary revenue source via made for Adsense sites

Problem though is a lot of Internet marketers, especially newbies, come across the Google Adsense opportunity and get really excited by it. It is after all a great business model. So they rush in and start building Adsense sites without first mastering the rules of the game.

How do I know this?

Because I was once that ill advised newbie

So a quick browse through the forums will turn up a lot of people declaring their $2 earning in a day after 6 months of working on their Adsense sites

$2 a day is hmmm.. $60 a month. Not enough for a meal for two at my regular restaurant.

This is not the way to build a business guys!!!

With any online business opportunity there is the potential to make a lot of money but things have to be done right

So here are a few tips on how to make money with Google Adsense

Google Adsense Tip 1: Read the terms of service and stick to it. You just cannot trick the Google Adsense code. If you click on your own ads, you will be penalized. It may just initially be registered as an invalid click, but persist and you will get banned

Info: An invalid click is one that Google does not pay you for the click because it is thought to be fraudulent or outside the terms of service

Google Adsense Tip 2: Have a large site. If you are going to make a significant income from Adsense, then you need to have a whole load of pages up online. 10 or 20 pages won't do. We are talking about a hundred or more pages. And the pages should be optimized for different keywords. I cannot over-emphasize this.

Google Adsense Tip 3: Traffic. You need to drive a ton of traffic to your made for Adsense site. Not hundreds but thousands of unique visitors every day. The traffic should also be targeted because it is only people who are interested in your content that will have some interest in your page relevant google Adsense blocks.

If you have a multi paged website with each page optimized for a different keyword, you can easily build a wide spread online presence with this one site and get the huge amounts of traffic necessary to make you Adsense campaign successful

It takes time, great content, good search engine rankings and targeted traffic, but it is possible to make a decent living by displaying Adsense ads on your websites


Till next time

Where Long Tail Keywords Make More Sense

For search engine optimization purposes we are told to go after long tail keywords because they are easier to optimize our sites for and are less competitive

Apparently the big money is to be made in the primary keywords

This is true up to a point

As an internet marketer, you want traffic that is ready to buy, not just traffic.

You want the guys that are looking to solve whatever problem it is they have now.

The ones who have their credit cards in their hands


So when you think about it if a man wants to buy a sony laptop, does he type in 'sony laptops' in the search engines or does he type in 'buy sony laptop', or 'sony laptop deals' or 'Sony Laptop Outlet Online'
'

For a person wanting tips on article marketing, is it 'article marketing' or crucial article marketing tips or better still 'free article marketing tips'?

These are long tail keywords which may not get searched as often as our primary more competitive keywords but they attract traffic that converts.


And that is the key of success in affiliate or internet marketing. getting traffic that is targeted and looking to buy

Page One of Google

So in our bid for search engine domination, we can get caught up in the obsessive cycle of checking what page our marketing sites are on

So you build the site and do some search engine optimization.

And then for the majority of newbies there is the endless search in Google with your keywords to find what position your spanking new website is in. And you search page 1, 2....23, page 50 and so on

I urge you to forget about this practice.

All you should spend your time doing is searching page one of Google for your chosen keyword or phrase

If you are not in that page, does it really matter if you are on page 10 or 100.

It's time to wake up! No significant amount of traffic is going to find you unless you are on page one and preferably in position 1, 2 or 3 for your keyword phrase

Time better spent installing a traffic analysis software like Google analytics and analysing what keywords ARE bringing traffic to your site

Analytics is free to use so check it out. The link is Google analytics

Value of A Blog

It's funny how we all hop online and start building our blogs for the purposes of

• Driving traffic to our websites
• Promoting some product or the other

But something in the news recently made me stop and think.

We forget the value of the property itself, I mean, how much is the blog worth

I am not talking about the silly piece of software that you put on your site and it proudly proclaims the dollar value of your blog.

By the way, you can get the code to put that particular tool on your website from technorati.

I confess I do not put much stock in the tool because, it's estimate of the value of your blog depends on whether your blog has been submitted to technorati or not

The value of a blog should be based on

Age. The longer a blog has remained active online, the more likely it is to have u to date and useful content

Number of posts. A blog with a post every day should intrinsically have a higher value than the two posts a month blogs, surely

Quality of the content. I suppose this can only be infered from the number of backlinks a blog has and the amount of traffic it generates
I mean how much in cold cash can you actually get from it.

Authority. Again the backlinks thing [ by the way visit search engine optimization using backlinks for a breakdown on backlinks and authority]

So to get back on topic, what is the true value of your blog. What amount of cash can you expect if you put it up for sale today

Looking at the examples of

• Bankoholic which is said to have sold for 15 million [ and it is rumoured to have been a one man operation!! If he or she can do it, well so can you. Or Me for that matter!

• One man's goal which I understand went for a modest $10000

Just makes you understand the true maening of the term, virtual real estate

Till next time

No Follow Links. Any Benefit?

So the teaching is to try and get as many do follow backlinks to your websites as possible to improve your search engine performance and ultimately to increase website traffic

So does that mean that no follow backlinks are to be ignored?

Well, I was doing some backlink analysis on one of my smaller websites using SEO elite.

By the way SEO elite is one of the most useful analytic tools I have and has made a world of difference to my marketing career. You can check it out by clicking SEO elite.

I found that a website that generates about half of the daily traffic to this small site of mine has a no follow link to my site

Hey?.

But these links are not to be sort after.
They are supposed to be of no value to my SEO efforts

Ah!! No value to SEO does not mean no value for increasing website traffic.

So, by all means court the do follow backlinks to your websites

But do not snub the humble no follow link

Till next time

Stumble Upon Verify User Email. Scam?

So today I got an email from 'stumbleupon' stating that I should click on a link to verify my account.

Don't know why but I thought the email was odd.

Perhaps because I have had a stumble upon account for a really long time now and asking for a user verification 1 year later just doesn't make sense

So I opened another Browser and logged into my account and there are no pending emails. Nor was there a verify your account message

So it is a SCAM!

So how do these people do this. Could it be that they just scrapped stumbleupon for user emails
Or is it my own email account that has been hacked

Either way, the message is BE ALERT. If it looks suspect, don't click it

Ezine Articles And Keywords

Ezine articles is one of the article directories that I recommended for you to use for your Bum Marketing in a previous post

Ezine articles has just got better

When you submit your article to the ezine articles directory, if it is accepted, the article gets published.

