Now, we see a variety of ways in which we can make some kind of money online, but what we need to do is find a way that actually catapults you to online success, one that is not only feasible, but legitimate and a big money-earner.

You have not one, but two ways to do this. Lets say you have a product that you created - this could be an ebook. You can publish this ebook attractively, promote it and sell it to make money. The crucial thing here is to get the right topic, and you could be making a lot of money quickly. But this sort of thing can take up a lot of time, energy and investment since you will have product development, setting up a website, stocking inventory and handling customer support. All this involves a lot of work.

Alternately you can sign up for an affiliate program. Affiliate programs are the easiest way to profit online - and they are very popular. You choose products made by someone else, and promote it for a commission. Advantages are:

• No product development
• No office
• No stock
• No customer hassles
• No capital

While you could actually do it all without a website, it is advisable to build one so that you can attract traffic.

But wait! What if the affiliate programs you sign up with didn’t bring in the commission you expected? Worse still, what if you were unable to sell your affiliate products because there’s no demand? Don’t despair! There’s a way out.

You must become what is called a ’super affiliate’. And believe me, it is the smartest way to work. Compare the advantages with simple affiliate marketing - as a super affiliate you don’t get involved in product development. You don’t even need a website. How simple is that? What you will do as a super affiliate is generate your earnings by identifying hungry markets and established profitable products that are already being marketed. The next step is generating traffic - not with your marketing efforts but through easy to set up advertising campaigns like Google AdWords.

To summarize - the best and the easiest way to profit online is

• Become a super affiliate
• Capitalize on existing resources in the form of established products and marketing models
• Combine them
• Enjoy profits

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Regardless of which social bookmarking website you choose to use, the tips that follow will help generate traffic to your website. So lets move to the 5 steps:

Action Tips To Leverage Your Social Bookmarking Campaign

Now, you know what a job it is to appear on the home page of social bookmarking websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, etc. You also know that being there could mean massive traffic and links to your website, in addition to high search engine rankings. Well, its not the Holy Grail anymore, if you know how. You are about to! Read on:

Your Posts Must Have Good Titles

Ask any SEO expert - and they’ll tell you that it’s in the title. It, in this case, is the keyword or keywords. Did you put the keywords for which you want to be found in your title? Say yes, because that’s how the people who see your content or article on these sites will link to you - that is, through the titles. This gets your keywords in the anchor text. This increases your search rankings. It’s a neat cycle.

Keep It Short

If you’ve noticed, visitors on social bookmarking sites don’t have a whole lot of patience to read lengthy text. What you need to do then, is to create content that is interesting, short and easy to read. The first two lines must grab your reader’s eyeball and keep it till the end of your content. Then they might link to it, if they like it.

Use RSS Feeds

Social bookmarking site members are there for information. Not for ads or to do their shopping. That doesn’t mean you’ve lost them. Why not put an RSS feed button on your webpage so that they subscribe to your site, and also submit your site to the social bookmarking sites? You can also position ads in your RSS feeds. That’s more money, more pageviews and more subscribers.

It All Comes Back To The King, Content

Have lots of content or linkbait - the more the better. It enhances your chances of focussed traffic. On social bookmarking sites, users comment. Do away with obstacles like asking users to sign in before they comment. Rather, lure them to comment.

A Word About Coming Up With Content For Social Bookmarking Site Users Here:

As obvious as it sounds, users browse to read as much as they can. They don’t want to linger. So make it easy for them by formatting your content to ensure that they read it and hopefully link to it. No point writing a great article if it isn’t easy to read.

• Make use of paragraph headers that highlights important points
• Get the best out of top ten/five lists - people love it
• Use images instead of words where possible.

You must identify the social bookmarking and networking sites that work best for you. The biggest may not necessarily mean the best for you. So identify those niche sites that can bring you a whole lot of traffic and customers rather than lose time on the passive ones. Check the sites you would like to be associated with to see if the content gels with you. Look for sites where the activity level is high. After you identify the right sites, establish yourself by submitting content and build the community’s trust in you. This will naturally lead them to your website.

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We already know that a well designed website is crucial to an online business’ success. Special care has to be taken in the pre-launch stage before you tell the world about your online presence. Making sure that your website is effective is an ongoing process, but especially just before you launch it. You will need to make sure that there are no broken links, no spelling mistakes in your content - because it adds to your credibility. Just imagine a visitor clicking a link that turns out to be broken - or even worse, having your affiliate program links not working efficiently!

To avoid last minute glitches and ensure that your website is launched successfully, here are some tips you must keep as a checklist no matter how many sites you launch!

