Online auction sites: ebay alternatives

Ebay is an amazing online auctions site. And a few people who have recently asked me where they can auction off there stuff have got ebay as the standard answer from me

But I got thinking there must be other options, surely
And there are.

The one that looks most promising to me is Triple clicks

Still doing some research on it but has a solid reputation and haven't found any glitches...yet

Click here to check it out

Oh and the listing is free, but you knew that already

RSS Feeds, Quick comment

Just a quick comment on one of the responses I got on the last two posts. A fellow blogger and a friend went the extra mile and put a button for millionrss on his blog. The idea is peopel who visit his blog will bookmark his feed and therefore increase his feeds prominence at the RSS feeds directory. Kinda like social bookmarking.

I think this is great, but as a marketer you need to be selective about which social bookmarking sites you want to achieve prominence in. Then spend time building relationships at those sites.

It really does take time to build enough followers or friends to significantly impact your links..

So what am I saying?

Great idea Andrew, as long as you limit the number of bookmarking sites you want to work with or perhaps outsource things

Some RSS Diectories Bloggers Must Consider

As a follow on to the previous post on RSS directories and niche blogs, here is a list of four feed directories that I suggest you submit your blog's RSS feeds to. Obviously as you gain more experience with using feeds, you will also discover other feeds directories that you think have good results.

RSS Feeds

RSS Mountain
One of the largest feed directories. Has over a million feeds. Submission is free but requires an email address

Feedbees
A relatively new RSS directory that launched early last year and now has over 200000 feeds. Feed submission is free and they use Adsense for RSS. This means any clicks on adsense ads in your feed generates revenue for you.

Millionrss
Almost 200000 feeds A free feed directory that is easy to use. needs an email address and some details

Feedfury
Only has about 35,000 feeds but seems to have a wide reach especially in the US





Myblog2U is a newer directory. It requires a reciprocal link for your link to be accepted but this may be an advantage as it helps weed out a lot of the dross



So what next?

Get the RSS feed of your blog and get submitting

Till next time

RSS feed Directories And Niche Blogs

So if you are using the blogger platform for your blogs you will notice an icon at the bottom of your page that says 'posts atom'. This is the URL of the RSS feed for your site. An RSS feed is simply a very simple format of your site that can be displayed on other peoples site. It is a website snippet so if someone posts the url of your RSS feed on their website then it displays some of your content on the site

Is this a good thing. You Betcha!

RSS feeds are a great way to get visitors to your site. Often the feed displays only a snippet of your content i.e the first few words or paragraph of a post.

Lets paint you a picture. Adam goes to site x a feed aggregation site that just manages to rank high in the search engines. On that site he sees an interesting first paragraph of a post on your blog. He sees this because site x has subscribed to your RSS feed. He finds this opening paragraph intriguing and clicks the read more tab. This takes him to your blog, which if well written will hold for him a lot of interesting and useful content that brings him back again and again

It would be an easy world if all you had to do was post useful content to your blog and the big sites scurry to your site and excitedly subscribe to your feeds.

The sad truth is in a world with millions of blogs and a lot of these with good content, you actually will need to be a little proactive about getting your feeds out there.

I am talking about feed directories. You need to submit your feeds to as many RSS directories as possible. It is slow and tedious but it really is well worth it.

In the next post, I will give you a list of feed directories that you can get started with

If You Must Buy Website Traffic

In the last post we talked about why buying traffic to your sites is not such a great idea. And highlighted the loopholes in buying traffic

But are there are reliable, ethical sources of traffic that can be bought. If you must buy traffic what are the options open to you?

Pay per Click: Absolutely definitely hundred percent legitimate. And you will never get penalized for this. With a well worded PPC campaign, you can start getting traffic to your site withing 15 minutes of setting it up. Obviously you pay for every single visitor that gets to your site via your PPC ad and they may not convert. PPC can also quickly become rather expensive so before doing any PPC I advice you get some training. Now there are several PPC services out there but the two major players are Google AdWords and Yahoo search marketing. I think investing some money in learning about AdWords is money well spent. I use this free course when I decided to go into PPC. Gave me the basics which gave me a good platform to build on.