The articles tend to get the greatest amount of traffic from people visiting ezine articles. Obviously for your article to get noticed, it needs to be on the front page of the ezine articles site or at least the category you have selected for your article

Unfortunately, because of the high volume of articles submitted every single day, most articles only stay on the front page of Ezinearticles for a few hours at best.

So is there another way to maximize your traffic from your article

A recent innovation in Ezine articles has made the answer to this question a definite yes

In the past, a small amount of traffic could find your article through the search engines, that is if you have a well written, search engine optimized article

But it is difficult to assess which keywords free search engine traffic is using to find your articles

Ezine articles has now included a keyword result to the authors tool kit.

This means that you can see exactly what keywords your articles' viewers have used to find your article

The bonus is you can then optimize the articles for the identified keywords and hopefully get more free search engine traffic through your search engine optimization efforts.

For more information on how to use article [bum] marketing to increase traffic to your website check out this training program

How To Get Traffic To Your Blog

So How do you get traffic to your blog?
Lets dive in because there is quite a lot of ground to cover here

On blog factors to help increase blog traffic:

• Post Often. You need to give the search engine spiders reason to come back to spider your blog and index your pages frequently. Post as often as possible. If you are a full time affiliate marketer then blogging daily should be your aim.

• Create authority posts. Posts that are well researched and full of useful information. Make sure the layout of these posts is reader friendly. With a few good posts on your blog, you will soon find other webmasters linking to you

• Try to stay focused with each post. This will help hold the attention of you visitors. General posts, talking about this and that, tend not to do as well as specific posts. For example this post is specifically about generating traffic to your blogs. There are no tangential ideas, no off topics. Stay focused.

• Try to be keyword specific. Decide what keyword it is you want to target with each post and build your post around it. Don't use only that keyword but try to include other words that are similar or variations of the keyword.

• Apply SEO. You must construct every post in your blog like you would a traditional webpage with regards to on page search engine optimization. Pay attention to your title, your keyword prominence and frequency, LSI and tags. If you are using a wordpress platform for your blog, get the all in one SEO plugin

• Allow Comments. No matter how great the content on a blog is, I just tend not to come back if they have a no comments policy. I find that in blogs, a lot of useful information can be found in the comments. Sometimes more useful than the post itself. Also comments help to generate more content for your blog. More content generally means more search engine spider food.

Off Page factor to help increase blog traffic:

• RSS feeds.Submit your RSS feeds to feeds directories

• Ping. Ping every post. Pinging is the process of letting servers know that you have new content on your blog. Once pinged, directories and sites that have your RSS feed on them get updated with your new content. A good pinging service, one that I use is http://www.pingoat.com/

• Submit to blog directories. Use variations of the keyword you want your blog to rank for as the title of your submission. Don't use the same title for all your submissions. Vary things a little. Most directories will use the title as the anchor link to your site. Now not all directories have do follow links so not all of them will contribute to your SEO efforts. But humans use directories as well and you can get direct human traffic this way.

• Bookmark your posts using social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us , technorati and digg. Also if it will not clutter your page, put a button for a few of these bookmarking sites on your blog. That way other people can bookmark your posts too

• Generate backlinks using article submissions and forum participation. Use anchor text in your links . Again the anchor text should include your keywords and variations of your keywords

Till next time

Thank You Coleen, American Airlines

So I recently flew to San Diego on a work do with American Airlines

Work sponsored gig so it was 'cattle class' better known as Economy

For those of you who have never had the 'privilege of flying economy, the seats are small and leg room, hmmm, what leg room?

And the tiny little TV screens, don't even go there

And yet when I got back home I had the most unbelievable feeling of having had a great flight

Why?

Because of Coleen.

Coleen is a flight attendant with a difference. Talk about customer relations, the girl has got it to an art form

I don't know where American airlines got her from but they really need to hold on to this chic

So how does this relate to affiliate marketing?

It is all about the little things. A little attention to detail. A smile, a pillow, a toothbrush offered just when you need it

Marketing as an affiliate is not about putting up as many ads as possible on your sites, there are loads of websites doing exactly that and not making any significant amount of money

It is about building relations.
Making your site visitors comfortable with you.
Making the majority of your email marketing be informative rather than a sales pitch
Offering useful freebies in your promos

So what airline will I be travelling with when I next fly abroad

You guessed it, American airline

Thank you Coleen

Till next time

Websites Hacked

Website hacking is on the increase

For those of you who do not know what website hacking is the process of getting access illegally to the control panel of someone else's site
Most hackers in the affiliate marketing world are into it for
Emails: They want to get the emails on your opt in list
Redirects: mainly targets high traffic sites and sites that rank well in the search engines. The hacker enters your hosting account and sets a redirect to their site. This means that all the trffic that would normally come to your site goes to their site

You need to be alert to this and be ready to take action

First you need a traffic tracking. Google analytics is a good free one. Monitor your traffic on a daily basis
If you notice a sudden drop in your traffic, that is not typical of the niche you are in, get suspicious. Inspect the code of your pages for any string that looks suspicious. Go into your user account and make sure that no new scripts have been installed there

Google alerts: Set up a google alerts profile and use it to monitor queries that would trigger your URL. Google alerts will email you everytime your search term is queried in the search engines

Check your sites manually regularly

Till next time

Daily Schedule For The Affiliate Marketing Newbie

As an affiliate marketing beginner, it is too easy to get overwhelmed by the large and varied amount of tasks to accomplish

And it is, oh so easy to spend countless hours in front of the computer just churning smoke i.e no useful activity.

Here is a recommended schedule to help you structure your activities especially with regards to search engine optimization

Directory submissions: Aim to submit to 5 new directories everyday. % because with all the other daily activities you have to do, 5 is a good aim without compromising quality. Don't run out and submit to 50 directories in one day. It will just raise flags with the search engines and you will get labeled a spammer

Blog Commenting: Find 20 blogs that have DO Follow attribute in their comment links and post USEFUL comments including a link to your site. "0 comments on the same blog will not do. It has to be 20 different blogs and don't forget to vary your anchor text.