• Check all links. Even though you have done nothing in the past weeks except crosschecking each link, just do it again. Broken links are a curse. Make sure that each link points your visitor to the right information page. No visitor enjoys receiving error messages. They will simply think that you don’t care enough and be lost in cyberspace forever!
• The fold - this is the border at the bottom of your web page and you must ensure that all the information above that line must have content you want your prospective customer to see. Lay the page out in such a way that your visitor sees what you want them to see first. Catchy headlines, bulleted content, subheadings, highlighted text, space, links to more information - are techniques to avoid clutter.
• Spell check - use it. All web building software come with spell check function. In fact, get a friend to re-check manually as well. Since you’ve been looking at the page constantly, any error will be more obvious to someone else.
• Take a fresh look at your website. Test the site. Have your close associates and friends look at it and get their reactions. It doesn’t hurt to make those little changes that will make a big difference. It could be something as simple as font size, color, the flow of text…
• Test your navigation links - menu titles must be succinct and to the point. There’s no point being overly creative with ambiguous words here. The most important information must jump out at your visitor in the few seconds he or she takes to glance over various elements of your website. This will make sure your conversion rate is high.
• Too much is too bad. This applies to the content on your page. Your prospective customers already know what they want. So make a page that is user friendly and easy to navigate. They can always be directed to ‘know more’ if they wish.
• Keep images relevant and to a minimum. An overdose of graphics will make the page take ages to load and no one is going to wait around until it happens.
• Check all your registration forms, submission forms, sign up links - everything.

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You can make article writing a key to topping the search engine Google. The key factors that determine the rankings in a search engine are:

• Whether it is optimized for keywords
• The number of links back to your site from other sites

The success you achieve depends on the above two factors.

Tips On Article Writing

• Share your domain knowledge
• Write an article of general interest concerning your domain knowledge. For example, if you are a doctor, you may write an article on, say “How to prevent cold.” You can be sure of instant traffic. Draw inspiration from your skill set. It is a powerful source for you to draw inspiration from.
• Leverage your hobby - Write an article on your favorite hobby. Article writing on subjects like photography, cooking, music, to name a few, draw popular attention.
• Article writing needs to be kept short - A four hundred word article is just about perfect. If a longer article is a must, keep it around 1500 words. Just ensure that the article has sustained reader interest.
• Focus on keywords - This aspect cannot be overstated. You need to optimize your article for keywords. Let your keywords turn into links back to your site. Include keywords in the headline, at the beginning of the article and a number of times in the main body of the text. This is a powerful mantra for article writing success.
• Submission of article - A good search engine will help you in finding sites to submit your article. Select a site most suited to your article subject and a one having a large number of subscribers.

On Publishing Your Article

• Who will publish my article? - Quite a few sites will lap up your article if it is well written. Informative and helpful articles generate a lot of interest. A prewritten article, having a good record of accomplishment of recognition, is a good bet. As an example, an article already published in a journal will have good readership from the right audience.
• Feedback from the publisher - Ensure that you get a feedback from your publisher once the article is published. Ask the publisher to notify you. You can set up a Google Alert. You will be notified the moment your URL is published. Take care to keep your link functioning.

Your Ranking

You will need to wait before you see results. Search engines do not update their index pages frequently. They may even do it once every two months. Even 100 inbound links may not make much of an impact on your ranking. Maintain a sustained interest in article writing. You will see results soon.

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SEO helps to optimize keywords for your site. Many hours of hard work go into this process. You pick keywords and phrases, select some, discard others and so the process carries on and on till you zero down on the best keywords for your website. For this procedure, you employ the best keyword research tools and Viola! you have an exclusive marketing strategy at hand.

The Best Keyword Research Tools - Types

Though there are many keyword research tools, some are the best of the best. Let us see the best keyword research tools, know how they work and learn their key features:p>

• Trellian’s Keyword Discovery Tool: This keyword tool is considered good for keyword discovery. It captures data such as frequency of searchers, searches of exact keywords and key phrases, related key phrase searches, keyword density analysis, misspellings as well as seasonal trends, from more than 180 search engines. It is comprehensive, and has a database consisting of approx 30 billion searches in the last 12 months.
• SearchStatus: This is also one of the best keyword research tools. Developed by Quirk’s CEO, Craig Raw himself, it fulfills the specialized needs of search engine marketers. Also a toolbar extension, it assists you in your endeavor to know how other websites are performing. It is all the more wonderful, as it is an open-source product that requires no licensing fees. Now isn’t that awesome?

• SEO for Firefox: Although one of the relatively new best keyword research tools, this tool is getting popular by the day. It has an exclusive design that helps you add more data to Yahoo and Google! It gives you a complete picture of the marketing scenario online and the marketing strategies that are being used, by providing to you marketing data points and important SEO information. The negative point of this tool is that it uses a large bandwidth, though that is nothing that you cannot handle if you show some care.
• Digital Point’s Keyword Suggestion Tool: This tool is free. Counted one among the best keyword research tools, this tool displays results from Wordtracker as well as from Overture to help you to find the most commonly searched for keywords and keyphrases.
• Wordtracker: Also one among the best keyword research tools, an old timer in the field, it searches only meta-search engines. Wordtracker is excellent not only for its massive database of the most searched-for keywords, but it also has the ability to show you the related key phrases that you have given a miss. This keyword research tool is an organized one as well as it records the number of per day per keyword searches, keywords in competition with each other and much more in a tabulated form.

These are some of the keyword research tools at your disposal. Some even offer a free trial period, so take the best pick.

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