Ezine Adverts: Not sure that advertising in ezines converts as well as it did a couple of years ago, but if you want to get your advert in front of people interested in a particular niche, then advertising in a popular ezine in that niche would be one way to go about things

Personally I think that free traffic via the search engines is the ultimate source of visitors that convert. Obviously It takes time to build your search engine ranking to the level where you get a significant number of visitors consistently but the bottom line is SEO should be one of your key skills as an affiliate marketer.

I guess I am supposed to recommend an SEO guide here

This article, On Page Search Engine optimization, should get you started

Till next time

Buying Traffic, Is It A Good Idea?

The more traffic your site gets the higher your chances of making a sale. Or at least so we are expected to believe
And in a bid to increase website traffic it is really tempting to buy traffic

We have all seen the ads. £30 for 10000 visitors to your site or something along those lines. And some reading this post may have actually gone ahead and bought the 'traffic'

The long and short of it is these kind of traffic brokers usually do not deliver high quality targeted traffic to your sites. Let us take a closer look at some points

Traffic conversion. What proportion of this bought traffic actually ends up taking a desired action ie clicking on an affiliate link and making a purchase, or clicking on an adsense ad, or joining your opt in list. From reports from other webmasters that have bought traffic, conversions are just about nil. So what is the point of paying money for a ton of 'traffic' that does not make you any money?

Traffic source. where do these 10,00 visitors come from. Think about it. If you had a list of 10, 000 people that are interested in a certain product or niche, and they are real people, and they are ready to visit a site and take action. well would you be selling this traffic for 30 bucks. I think not. You would probably run out, set up your own website and send the traffic to it. And retire a rich happy man :) But more seriously, you have to think very carefully about the source of the traffic. there are paid to surf sites where people are paid to visit sites. And there is even software to automate surfing. i really do not think this kind of traffic is going to convert

So on the issue of buying traffic from the mass click brokers, I think the answer to the question asked in the title of this post is no. It is simply throwing away your money

But having said that there are other forms of bought traffic that do convert and are real visitors and we will be covering these in a later post

Till next time

Livejournal Job Cuts?

Wow.
I could not believe it when I heard the news
Live Journal is a major blogging platform and I am sure that some followers of Niche Traffic have live journal blogs of their own.

I must say that I am surprised at the news of the job cuts. As always the usual 'restructuring' phrase is given but one wonders if the credit crunch and global recession is not a contributing factor.

Hmmm and what is that about moving to Moscow?

Difficult times ahead for anyone with only one source of income, the job

Till next time

Is Twitter Useful For Niche Affiliate Marketing

So I gave in and finally took a look at Twitter. Twitter is what is known as a miniblog, i.e a blogging platform that permits you a limited number of characters per post. In the case of Twitter the limit is 140 characters

For whatever reason twitter seems rather popular especially with online marketers

So my question when I joined was does this really help?

I am a great believer in testing things out for myself so I duly signed up and did all the research necessary to improve my chances of succeeding with twitter

The results so far?

• Followers. I have managed to get a few followers i.e other people subscribed to my Tweets. I really honestly cannot tell you how they found my twitter account or why. But as long as their interest is maintained, I suppose that's the point of things really. By the way just to mention that I did nothing to advertise my twitter profile. Just set it up and added updates
• Updates. Really difficult to get a point across in a few words I find and some days I put tweets that even I would not be interested in. I think one really has to think carefully about the updates and get you main theme across within the first 4 or 5 words.

• Update Daily. Like blogging, Twitter seems to thrive on frequent posters. As my post frequency increased, the number of followers increased.

• Backlinks. I think Twitter is not really useful if you want to use it to get backlinks to your sites. Once the URL posted is longer than 30 characters, then it uses a tiny URL link. I am still trying to see how to get around this. Found a few methods which I will describe in a later post once I have tested them, but so far nothing that would create any excitement

So for me the jury is still out. I honestly believe that for marketing Twitter is just another social networking tool. The advantages are making more contacts and a platform on which you can build relationships and maybe build your online reputation. But as for any direct and immediate traffic benefits for your site, I don't think Twitter has anything special to offer

Obviously I am still testing things out and if things change as I gain experience, I'll let you know.