Blog commenting is actually a double advantage because while reading the posts you are commenting on, you will learn a heck of a lot about your niche

Forum Participation: 5 authority forums in your niche is really all it takes. Always structure your signature first, using anchor text to link to your site. Aim to post about 5 comments every day in each of your forums. Post useful comments and make sure you stay on topic. Remember, the forums are a place to build your reputation as well so keep the comments useful

Blog Posts: If you do not have a blog you need to start one NOW. Got to how to create a blogger blog and learn how to set up a free blog there. Then set up your blog today. Not tomorrow, not later now.

Aim to add a post at least once a week to your blog, but you really should be aiming for daily posts

[In this I fall short, but you have to remember I only market part time and am still able to post on a fairly regular basis]

Edit your Website: You must review your website on a daily basis and try to improve the content. You can add new content, post a freebie whatever. Improving your money site or building a new site in a new niche is something you must consider on a daily basis

You will find that doing the activities above on a daily basis will soon have a significant effect on the amount of traffic coming to your websites

5 Useful Forums In The Affiliate Marketing Niche

Forum participation is a great way of getting traffic to your niche sites

Here is a list of 5 useful affiliate marketing forums

1. http://www.affiliatemarketingintro.com/Recommends/CYN Top recommendation
2. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/
3. http://affiliate-marketing-forums.5staraffiliateprograms.com/
4. http://forums.seochat.com/
5. http://www.webmaster-talk.com/

Loads of useful information

Till next time

Adwords Account Hijack

For any of you doing PPC to generate traffic to your sites and affiliate links, this is a heads up
Just come across two posts in the forums about adwords account hijack

Apparently they logged into their accounts only to find that someone had set up campaigns that were running for thousands of dollars a day and sending traffic to an adware site

Of course any clicks are charged to the owner of the adwords account

You just really need to be extra vigilant in this business

A couple of tips

• Check you adwords account everyday. You just have to keep a close eye on ANY online activity that allows money to be automatically taken from your account

• Protect your passwords and make them unique

• Have a separate credit or debit card for your adwords account so that if this happens you can simply cancel the card after informing Google of the problem.

Just cancelling your account if you fall prey to these fraudsters just won't do because to reactivate your account, all you need to do is log back in and activate it. What's to stop the fraudsters from doing this

Stay safe

Ebay sues digital point owner for 'alleged' cookie stuffing

A heads up for those of you considering black hat methods

IT DOES NOT PAY

Hot on the press is the story of Ebay suing certain defendants for alleged cookie stuffing

Read the full story at http://www.courthousenews.com/2008/08/26/eBay_Sues_Alleged_Cookie_Stuffers_.htm

Now the case is still in its early stages so no conclusions of guilt can be drawn

Personally, I participate in the digital pounts forum at least 4 times a week and to be honest with you have gained a lot of useful information from other internet marketers there

It is a bit of a concern the implications of this allegation

If true, does this make digital point a bad forum or just reflects on Shawn, the owner.

And if proven not to be true, how long does it take to wash away the smear

I intend to continue to use the digital points forum

Anyone worried about cookie stuffing from any site need only to clear their cookies frequently

But the big message here is BLACK HAT COULD RUIN YOUR BUSINESS

Not so 'Free' Directory Submissions

So as an affiliate marketer or an internet marketer with your own website, one of the things you are certain to have been doing is submitting your website to free directories to get a backlink

If you are not already doing this then get off this post and start hunting down some directories to post your link in, like now!

Anyway I was doing my daily routine of generating backlinks today when I came across a site that has a "List of Free Web Directories that offer a Free One Way Text Link"

So I picked one of the directories and submitted my link, only to be met with the message, "your link will be live once you pay via paypal"

Pay by paypal?

Why was there not any warning before I got to the stage of submitting my link

Anyway, of course I have no intention of paying these cowboys.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with paying for links [actually I do, it's against google's TOS] but hey they've got to make a living too

But mate, if you are going to charge me for a link, then announce it from the get go so we both know what the game at hand is.

Not an unreasonable expectation is it?

Anyway newbies, be warned

No backlink is worth paying for

5 Things You Must Not Do On Your Niche Marketing Sites

Over the last few posts we have talked about things to do on your website to generate traffic, increase conversions, improve your opt in email list

Surfing through the forums, I have come across a disturbing trend of trying to trick the search engines to get ranking.

Problem is a lot of the sites teaching these methods do not have a sign up stating 'black hat' or 'this could get you banned'

So for clarification for any affiliate marketing newbies reading this, here are the five top things that are against the TOS of the search engines that you may have previously thought were legit

If you have been doing any of these or are contemplating doing them, the only useful advice is

STOP!

1. Keyword Stuffing: This refers to the practice of including your keywords in your copy an excessive number of times. I know that good SEO says your keywords and variations of it should appear often in your copy. However there is such a thing as too often. This actually does not help your rankings as the search engines can see right through it.

2. Buying Links. You build a website and you come across an ad for 2000 backlinks for $20. Sounds tempting, all those links from other sites pointing back to your website. Again not a good idea. The search engines especially Google, who have the lion's share of the market, frown upon paid for or purchased links and will reduce your ranking in the search engine results pages when they catch up with you

3. Hidden Text: This is the practice of adding your keywords to your webpages using the same colour as your page background, making the text invisible to human visitors but visible to the search engine bots. Again stay away from this. You'll just get burnt

4.Cloaking: Very big with blackhat marketers who are looking to make a quick profit from a website in a short period of time. The timing is crucial to them because they know the search engines will get clued on to what they are up to pretty quickly and shut them down.
Cloaking just means displaying one version of a webpage to human visitors and via software, having another version for the search engine robots. The page shown to the bots are often full of keywords and other SEO components but the content would not make any sense to a human visitor. This results in an artificial increase in ranking of the website but not for long
The search engines will detect your cloaked pages and... yes shut you down

5. Click fraud: Some webmasters monetize their niche sites with adsense. The TOS of Google adsense clearly states that you should not click on your own ads. Click fraud is the practice of clicking on adsense ads on your own websites to try to generate an income. Not good. You will get found out and you will get banned

So just a few things to pay attention to while trying to promote your niche marketing sites

Till next time

Affiliate Marketing Beginners | The Solution Is Here

I don't care whether it is poor conversions or low number of adsense clicks

Many affiliate marketers have a problem with one area or the other of their business.

