Articles are a powerful way to generate traffic, in addition to bringing you a whole lot of other benefits. When you post articles, you build credibility and trust which is very important for an online marketer. When readers believe what you have written, they don’t hesitate to click to your site and know more or sign up with you. You build a reputation with your niche market. When you are perceived as trust worthy, you also attract joint venture partners.

How do you write articles that will bring loads of traffic? Here are some tips:

• Your keyword rich articles must be focused to your niche market. Decide who should read your articles and write for them.
• An attention-grabbing headline with your primary keyword tucked into it is essential. People read the headline first, and if they find that it shows a benefit, decide to read the rest of the text. People love useful information, and you should write your title accordingly. Some suggestions are:
  • How to…
  • The complete guide to….
  • The truth about…
  • What you don’t know about ….
• Make sure your article has a proper introduction, flows well into the conclusion and states what action the reader should take after reading it.
• Your resource box at the end of the article is the most important component of your article next to the quality content. This resource box will have your contact information in the form of a link to your website. It must be worded in such a way that there is a call to action - depending on whether you want the reader to sign up for your ezine, purchase your product, claim a free report, etc. Your resource box is a lot like an ad so write it with care. Preferably use language your readers will identify with. You must include a benefit to encourage your reader to take immediate action.
• While there is no rule about the length of your article, generally about 500 words should be adequate. Don’t forget to include your keywords.

Articles are an efficient way to get back links and traffic to your website. If you already have a blog, you can always use your own content to write good articles and submit them to article directories. Article directories let you link back to your blog or website via the resource box so that they can generate traffic. Just make sure you have a headline that tempts the reader to get to the whole article.

One method to have your reader clicking to your website or blog is to post a part of the article and at the end, say “part 2 is at link” Your article must be divided at a point where the readers will quickly rush to your link to read the rest of it.

You can post your articles to your blog, your website and on forums. No Internet marketer can afford to ignore article marketing because keyword rich content is the single biggest traffic builder. Search engines love information in the form of articles especially if they are original and updated regularly.

Popularity: 90% [?]

As a first step, identify what you are interested in, because this will help you find the right products to promote. When you are enthusiastic about the products you sign up with, it shows in the way you promote them and it doesn’t seem like work at all. Your eagerness to share the product comes through in a genuine manner and it becomes much easier to convince others. See what we mean? So identify what you are passionate about. In fact, make a list of all the things you love. If you love music, go a little further and identify a ‘niche’ in that broad topic.

After you’ve zeroed in on a few music related topics you are passionate about, you can use ClickBank, the affiliate networking site to find sites you can broker for. When you go to the “promote products’ sections and click on the marketplace link, you will land on the ’search the ClickBank marketplace’ page. Here you can choose a category from the dropdown list.

Check out the ‘money and employment’ category for a huge database of niche market ideas in that category. Now all you need to do is find the niche market that interests you. You can check out the links to know more about the sites. See, right now your motive is to find ideas of the markets you can broker for and finding the specific sites is the next step. So shortlist the niche markets that grab your attention.

Probably the most intricate step is to find the sites to broker for, but once done with this, you would have set up a system that will earn you money for years and years to come for just a couple of hours of focused work. Let Google help you with this. Type in the search phrase with your niche market name followed by two tier affiliate program. You’ll get your search results. See the number of results? Look through it to find a site that suit the parameters we talked about in part two of our training series, namely provide promotional material, dependable tracking and a percentage from the sales of the affiliates you recruit.

With the steps outlined above, you can find a niche you love, a two tier commission structure, a commission of $10 or more from the sales of marketers with whom you broker the deal, promo material, and tracking system. Go for it.

Notice that you don’t even need a website to get started with JV brokering. But suppose your two-tier affiliate program asks you for your website URL? In most cases, you can continue signing up by mentioning ‘coming soon’ or not available. You can also find niche two tier programs from affiliate directories.

Popularity: 93% [?]

In this article, I am going to talk about a social networking site that is loaded with rich prospects. Not yet as popular as MySpace or Facebook, Gather.com is a social networking site that is any Internet marketer’s dream. In its own words Gather is a ‘place where informed, engaged people share perspectives on everything” Consider the following about Gather.com

• At least 75% of the members have a college education
• A majority of the members fall within the 30-60 age group
• More than 80% of the site members enjoy a $50000 annual household income
• These members enjoy spending

These well placed citizens on Gather.com would constitute quality traffic. Can you ignore it? Of course you can’t. So your first step is to visit gather.com and register for a free account.

After signing up, you can head to ‘My Gather’ and create your member profile. You can then post an article or comment. You can also browse around, read other people’s articles, and share images. You can join groups that appeal to you and also invite other friends or associates to join.

Since your intention is to generate traffic, you must make your profile attractive by posting quality articles that are interesting to read. You must ensure that your headlines are catchy with relevant tags.

When you post your articles, you can also include links, images and lay them out to look pleasing so that you get a lot of highly targeted visitors who click the link to your website and can convert into customers.

Gather.com is a social networking site, and as such, you can promote yourself. You can network with members who are in your target market. Get your friends also to join gather.com and rate your posts - highly.

You can ask people to recommend your posts and share it with others by bookmarking it on del.icio.us or ‘digging it.’ If you have any free stuff to offer, mention this at the end of your article with a link. This can get you heavy traffic.

Commenting on other popular members’ articles particularly if they are in your niche can get you lots of highly traffic.

Gather.com is also a great place for pay per click advertising and paid ads. So cash in on this little known social networking site to attract these prosperous members to your website.