Till next time

Google Alert, A niche Marketers Tool

Google alerts is a service provided by google where you enter a word or phrase and google alerts you via email every time that keyword is used and tells you on what website it has occurred

Google alerts has several uses for the niche marketer

• Keyword research. If you want to know how frequently a word is searched or used on the Internet, just set up an alert for it

• Researching your site: Website traffic analysis gives you a pretty good idea of how frequently your site is visited. But does not tell you how often your website is referred to. e.g someone makes a mention of your site on their blog using a no follow link. Alerts can let you know whenever your website is cited as it happens. Useful for assessing who your supporters are and more important for putting out any fires. If you know what I mean :)

• Finding blogs to comment on. Now blog commenting is really useful for building reputation on line and also for getting links back to your sites. The aim is to comment on blog posts as early as possible. With google alerts, you can set a blog alert up that tells you as it happens when your chosen keyword is used on a blog

The problem with google alerts though is if the word or phrase you set your alert for is popular, then obviously your inbox will be swamped with alerts

I suggest you set up a different email account dedicated to your google alerts campaigns

Also if you set up an alert for a multi word phrase, then you could get alerts for the individual words as well

The website is http://www.google.com/alerts

Till next time

Social Bookmarking Sites And Niche Marketing

Social bookmarking sites are yet another tool in the armamentarium of niche marketers to try to increase traffic to the money making niche sites

And for most newbie affiliate marketers, that stampede of traffic that is supposed to occur once the sites are bookmarked just does not happen

But social bookmarking sites do work. We just have to learn the rules of the game and then ...Result

So here are a few social bookmarking tips that I have picked up from the many ebooks and videos I have watched on the subject

• Mass submissions: To be generally avoided. In the past it as great to submit to as many social bookmarking sites as possible. Simply for the backlink value. But now the majority of them have no follow links. I know, you have seen the forum posts that have this wonderful list of social bookmarking sites that do follow. Well try submitting your bookmark to them and use SEO elite to try and analyze the bookmarked webpage's backlinks. Need I say more. So select just a handful of social bookmarking sites that you want to work with and stick to them, at least till you get the results you want

• Bookmark other people's sites: If all your bookmarks point to the same set of websites, then things begin to look a litttle fishy. Bookmark other people's sites as well as your own. It helps build relationships fast and could garner you some bookmarks in return. I suggest bookmarking sites that are not in direct competition with yours :)

• Build relationships: This is the reason why you want to work with just a few bookmarking sites rather than the whole horde. You need to build relationships at the bookmarking sites, make friends, increase your profile, that sort of thing. It takes spending time in these sites to build a large enough group of friends to make a significant ifference to your bookmarking results. [By the way, this is what I am working on at the moment] You must have heard of the concept of the power digger at digg. He posts an article and it's like magic. Within a few hours he gets double figure or triple figure diggs for his post. It takes time and a lot of networking to attain this status

So knowing all this what am I going to do?

It's straight forward really, build relationships

Using the old methods I have managed to get one digg per post on this blog. And you guessed it, that digg is mine. Occasionally you will find a post on this blog with two diggs, those days are like christmas

With following the methods in this post, perhaps I can improve on this

Heads Up! Auctionads Irregularity

Auctionads, now known as shopping ads is an ad revenue site that I have been using to generate an income from a couple of my sites

And I noticed that just recently the pay outs had completely gone

What gives!

Earlier today, I logged into my account and for some reason thought I would check my settings i.e email, paypal email etc

And what do I find?

Some strange paypal address, email address and contact details in Selangor. Which I found out is in Malasia

I cannot tell you what is going on

Most likely someone has hacked into my auctionads account and changed the payment details

You know the old trick

I do all the work and they get all the money

I fired off an email to the shoppingads support team.