The bottom line is you built the website so as to make loads of money. That's the basis of internet marketing

I know there are a lot of guides out there about a call to action, search engine optimization, building the almighty opt in list and building webpages that convert. Heck I have written a few posts on this blog about very much the same things

But the affiliate marketing newbie does not know about autoresponders and a clear call to action

And more often than not he has no ethical bribe, 'freebie', to offer as an insentive to join his/her opt in list

No money for PPC ads, No clout to be sought out for JVs, nothing

So how is the humble internet marketing newbie to make a few bucks on the internet

Traffic.

Yes the simple answer is traffic.

Get tons of traffic to your website

And you can do it without investing one cent.

Yes , your site may not be the most professional site in the world.

And you may not yet have figured out which is the best Adsense block format for your pages

Just get a reasonable site out there ...
...And drive tons of traffic to it

If your conversions are 1%, and you only get 5 visitors to your site a day, you are looking at sticking to that day job for a long time to come.

It will take you 20 days to get a conversion on average.

Now take the same site and drive 1000 visitors to it a day.

Ah, the same 1% conversion rate results in ...10 conversions a day.

Now that is the beginning of a business

Once you have made some money with your high traffic, poor conversion site, perhaps consider investing some of those earnings in improving your site.

An average e book on increasing conversions will cost you about $47.
With the knowledge you gain, you can maintain your traffic but increase your conversions

Now how many sales or clicks a day would a 3% conversion rate make you

Till next time

Adsense Units Showing Public Service Ads

Adsense siites are becoming a popular method of earning a living on the internet.

But what do you do when you do your niche research, get the website built, add your adsense units in those startegic places on your site and...

Instead of niche relevant adsense ads, you get public service ads. Which make a grand sum of zero dollars and zero cents per click

Shock Horror!
Here are a few reasons why this could occur and what you can do to rectify things

1. Your website is yet to be crawled by Google. This is why we are advised to complete your website and get it indexed before including your adsense code. To experdite indexing, try and get backlinks from other high traffic sites. The bots crawl the high traffic sites often and they will follow the link to your site and crawl it

2. Your site is in a niche that does not trigger any ads. The importance of doing your research before building the site cannot be over emphasized

3. Site in a naughty niche. Need I say more

4. Misuse of the robots txt in your code. This tells the google bots not to crawl certain parts of your site. So google cannot determine what the keywords and content of your site are and pout relevant ads on your pages. Hence public service ads.

Learn more at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10035

Till next time

Wordpress SEO | It's All In The Theme

Well we all not it's not ALL about the theme but in the competitive affiliate marketing business, you need to give your blogs every chance you can with regards to search engine optimization

It is often said that Wordpress is great for SEO and this is why a lot of affiliate marketers are using Wordpress as their blogging platform

I stubbornly stick with Blogger but that's just my preference.

Anyway for all you Wordpress enthusiasts you need to be aware of the influence of Wordpress on your SEO.

And this is where the title of my post 'Wordpress SEO, it's all about the Theme' comes in

There are some Wordpress themes that are very SEO friendly. Probably based on the amount of code, header height and such.

In choosing your Wordpress theme, take a few minutes to research how the theme affects your blog's Search engine rankings

There is always the option of getting a plug in such as all in one SEO plug in [I am told it is rather good] But best to get the basic right as well

Till next time

Why Adsense Sites Need To Be Niche Specific

In an earlier post on getting the most out of your adsense sites, I mentioned that your best chances of success are with a niche specific site.

Here are a few reasons why

1. Targeted Audience. With niche specific adsense sites, your target audience is very specific. It is easier to identify who your audience is when you are operating in a niche.
Why does it help to identify your target audience? Several benefits in this

a. You can more easily find put where they are likely to hang out online and go get them from that site to your site.

b. Once you know who they are, you can more easily identify their needs and cater to this. Internet marketing after all is about finding a hungry market and feeding its needs after all.

c. Learn to speak their language. Again, once you have identified these people, you can quickly learn how they communicate, the subtle nuances of the niche and incorporate that into your website content

2. Conquer the niche. It is easier to become an authority online in a specific niche than to become a guru on everything.
It is authority and reputation that internet users buy from.


Imagine visiting a website about this that and the other
And on a page he say's hey 'i totally recommend product x'.
And you look about the site to see what his authority is based on.
What experience does this guy have on this topic to recommend this product?
Only to find no other information on the topic.
You are not likely to buy.

You need to establish yourself as an authority in a particular niche to get repeat sales.
Even the mighty Amazon, started as a bookstore. It is only when they attained authority and reputation that they diversified into what Amazon is today

3. Generate Content For Your Site. Structuring and generating content for a niche specific site is certainly less complicated than a general site. With a niche specific site the structure of your site is almost already predetermined. The requirements of your readers more easily defined and researching content is much easier

4. Search Engine Optimization. This is the biggest reason of all.
Identifying niche specific keywords to optimize your website for is much more straight forward in niche specific sites.
Also getting traffic via your SEO efforts is more successful with niche sites than with general sites.
You see most people when they go onto the internet are looking for the solution to a specific problem.

E.g I am bored and want to play sudoku online [This person types in 'sudoku online' which is a niche specific keyword. He doesn't type in 'I am bored']

5. Website Conversions. Loads of affiliate marketers have reported better conversions on their niche specific sites than general sites.
Now personally, all my websites are very niche specific so I cannot discuss this topic from personal experience.

It however stands to reason that the person typing in 'sudoku online' is more likely to play the game when they get to the site, than the person who typed in 'I am Bored'

It is safe to conclude that conversions either with adsense or affiliate products or your opt in form from niche specific sites will be higher than for general sites

Can You Really Make Money with Google Adsense?

As I browse through the forums I find a question that comes up again and again

Can I really make money with Google Adsense?

Some asking this question are internet marketing newbies who have no experience whatsoever. In this case it is understandable that they have come across the concept of adsense sites and are seeking information before jumping in.

Unfortunately, others have had one or two years experience online and have made nothing from their adsense sites. This is the group that I think really needs to worry.

I say this because you can make money from adsense sites and it is not realy too complicated to achieve.