I am yet to get an answer but hey it's saturday and I have only been waiting 6 hours

Lesson: Check your contact details and payment details of all your affiliate marketing accounts

Hackers are really fine tuning their skills

A slightly frustrated

Internal Links And Search Engine Optimization

So when it comes to SEO, we are told to get as many relevant backlinks, i.e links from other peoples' sites to our sites' as possible. Preferably links with our keywords as the anchor text

But what about the internal links on our sites.

To my aplomb I found out that the internal links on your site make a huge difference to your rankings

I have a 30 page website the homepage of which has been ranking in the coveted number one position in the Google SERPs for about 40 keywords, that I am aware of, for the last two years

Well, a couple of weeks ago, I did something silly

I decided to update the site. Really Silly!!!

I changed the titles of the inner pages on the website, not really changed but altered the arrangement of the words

Problem is the original titles of the inner pages had my main keyword first and then the keyword for the subniche that the individual page was targeting second

• e.g affiliate marketing backlinks

All I did was change to subniche keyword first and then the main site keyword second.

• e.g backlinks affiliate marketing

Didn't touch the home page

All the inner pages have links to my home page

Anyway, the next crawl of my pages by the google bot came along and it's like a really dark kind of magic.

My homepage disappears from the first page of google. For all of the keywords that it previously ranked for

OMG!!!

Going from position 1 to position 60, 70 or ... Does not bear stating

It's obvious what happened here.

The internal links of my site were giving my homepage a BIG SEO BOOST for the keywords my homepage ranked for.

Because those keywords were high up on my internal pages!

By pushing the keywords further down on my inner pages as viewed by the search engine bot, SEO juice kind off ebbed

The content of the internal pages linking to your home page does really matter with regard to SEO so be warned

Till next time

Own Website Necessary For Successful Affiliate Marketing?

It's a question that comes up again and again

Do you need your own website to be successful at affiliate marketing?

Probably not could be an honest answer, but having your own website makes the job a lot easier

If you think about it. What are your options for advertising your affiliate links if you do not have your own site

There are a few options

• Use Pay per Click ads with your affiliate links as the destination link. This is what used to be called the google cash method i.e you put up an adwords ad with the affiliate site's URL as your display URL and your unique affiliate link as the destination URL. Used to work but now with high bid costs and a very competitive market, there are very few niches that you can actually make serious money doing this. At best most people report breaking even. not really what a business is about. Also there is the problem of tracking your clicks. I mean which keyword actually generated the click that went on to buy?? it's anyone's guess

• Use other people's websites e.g Squidoo or Hubpages. The benefits of this is that you don't have to pay for hosting. The problems though are that you are GIVING AWAY your valuable content and the sites are not totally under your control.

• Use USFreeads. Admittedly an effective method. Tips at USFreeads And Niche Marketing. Again the limitation is that you actually need a premium account to make USFreeads work for you and your niche marketing campaigns. The free account is just not worthwhile

• Other Free Classified sites. I think anyone with any experience in the free classifieds sites knows that the majority of the traffic is people looking to place their own free ads. I tested free classifieds for about a year and yes I got some clicks but nothing that added up to serious conversions

• Buy an email list and spam them: A definite no-no. Besides, bought email list recipients tend to be very trigger happy when it comes to hitting the SPAM button

Advantaged of having your own website or Blog:

• Totally under your control. The content is yours. you can tweak it, add to it, alter it , improve it's search engine properties, take it down, you have total freedom with regards to what goes on those pages

• You can focus on driving traffic to this website on which you can promote more than one product or even have different methods of monetization

• You can build a reputation and have your personality reflected on your site. If you think about it, a lot of people out there make purchases from one person and not the other because they liked the way the sales person approached them.

• You can build an email list from an opt in form on your website and then work on building a relationship with the people on your list. Again sales are easier and people are more open to recommendations from people they feel they know

So let's get back to the original question

Do you need your own website to be really successful in affiliate marketing

I suppose the answer is probably YES

Till next time

Does a Niche Affiliate Marketer Really Need a Laptop

In niche affiliate marketing, there is obviously the need to have your own computer with internet connectivity

Personally, I have a laptop and a desktop but tend to use my Laptop most of the time. Even when I am at home

But does a niche affiliate marketer or any other form of internet marketer actually need a laptop?

The Portable Business Model:

One of the things that probably attracted you to affiliate marketing as a business is probably the idea of being able to take your business anywhere with you.

With a bricks and mortar business, you are really constrained to the office, shop floor, wherever.

As an internet marketer as long as you have access to the internet and the relevant log ins and what have you, you should be able to conduct your business from just about anywhere, be it a nice hotel in La jolla or a sandy beach in Goa.

So what is the point of having a business with these perks if you do not have the tools to take advantage of them??

The Efficiency Factor:

You know the feeling.

You are stuck on a train, plane, boat, whatever and have nothing useful to pass the time.

You have loads of ideas runnng through your mind and nothing you can do to implement them...till you get home to your trusty old desktop.

So you make notes on little scraps of paper that you know you'll lose before you get home or will come out as little bits of felt in your pockets once the laundry is done. Yikes

Admit it, it's happend to you. Perhaps more often than you'd care to admit.

But take the same scenario with a laptop in your hand luggage. Totally different prospects.

You may not have internet connectivity but you can at least make notes of your ideas and save them in an ideas folder for example. Or even write a draft for your next blog post.

By the way, I am writing this sitting on a coach, stuck at Sheffield, England.
Don't ask why I am on a coach trip. Long story for another post

But to get back to the point, imagine the 30 minutes spent waiting here or there and what you could achieve in those 30 minutes.

...If only you had a laptop

For me, my laptop goes everywhere with me.

SO what stops you from investing a few hundred dollars in a piece of equipment that could help take your business to the next level

Free ground shipping on all Sony Style orders $100 or more.

Till next time

Search Engine Optimization. The First Paragraph

This search engine optimization tip is one that I try to apply in all my online work. At least where possible.

So if you have your own blog or website, by now you will have realized that you need some SEO if your site is to get anywhere in the search engines

And these days getting good ranking is like going to war. The competition is really that fierce

Anyway here's a tip that works

Pay attention to the first 25 words on your webpage, be it blog or website

They really do matter.

It is important that you include your keyword /phrase AND some related words here

When the search engine bot gets to your page and finds a well crafted first paragraph, the bot knows precisely what keywords your page is relevant for

It is important not to overdo it, i.e the SEO, though

Since the florida update, the bot has been on the lookout for pages that are 'over optimized' and will penalize them

Till next time

Make Money With Adsense Traffic Question

Adsense is an increasingly popular method of making money online

Especially among internet marketing beginners

But the sad truth of the matter is many of them report success as making a couple of dollars a day.

Yes $2 dollars a day and they are all over the forums with their 'check me out' posts

Hang on a minute. $2 a day means $60 a month!!!

Not really a business is it

One of the things that a lot of the adsense training books overlook is how much traffic you need to make a decent income with Adsense

They all say 'drive loads of traffic'

But what's 'loads' of traffic?

For any internet marketing newbie getting 10 unique visitors a day is pretty good going. A hundred and they are ecstatic.

But the truth is this is just a trickle

Let's do the maths for a second

Let us assume that you have really good adsense conversions, say 10% of the website's visitors click on your adsense ads.

And lets say you are in a niche that pays $1 per click on average, for example

To really make a significant income from adsense ads that is going to help you 'Fire the boss' you really need to be making $3000 a month.

That's $100 a day

So to get this income how many visitors a day do you need if your click through rate remains at 10%

$100 means 100 clicks which means 1000 visitors a day

Now lets take a closer look at the forums

Too many posts with people claiming 10 cent clicks and even 5 cent clicks

So it would seem that for the majority, they actually need 10,000 visitors a day with a really high click through rate to get ant decent income from adsense

So am I saying adsense is bad or not worthwhile?