We are not talking about Ginormous sums like the shoemoney site disclosed recently. We are talking about a couple of hundred dollars a month as an initial target. And this really is achievable

So here are a few tips that have helped me along the way

1. Niche specific. Your adsense sites should be niche specific. In later posts I will explain further why you need a niche specific site

2. Search engine optimization. You must apply some seo to your niche sites. Identify your most appropriate keywords and optimize your site for them. You should not settle for a less than a number one position in google for 3 or 4 keyword phrases

3. Stick to The TOS. A must, must do. Cannot over-emphasize this. You just need to read Google's terms of service and stick to it. No black hat or grey hat or whatever other colour unethical hat there is out there. Just white hat techniques

4. You need to update your content regularly and frequently. To maintain your ranking, to keep your visitors coming back and to maintain your reputation as an authority in your niche

5. Master Traffic generation. Even if you are only able to get 1 click per hundred visitors, it converts to a lot of clicks and therefore a lot of income if you are able to get a ton of traffic to your site. In fact I think this is something you really need to concentrate on. traffic generation.

6. Test your ad formats. There are different formats for adsense and you just have to keep testing different formats in different positions till you find what works

7. Have several pages on your site and optimize for different keywords in your niche.

With these few tips, you really can get started on making money with adsense

Till next time

Some really useful directories to submit your sites to

Directory submissions is one way of getting backlinks to your niche marketing sites.

At the moment there is a lot of uncertainty about the advantages of directory submissions with regard to SEO i.e do follow backlinks.

My advice is that it does not take too long to submit to a handful of directories and it does not hurt your rankings so do it!

Also there is the possibility of getting human traffic from the directories to your site.

The directories listed below are free to submit to and also do not bombard you with unsolicited mail.

http://www.jayde.com/ One of my favorite. really good service
http://www.dmoz.org/ It'll take for ever if it happens, but said to be liked by the big G
http://freesubmit.thetam.net/ Very quick turn around
http://www.best-net-sites.com/ Another quick turn around
http://www.best-sites.co.uk/ Quick inclusion and email confirmation
http://www.somuch.com/ Another quick turn around with email confirmation
http://www.01webdirectory.com/
http://www.linkhelpers.net/


This is just a short list. But there are loads of directories out there you can submit your URL to. Just be careful that there are no hidden costs.

Till next time

Niche Giveaway Live

Hi there,

Just a quick note to let you know that the second stage of the niche giveaway is now on

Loads of free downloads, some really useful.

Honest truth is there are some products that have shown up in virtually every other giveaway this season, but there are some good ones I haven't seen before

Get your free downloads here

For newbies I would say that these give aways are not to be sniffed at. They give you information on a wide range of aspects of affiliate marketing at no cost to you.

Nuff said

Till next time

How To Find Niche Do Follow Websites And Blogs

Hi there,

As webmasters, we are told to generate backlinks to our sites.

And not just any backlink will do, they should be from other websites in your niche or a similar niche.

The problem is some of these websites use the 'no follow' attribute. So how do you find sites that do follow

The reason you want to find these sites is because you are going to submit useful, informative and unique content to these sites. Either in the form of blog comments or as submitted articles

Before you use the resources I am going to reveal to you, I must inform you that spamming these sites will not do you any good, for several reasons

1. The blogs tend to use comment moderation, especially the blogs that are worth getting backlinks from. So if you try to spam them, your comment will just not get published
2. If you do manage to post some nonsense on the sites you discover, you will damage your reputation as a business and a tarnish takes a very long time to erase

Always ensure that the comments you submit are useful, on topic and contribute to the discussion.

Now to find niche do follow blogs use the following resources

1. Dofollo
2. Bumpzee
3. Do follow diver
4. Do follow Blog Search

Please use these resources ethically

Till next time

Quick Tip For Monetizing Your Website

Hello,

As an affiliate marketer, it's not always about the long term. You know the long courtship with your customers, endless freebies and tips in emails before making the sales pitch

Sometimes you just need to cut to the chase, show them what you,ve got and let them take it or leave it.

There are not many plans that you can do this with successfully

However I recently came across a video that teaches you how to make quick changes to your websites or blogs that could result in increased income to you.

Believe me, you'll be impressed.

You can watch the video by clicking on quick website profits

Enjoy

Get Rich Quick Schemes Or Scams

Hi there

Was going throught the forums and blogs today just to see what news there is in the industry when i came across this on a high traffic blog

"I love a get rich quick system. Why? Because they always work !!"

I kinda did a double take. But i Thought it was probably a hook line and he will double back from this in the body of his post. But this affiliate marketing 'expert' stood very firmly by that statement. Did not really give any arguements for the statement, just made the assertion and went on to promote some casino sites

It really is shocking what people will say or do to make a buck online today

Get rich quick schemes do not work. Period.

Yes it may work for someone that your aunty's, hairdresser's, partner's baker's son overheard about on the subway but for the majority of people, they are money losing scams

Stick to a real business. Yes affiliate marketing takes time and effort but it is a busines model that works. Yes a lot of affiliates may complain that they are not making a ton of money but they all admit that they have made some money

The trick to affiliate marketing is just to keep working at it. Get better, get smater, build that list and eventually, you too will make some money

Affiliate Marketing Beginners, Professionalism Is Everything

Hi there,
I was browsing the forums and blogs this morning when I came across a post that really got my attention

No it was not some secret way to make gazillions online, nothing of the sort

It was about a game company launching an affiliate program. Nothing exciting about that except that they state in their policy that 'No SEO allowed'

Hey?

Did they mean SEO or something else?
Do they know what SEO means and how crucial it is to getting traffic via the search engines?

Anyway after much discussion it turns out that they made a mistake and SEO is allowed

A lame apology and red faces.

So am I going to jump on to the band wagon and promote this product. Of course not

The lesson is you must cross all your t's and dot all you i's BEFORE rolling out any campaign

No typos on your pages, no using of terms that you don't understand. no hype

Till next time

Adsense Units Best Format

Like me you will have come across tips by 'adsense gurus' claiming this adsense unit format is better than that

And initially I followed their advice without questioning

But I got a course by Perry Marshall [Click here to get the free course] and one thing he says over and over again is Test, Test and Test again.

So i decided to test two formats on one of my high traffic sites

I tested the 300 x 250 format within my content against the 160x600 skyscraper on the left side of my page

And the skyscraper format consistently did better than the 300 x 250 format

hmmm, i hear you say.

Goes to show that although the general guides are useful, different site will get different results

So get testing

More info on adsense at adsense basics

Till next time

Google Pagerank Madness

As an affiliate marketer, you probably obsessively check the PR of your websites every so often. Hoping that you will somehow have miraculously attained a PR of 5 or above?

But what is behind affiliate marketers obsession with pagerank that it has become an all consuming focus

And more important, is it a valid focus

According to Google "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

Oh yes and there are formulas as well

But I won't bore you with that

The problem with PR is it does not predict how well your site will do. You see there are two factors involved in your websites success

One is the search engines for which numbers and link quality and keywords and PRare quite relevant if your site is to get their attention

But the second and more important factor is human visitors. For human visitors, it is your content that matters. You could have a PR 0 page but if you have great content, you are more likely to make sales and loyal customers than a site with a gazillion backlinks and high PR but lack luster content

So what am I saying

By all means pay attention to your backlinks but not at the expense of your content.

It is true, unique content is king

Facebook And Affiliate Marketing

Facebook is a familiar site to most of us and the majority of people reading this will probably already have a facebook profile.

Probably a personal profile where your friends can check you out and leave personal notes on your wall. And that's okay... for personal stuff.

But I come across a large number of facebook profiles where pleasure and business are all mashed together. Not really good.

Imagine going to the Facebook profile for this blog and finding a note written to me personally about how silly we were at last night's party. or some such thing. Just does not reflect the business in good light.

Every website you own needs a facebook profile. It is crucial that you can network with people in the same niche without life issues interrupting.

And with the website or blog having it's own profile, you can quickly build a huge following for your blog.

Because that profile will only be focused on one niche, you can easily and quickly become the authority profile to go to in that niche

A tip is to put your blogs RSS feed on your facebook account.

Or better still have an autoposter from your blog to the blog's facebook profile. So every time you post on your blog, it automatically shows up in your facebook profile.

Great for generating traffic

Till next time

Top Reasons Why 90% Of Affiliate Marketing Beginners Fail

So the statistics say that over 90% of affiliate marketing beginners fail and quit before making a cent from their business

And you may be one of the affiliate marketers who is seriously considering throwing the towel in.

But why? Why are so many people who are aware of the excellent opportunity that affiliate marketing is, turning away from it after a period of 'failure'

False expectations: The number one reason why affiliate marketing newbies fail and quit is false expectations. You know, all those ebooks that purport to tell you exactly how to make $10,000 or some ridiculous amount in two weeks flat or the one that guarantee's you that using the tips contained in them will deliver 1000 unique visitors to your site every day.

So having spent all your savings on these ebooks that just fail to deliver, of course you are frustrated and want to throw the towel in

Poor Foundations: A business, any business is only as strong as its foundations. Have a poorly planned structure and you are doomed from the start. Planning includes domain name planning, website layout, product creation, article submissions, everything. You need to have a strong foundation if your business is going to grow. A poorly laid out website, or a weak grasp of traffic generation or shoddy keyword and niche research will get you exactly zero dollars

Jack of all trades: There is so much information to study and understand in affiliate marketing. The newbie can easily be swamped by the amount of material they need to learn in a short period of time. Also There are so many new and 'shiny' tips and tricks out there that instead of focusing on one thing, mastering it, implementing it and analyzing results so he can improve on it, the newbie spends his time running after one or the other next big thing and eventually, burn out

So if you are considering throwing the towel in, please don't. Affiliate marketing is such a simple business plan and has so much potential, it's simply amazing

Instead, start again, lay solid foundations, have reasonable expectations i.e expect to put in a few months of work before the profits roll in and master one thing at a time

Give yourself a treat. Get these Free affiliate marketing study material

Till next time,

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

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

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

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

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

SEO Digger User guide

Hi again,

Really this should have been on the previous post on SEO digger but you probably like your information in bite size portions

So here we are just going to delve a little deeper in SEO digger.

When you go to http://www.seodigger.om/ you have one of three option

• Anonymous user of SEO digger: I'll save you time now and say, don't bother with this. Limited searches, limited number of links and very limited accuracy of results
• Free SEO digger account: Highly recommended: You get a lot more searches and access to their large keyword database. Also the results are more accurate and you are given the option of saving your newly discovered keyword list as a worksheet
• Premium SEO digger account: wouldn't bother with this unless you are a full time affiliate marketer or have loads of websites.

Some nomenclature on SEO digger.

SEO digger is pretty simple to use and the site is pretty self explanatory

WT means wordtracker

OT means Overture keyword suggestion tool

Have fun

SEO digger: An honest review

Hi guys,
Today we will talk about a tool that i use frequently and have found to be very helpful.

Now we all know how important keyword optimization, and keyword selection are. We go out, find a niche, research appropriate keywords and optimize our sites for those keywords. This is conscious search engine optimization.

As your website becomes bigger and your content more varied, you will find that your site ranks for keywords other than those chosen in your conscious SEO.

A lot of these keywords are low traffic and not worth pursuing but some of them are pure gold.

What you want to do is

• Discover what those other keywords are that your webpages seem to make an appearance in the search engines for
• Accurate assess what your search engine results page position for these 'new' keywords is
• Determine how much traffic these keywords are generating in the search engines

Now if you find your website is position 22 for a high traffic keyword that you had not deliberately optimized for, what do you think will happen if you start generating backlinks to your site using the newly discovered keyword as your anchor?

MORE FREE TRAFFIC

But how do you get all this information.

There is a free tool at http://www.seodigger.com/ that allows you to do all this, at the click of a button.

There is the option of using seodigger as an anonymous user but results are more accurate if you register for an account. There is a free option and the premium upgrade.

Head over to http://www.seodigger.com/, get your free account, type in your domain name into the search bar and start working on that list of keywords

Get busy

Till next time

$1995 Affiliate Marketing Products, The Real Deal?

So we have all seen them. The product that will definitely take your affiliate marketing business through the stratosphere. The $1995 products.

[We are just quoting $1995, there are the $995, $1450 you know, high end products]

Every affiliate marketer with an email list is promoting it. You open your inbox and you have 50 new emails all pushing the same product .

Wow, this must be the greatest affiliate training program ever , you think as you go through the extremely persuasive emails.