Certainly not

I make a significant proportion of my online income from adsense

But this really is a 'getting you in the right frame of mind' post

You need to focus on your traffic generating campaigns to really make adsense work for you

Till next time

Fake Clickbank Income Proof

Just came across this video and thought i'd give you a heads up

Go to any make money online product's sales page and you will see the almost inevitable proof of sales or proof of income on clickbank

And for the majority [I hope] of these sales letters, the proof of income snap shot is probably genuine

But there are those products that are supposed to help you make a few hundred dollars a day and you buy them and implement what it teaches to a tee and nothing happens
Your clickbank account is still showing ZERO

And you must be wondering, is it me?

The vendor shows evidence of this system working for him so it must be that I am doing something wrong..or whatever

Well watch this clip and then decide for yourself



Well, you've been warned

Till next time

Traffic Analysis Niche Marketing Essential

Traffic analysis is one area that a lot of newbie niche marketers or affiliate marketers fall down on again and again

Traffic analysis is crucial to taking your business forward

The formula for success in this business includes your niche site, traffic and conversion

The aim to to get traffic from the sources that provide visitors that convert

Building a niche site and just driving any traffic from anywhere just will not cut it

Yes you may get the occasional conversion; and more often than not that conversion is an adsense click [Peanuts] rather than an affiliate sale [real money], but you will be going through a large amount of traffic to get the conversions

What any niche site needs to have to be profitable is traffic that does convert!!!

So how do you know where this traffic is coming from?

From your traffic analysis software

I know a lot of people are put off because they think it involves buying yet another product. I mean this business is supposed to be about making money, not spending it!

But there are good traffic analysis products that are free and quite accurate

My recommendation is Google analytics. Analytics is easy to use and very up to date

Once you set up analytics all you really need to do is focus on your bounce rate and your length of visit data

A source that has a bounce rate of over 50% is one that I don't really spend too much time cultivating. Especially if you combine this with a length of stay of less than 30 seconds

You could argue that a high bounce rate means that they are clicking on your affiliate links and going to the merchant's page, perhaps to make a purchase

But no-one comes to a website and within 30 seconds has read your content, decide to buy and clicks through to the merchants site with credit card in hand. It just does not happen that way

So get analytics
Monitor your traffic sources
Pay attention to the bounce rate and length of stay
Then focus on the traffic generation methods that are providing you with interested traffic

And if you are willing to pay a small amount of money for a more robust software then consider Site Tracker

Till next time

Top 10 Blog Traffiic Tips. Guest Post By Yaro Starak

In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else's blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that's about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called "traction", which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major "pillar" articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good "how-to" lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don't have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that's the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger's article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry - it's sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important - it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it's so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it's worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it's worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have - your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your "Resource Box". You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it's certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

The Problem With Yahoo Answers

Any regular reader of this blog will know that I consider Yahoo answers one of several methods you can use to generate traffic to your niche marketing sites

And It really does work a lot of the time.

There is an increasing frequency of complaints about Yahoo answers in the forums lately. And one often repeated complaint is account cancellation for no apparent reason

And I must say it really is for no apparent reason.

My Yahoo answer account which has been built up to a level 3 with about 15% best answers was suspended today because someone complained about an answer I posted

No worries except that I do stay well within the TOS of Yahoo answers.

But I am not one to worry about these things so I got to thinking what lessons can we learn from this

• Back up your answers. If like me you are someone who bothers to put up detailed answers to questions asked, Saving a copy of your answer in a document is a must do. Even if your account never gets suspended, which is highly unlikely, the answers you have given can be tweaked and then used as content for a blog, or an article

• Never depend on one source of traffic. The idea is to create multiple streams of traffic so if one source gets cut off, like me, you'll not be too concerned. You must continually expand the methods by which people find your site. Obviously Yahoo answers is a very good source of traffic but you can see that there can be problems with Yahoo answers as with any other traffic source.