And as an affiliate marketing newbie you have probably kicked yourself because you just cannot afford to buy this product. But just a minute lets look at these super expensive products a little closer.

Why is everyone promoting them. It must be that they are really good products.

They probably are but take a moment to think about it. If I promote a $99 ebook for a 50% commission, I get about $50 per sale. Got to shift a lot of those e books to pay the bills.

If I promote a $1995 product, using every trick in my arsenal and only manage one sale.

What's that? The commission? About $1000. Now you are talking.

As you can see there is every reason why anybody promoting these products will extol it's virtues to the nth degree.

I am by no means saying these products are bad, in fact some of them are really good and worth much more than the high dollar tag they carry.

What I am saying though is next time your in box is full of emails all promoting the same high dollar product, pause for thought before whipping out the credit card

Till next time

Title Takes It All, Decrease Website Traffic?

The title of this post may have you thoroughly confused but soon, all will be revealed.

We as affiliate marketers are always told to write attention grabbing titles for our blog posts, emails or articles. And we do try to use words like 'discover' and 'hot tips' and all those overused and under achieving buzz words

Imagine my reaction when I came across a post is a very popular seo blog titles 'How to get less search traffic'

Hey! In this world of affiliate marketing, where we are all scrambling for methods to increase our website's traffic, someone is actually trying to teach us how to decrease traffic. That's a new one

So in my mind I was thinking do nothing, stop building backlinks and presto, search engine traffic gone.

But I clicked on the mouse and read the post

You see, the author had captured my attention. I just had to read what he had to say. And every word I read as well. He was actually discussing something he had seen in a forum and because I was so intrigued by now, I went to the forum

It turns out that someone had craftily posted this question on a forum. As this was the title given to the thread of course anyone visiting the forums will see this title. And how many people have clicked on it? 235

The next topic down in the forum was about some method of generating traffic to your website and only has 93 viewings

When you actually read the post, the chap is trying to find out ways of increasing traffic to his website APART FROM search engine traffic. Slightly different discussion there right?

Goes to show you the importance of having an attention grabbing title

Till next time

Affiliate Marketing Buyers, Avoid This Scam

I just got an email that was rather upsetting.

It was a heads up from a fellow marketer warning me of a scam he has just uncovered.

It's one I have fallen for in the past and thought it was a genuine mistake on the affiliate merchant's part. But apparently I was wrong

The scam is this

You are offered an amazing affiliate marketing training package for a limited period for a ridiculously low amount, say $1.

So far, no scam. Affiliate marketing 'guru's' do these offers often. The hope is when you sign up for your trial period and have taken a peek into their membership program, you will be so impressed with the content that you will want a full membership.

But it would seem that some vendors have perverted this excellent system and are using it unethically

Now where the scam comes in is this.

When you sign up for some of these programs, you are also automatically signed up for their rather expensive newsletters. In my case it was a $99 per month newsletter. You then get the first installment free and are billed for further issues.

Why is this a scam? Well you never signed up for the newsletter in the first place. No one has the authority to set up a direct debit on your credit card or account details without you say so.

In my case I didn't realize what was going on for a few months.

Now I am not saying the £1 offers are bad, in fact in the majority of cases they are just as advertised, a $1 offer for a preview of a great affiliate marketing product.

But you have to watch out for the few scammers who are trying to use the one dollar offer to get your card details and automatically subscribe you to a junk newsletter at extortionate cost.

If you get a newsletter that you know you definitely did not subscribe to, Unsubscribe from their list immediately.

Till next time

Free Video Tutorials Get It Now

Free video tutorials that you will learn from. Guaranteed
Watch as Derek builds an affiliate marketing website and takes it to profitability in just 4 days
If he can do it and show you exactly what he is doing, so can you

The affiliate marketing video is absolutely free if you get them via this link before April 20

The link is http://www.affiliatemarketingintro.com/Recommends/Challenge

What are you waiting for?

95% of Affiliate Marketers: No Failures, Just Quiters

You have read the statistic several times before. 95% of affiliate marketers fail at affiliate marketing.

So I started to think 'Why does this relatively simple business model work so well for some and not for others?'

What does the 5%, that make loads of money and live the life of luxury, have that everyone else doesn't?

With increased experience and some success in affiliate marketing, the answer came to me.

No-one fails at affiliate marketing? No-one does it right, ticks all the boxes, does all the website traffic generation, cloaks there links, builds a hyperresponsive e mail list and then fails to make some money. It just doesn't happen!!

So why do we come across so many people in the internet marketing forums who have 'failed' at affiliate marketing??

BECAUSE THEY QUIT?

They quit the business before they have spent enough time and effort in building it

They quit thinking of ways to take their business forwards

They quit thinking about affiliate marketing as a real business and start treating it like a get rich quick scheme. [Or is that scam?]

They quit investing the hours of work everyday that is necessary to get their business off the ground

They quit on themselves before they make it happen

My question to you is

ARE YOU A QUITTER?

Give yourself a chance, get these free videos and learn a few tips that could help you take your affiliate marketing business forward

Make Money Online, Make A dollar A Day

It's snowing today!!

The view from my window is amazing. The paddock is all white and the hill top is capped.

It is great to have the opportunity to live where the views are just simply amazing

The business of making money online is one that has the potential to allow you to pick and choose where you live. But you really need to work at your business to make it work

So how can you, the affiliate marketing newbie, get your business to the level where you can wake up to views like mine?

One step at a time and lots of dedication and hard work

First of all you must have reasonable expectations of your business.
If you are hoping to make a shed load of money overnight with minimal effort then you are mistaken. This business is not for you.

If you are not ready to put in the hours of hard work, then quit now.

Start with small targets. What? Small targets?

To start with build a niche targeted website and aim to make a dollar a day from the site in your first couple of weeks

A dollar a day? I hear you say.

Take a moment to think about it.

A dollar a day means $30 a month. This easily covers your hosting account cost and your domain name fees

So by just making a dollar a day, you break even. Nothing lost, anything from there on is pure profit
And it is relatively easy to make that amount of money, just with adsense alone

Once you have broken even, you can then up the ante and start driving hoards of traffic to your site.

Tweak it, add affiliate links where appropriate, improve it and soon you will be well beyond you dollar a day target.