• Keep Moving. So often we read on the forums about this or that person's Yahoo answers or Google adsense account has been suspended. And there is this plea for help 'How can I get my account back' My answer to all these posts is move on! One door closes, FIND AN ALTERNATIVE! In the short time since I got the email, I have found several question answer websites that look pretty good. I have found one that allows anchor text links from within the body of your answer. Still need to find out if it does follow. But my point is you can either get busy arguing with whatever body about getting your account back or you can get busy building your business in other directions

So although this post is titled 'the problem with Yahoo answers', I still do believe that it is a good source of traffic but not one to be totally dependent on

Til next time

Search Engine Optimization Link Building Strategy That Works

Backlinks are very important when it comes to SEO. And it is understandable that once an internet marketer gets hold of that piece of information, they run out and try and grab as many links as possible.

So you end up with a very nicely built website, with great information and lay out and it suddenly gets a gazillion links over about 1 week

What do you think the search engine spiders will do?

Give the site higher PR and better position in the search engine results pages?

I think not!!

You get a great big penalty or even get BANNED!!!

The search engines aim to give the most accurate results for any search term. So any evidence of activity to artificial enhance search engine performance of course will be frowned upon

What the search engines want is a natural pattern of link network development.

So build you links slowly and consistently over time. Be it article submission, directory listings or forum participation you are doing, be a little sensible and patient with it

The aim is to slowly build up your link network over time to give your site good, long term search engine performance

Till next time

SEO Practitioners. Yahoo An Option

In the world of SEO [search engine optimization], in every SEO ebook or manual, we are told that the aim is to rank well in Google for our chosen keywords.

So we go about trying to generate Quality backlinks amd do our on page optimization and chase the same spot that is being chased down by hundreds of other marketers.

And dare I say, some more savvy that us

And in all this flurry we sometimes forget that Google is not the only search engine out there, at least not yet :)

I just did traffic analysis on one of my sites and found that in the search engine traffic category, Yaho was giving that site about 4,500 uniques per day whereas I was getting a measly 1000 from Google

So a quick heads up to you affiliate marketers and SEO enthusiasts out there

Yes Google is King of the search engines

But Yahoo, well it can provide you with a significant income too

Till next time

Commission Blueprint. An Honest Review

Commission Blueprint has been out for a while now but I was so busy doing other things I just did not have a chance to take a look at it, till now

To cut a long story short, Commission blueprint is a video guide that teaches you how to effectively use adwords to promote clickbank products

And in one word, it is an excellent series of videos.

If you are regular reader of this blog you will find that posts dedicating to promoting a product are pretty rare.

This is a blog that aims to give free and useful information to affiliate marketing beginners.

But I am so impressed by the quality and mode of presentation of Commission Blueprint that I just had to talk about it

It is a series of 14 videos and a bunch of ebooks that really DOES take you by the hand and teach you how to construct effective adswords campaigns for clickbank products

And it works :)

Anyway enough from me

Click on Commission Blueprint for a more information

Till next time

Alternative To OnlyWire

Onlywire is a bookmarking service that I have recommended in previous posts. And for a while it was useful.

But recently onlywire has become a subscription service i.e you pay so much a year if you want to continue using the service.

There is still a free service but that entails you putting a code on your site that allows them to place their adverts on your pages. Not clear whether these woll be adverts recommending onlywire or promoting other products. Needless to say, it will be completely out of my control as a webmaster

Not very satisfactory!

Anyway a FREE alternative to Onlywire is Socialmarker

Social marker is another mass social bookmarking service that allows you to submit lots of bookmarks in a short period of time, so check it out

I think if onlywire wants to become a paid for service, they need to up the service

If you are considering a paid for social bookmarking service then I suggest BMD.

This is a truly automated social bookmarking submission tool that just takes the hassle out of getting backlinks to your site

You can

• set up multiple accounts for each bookmarking site
• randomly vary the title, description, user name of your bookmarks automatically
• set up a schedule so bookmarks can be submitted at spaced intervals and loads more

And it is a one time fee not a recurring bill.

Anyway click here for more information and videos on BMD

Till next time

USfreeads and niche Marketing. Does USfreeads work?