Once you are regularly making an amount of money that equals your pay from your day job, you can choose to sac the boss, so to speak, or stay if your day job is your passion

Till next time

How Affiliate Marketing Works by Rosalind Gardner

Hi there,
So today I thought I would tell you about how I got started in the affiliate marketing business.

In the beginning, I realized the true potential of affiliate marketing but I also knew that to make affiliate marketing work for me, I had to get a good guide on affiliate marketing

Now don't get me wrong, there are a lot of e books out there on affiliate marketing, but you will find that a lot of them are repetitive and only a few give you the tips you need to make this business work

I bought the superaffiliate handbook, amongst a bunch of other e books on how affiliate marketing works. And i will tell you some of the ebooks really sucked.

I was ready to throw in the towel and conclude that this affiliate marketing thing does not work.

I had printed out the handbook and one night couldn't sleep so i thought 'well this ought to send me off to sleep really quickly'

Boy was I wrong!! I stayed up all night reading Rosalind's handbook. Thank heavens it was a friday night as i was still then totally dependent on the income from my day job. [doesn't it suck when you have to toe the line because you need the job?]

The rest is as they say history.

I still do my day job, because i absolutely adore what i do, but no need to tip toe around people. I just go in, get on with looking after patients and go home. Knowing that have a healthy alternate stream of income has made my job rather enjoyable now.

Anyway here is a short video by Rosalind herself explaining how affiliate marketing works.

When you are done click the link below to view other videos by Rosalind Gardner



Click here for more Rosalind Gardner videos

Enjoy

Free one way backlink from authority site

Just came across this and knew i must share with you

http://niche.qassia.com/ is a new site that gives you free one way links to your site.

Great site, free to register and graet backlinks to your site.

Enough said

Go to http://niche.qassia.com/ while it is still taking on free sign ups

Ebay's Clamp Down on Digital Products

Hi again,
Some interesting news just out.

Straight from the source, Ebay has announced that it is changing the way people sell digital products on Ebay. Digital products of course refers to e books and downloadable software.

Sellers will no longer be allowed to sell these products at auction.

Apparently, there is some issue about seller/buyer feedback which does not work when it comes to these products

Anyway, you can still advertise your digital products on Ebay but in the classified ads format.

Till next time

10 Hot Tips To Increase Your Blogs Readership

It is not enough to post to your blog regularly and wait for the money to come in. You need to write posts that people will actually read

Some tips on generating blog content here

It is the words on your blog that leads to conversions.

Here are 10 top tips to help increase your readership

1. Unique, good quality content. You just have to make sure that what you post is accurate and of good quality. There just is no short cut to doing your diligent research before posting to your blog. Also make sure your posts are timely. Posting today about an event that happened 3 months ago and has gone cold, is not going to cut it. Be timely, engaging and informative.

2. Post regularly. There is just no excuse for allowing your blog to go stale. If possible, post everyday but if not at least once every two weeks. Yes I know there are affiliate marketing gurus that post maybe once a month to their blogs. But these are guys that have already established themselves. They can afford to keep us waiting for their next instalment because they know that when they post, We will come!!

3. The title of your post, and the keywords you optimize them for, are of fundamental importance. Keyword research is as important in blogging for profits as in traditional websites. I use this keyword tool. Get your keywords and make sure you apply some search engine optimization to each and every post

4.Do not neglect to use your RSS/Atom/XML feed. This allows your content to be syndicated to other sites, giving you greater reach. The blogger blogging platform allows you to do this easily.


5. Join a blogging community and interact with other bloggers. A great community is bumpzee.com

6.Participate in other people's blogs, especially those related to your niche. Leave useful comments on them and offer feedback where appropriate. Use the opportunity to increase visibility for your blog by adding a link to your blog in your posts on other people's blogs, if permitted. Now make sure that your comments are useful and informative. Some website owners abuse this opportunity and spam other peoples blogs. This is despicable and is strenously discouraged.

7. Include a link, preferable using your keyword as the anchor text, in your email and forum signatures. This is easy and free advertisement for your blog. Everytime you send an email or post a useful comment on a forum, your little advert for your new blog is also displayed. This helps increase traffic and could also improve your ranking in the search engines.

8. Submit your blog to a handful of high traffic blog directories. I don't use directory submission software for this. Rather I hand submit my blogs to the individual directories.

Also I cannot see the benefit of submiting my blog to 100 low PR low traffic directories. My time could be better spent elsewhere. Just pick the few directories that have been proved to yield traffic and stick to them.

9. Article Marketing and Bum marketing. My favorite method of free website promotion. Second only to search engine optimization. Write articles that are related to your blog's niche and of good quality. Submit these articles to article sites. Remember to add your signature, with link embedded, at the end of each article. Again you do not need to use 100 article sites. I suggest ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com


10. Use an update service or ping service to let readers know your blog has been updated. Ping your blog everytime you add a new post. I use pingomatic.com but there are loads of other good pinging services out there. The beautiful of pingomatic is it pings a lot of servers simultaneously.


The above tips should get you well on your way. It is important to recognize that you will not get a large number of loyal readers overnight. It takes time to build reputation.

Whatever you do, keep tweaking, learning and improving and you will soon see a large amount of loyal subscribers to your blog

Till next time

AOL, Bebo And The Affiliate Marketer

By now you will have heard that AOL has bought Bebo, a social networking site.
So what does this all mean.

It just goes to show how important web 2 is now for the serious marketer.

Not many of us have the financial muscle to buy a social networking site. But this does not mean you cannot use these sites to improve your profile on the internet.

Web 2 is here to stay, so get with the program

Till next time

Is Google Paying Webmasters Less Per Click?

Recently, a few blog owners and webmasters using adsense as a source of residual income on their sites have noted that their adsense revenue has dropped despite maintaining their visitor numbers.

Some webmasters are in a panic over this and there is a lesson in it for us all.

The concept of making a significant income online is one based on creating multiple streams of income.

You really cannot decide that you will only use adsense, or one affiliate program or whatever as your revenue source.

You need to have money trickling in from here and then some more from there and so forth.

So that if Google decides to reduce the amount of pay out per click on your adsense pages, you still have other channels bringing in the money and you will not be too bothered by the change.

It actually has not been confirmed that Google has reduced pay out per click.

Wow, what a lot of bother over an unconfirmed rumour

Till next time