USfreeads is a free classifieds site with paid option that a lot of marketers especially bum marketers use

And you will see a lot of blog posts extolling the virtues of USfreeads, with the necessary affiliate link of course :) , and telling you how very easy it is

And I, as a newbie affiliate marketer, saw one the afore mentioned blog posts, and hurriedly went and signed up for a free USfreeads account.

I rolled out a handful of ads and waited and waited and ...... nothing. not a sale, no onslaught of traffic, nothing

And to make things worse, after what seemed like a short period of time, my ads became inactive!!!

So I was perplexed and thought, there must be something in it. There must be a way of using USfreeads to promote my niche websites

So after a lot of research and experimenting I found a few answers

So here is a list of the things that I think contribute to my improved results with USfreeads

USfreeads tip 1: Get the paid option. It's only $10 a month and you can post a lot of ads with this membership. Click on USFreeAds to sign up

USfreeads tip 2: Test everything. You need to test and track your ads. Use unique tracking codes when setting up the affiliate links to be used in your ads campaign, so you can know when the sales are coming from you ads campaign

USfreeads tip 3: Put up loads of ads. those that have success using USfreeads have stated they have 70 to 100 ads running at any one time. You can weed out the ads that are not generating sales and replace them with new ads

USfreeads tip 4: Apply basic on page SEO when writing your ads. That way your ads will do well in the search engines and you can get tons of traffic to the ad campaign

More info at USFreeAds marketing Guide

Till next time

Adsense Hijack

Adsense Hijack?

Just came across a marketer who monetizes his sites using adsense

He noticed a drop in his adsense revenue and decided to investigate further

To cut to the chase, he found that some of the adsense blocks on his site had his publisher id on them and some had a strange id

Website hacking is getting more common and problem is the techniques are sometimes so subtle, that even the most vigilant can miss the signs

Just a heads up

Till next time

Getting a New Site Indexed In Google

All affiliate marketers want their niche marketing websites to appear in the Google index quickly, preferable with good search engine position

A quick look through the affiliate marketing forums reveals a large number of posts regarding getting indexed in Google

Before you submit your site for indexing, make sure that your website is up to scratch. Check for any broken links. typos and code bloat

Then you can do one of two things

1. Go to the Google submit your url tool and submit your website's address there. You will be asked to fill in a verification code and then you have to wait. Often a long period of time. So many sites are submitted everyday with Google that it can take a long period, some have reported 3 months, before the bot crawls your site

2. You can give the bot a helping hand by helping it find your site. The thing to do is, instead of submitting your site to the 'submit your URL' form, try and generate some backlinks to your site from other frequently crawled websites. examples include ezinearticles, blogs and active forums

Obviously the links have to have a 'do follow' attribute or the bots just will not see these links

Hope this helped

Till next time

On Page SEO For Your Blogger Blog

So I have managed to get a few of the posts on this and other blogger blogs to rank well with the search engines for a bunch of keywords

Everyone in affiliate marketing goes on about how great Wordpress is and how all those plug ins allow you to enhance your optimization efforts. And there is no disputing that this is true

But blogger posts can also be easily optimized and you have the advantage of quick indexing with blogger

Here are a few on page optimization tips for your blogger blog

On page SEO tip 1: Domain name. Before you choose the domain name of your blogger blog, do some keyword research and determine which keyword is most relevant to your blog.

Once you have identified the keyword, use it as the first word of your blogspot domain name
Remember, the earlier in your URL the keyword appears, the better for your SEO

On page SEO tip 2: Post title. When setting up your blog, you should have selected yes for the option to allocate each post it's own unique URL.

If you have done this each post's URL is your blogger domain name + the post title.

You should, where possible, include the keyword you are targeting in each post, in the title of your post

On page SEO tip 3: Template. We know that the google bot reads the webpage from LEFT to RIGHT and TOP to BOTTOM.

So why would you want to choose a template that has the about me and other widgets on the left side of the page? They have little or no SEO value.

It makes better sense to use a template that has the blog post to the left of the page and all the other widgets, ads etc on the right side of the page

Till next time

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