Like Gather.com, there are other social networking sites that can also be effective in getting you highly traffic. Social media marketing is here to stay. By using the web 2.0 websites and blogs wisely, there are a lot of benefits to be gained, apart from the obvious ones.

Popularity: 86% [?]

A lot of Internet marketers ask this vital question - which should we find first - the market or the product? So lets get this cleared right away. It is not only easy, but also sensible to find your market first. Only then, understand what they want, look for those products and offer it to them. if you find the product first and find that there’s no hungry market for it, then you have just wasted time and effort that you could have effectively spent making a profit.

Here’s how you go about finding well-established products that are profitable:

Focus On Niche Products

A search will reveal the ones that make the largest commissions per sale. But remember, you must also get the products that aren’t so competitive that everyone is trying to make money from it. Did you ask why? Simply because when there is fierce competition you will have to invest in advertising and promotion - which involves time, effort and most of all - cuts into your commission.

Competition is good - but there are plenty of products and markets you can focus soon. So look for hungry markets niche products with high demand and lesser competition. Niche marketing is the way to go, because you can cater to a specific need.

Find Good Quality Products

The advertisements and sales letters must be accurate in their claims of the product. Can you imagine great promotion - the product turns out to be bad - and you end up getting involved in refunds? The market will just dry up. One way to figure out the quality of the product is to check it out for yourself. The easier way is to read reviews online. Marketplaces like Clickbank where you can find hot niche products will also rank affiliate products, which in turn, will tell you about their quality.

Pick Products You Like

Choose it -

• If you loved it and experienced it
• if you see a lot of repeat sales

It means its good, there’s a hot market and the sales material works.

Bottomline - High Margins?

Is the money you will earn worth the effort you put in? Personally I recommend products that offer you a high margin. The more you make per sale, the better your profits. So look for an average commission of at least $35 per sale.

Does The Product Have A Great Sales Page?

The job of a sales page is to convert the visitor into a customer with accurate information. It should grab the visitor’s eyeballs, get them excited, feature testimonials and offer a refund, among other things. Look at the sales page - does it grab you? if it doesn’t, it is likely that it wont pull in customers.

The Affiliate Program For The Product Must Be Reliable

Prompt service, good products, regular payouts and good reviews are the hallmarks of good affiliate programs. Look for them. One of the best sources is Clickbank, an affiliate network.

Popularity: 41% [?]

Link building takes time and effort but the long-term benefits are worth it. So how will you build link popularity for your site? That’s our focus for today.

In a previous article, “Why Should You Build Links?“, I talked about how important it is to build your site’s link value since it will increase your chances of getting linking requests and gradually get other sites to link to you, increasing your link popularity at the same time. There are certain things that you must bear in mind when you build link popularity:

• Go only for the relevant links. Quality scores over quantity any day and you need to ensure that the links pointing to your site are from web sites relevant to yours.
• List your website in all the major directories.
• Submit your website to the about.com site if it is relevant to a particular topic.
• Which sites link to your competitors? Find those and try getting them to link to yours.
• Make a list of links when you get in touch with related sites for linking.
• You can also try to get websites complementary to yours to link to you. if you sell dog food, then you might want to a website dealing in kennels to link to you.
• While visiting websites related to yours, if you comment on their guest books or participate in their forums, include your website URL in your signature.
• Write a testimonial for the website you want to link to you so that they can link to it on your website.
• Affiliate programs are a great way to build link popularity

Search engines prefer to see links that come naturally to your site and there are several ways to achieve link popularity, increase your search engine rankings and generate huge traffic to your site.

How Great Content Can Help With Link Popularity:

Just as search engines love natural inbound links, they also love quality content. This is a major factor that brings in natural back links. You can write keyword rich articles, publish them in high-ranking websites, and also submit them in article directories. By adding a resource box where there’s a link to your website, you can see a lot of traffic and inbound links.

Consider Blog Publishing

By starting a blog, you can post the kind of content you want your niche market to see. Unlike in article directories, you can also freely add links to your products or services where appropriate. Blogs can be submitted to blog and web directories enabling you build link popularity. In addition, RSS syndication will also make you more visible.

Posting In Forums:

These are search engine friendly places where you can sign up for free and provide useful content. Apart from the advantages of establishing yourself as an expert, you can also generate a lot of natural inbound links to your site through your signature file on the forum.

Obviously, there are plenty of other ways to build links to your site. High page ranking by the search engines equals traffic equals better conversion rates and profits.

Popularity: 32% [?]

If you have heard of the Internet marketing business for quite some time, then you already know that niche marketing is one of the most popular methods of making money online. Best of all, this market is nowhere near saturation because of the ever-increasing demand for quality information.

So let us quickly look at how you can select a niche that pays.

Choosing THE right product from a hot list of products is probably the most difficult thing for a marketer. Coming up with an idea that sells is something that gives jitters even to the experts. Here are a few things you can do to improve your chances.

Keep your eyes open: The first thing to do is to spend some time surfing the net. Look at ads on websites. What products are they selling? Visit blogs and look at the “paid sponsors” section. Watch the news and read papers. See what products are being offered on the market right now. Search for a keyword and see what comes up in the search engines. Visit websites like google.com/trends or wordtracker.com and look up the demand for keywords you like. Watch TV and find what products are selling hot. Market research is vital to finding the right niche.

Look inwards: What ideas do you have in your head? Are your ideas already on sale? Explore new ideas and new angles of old ideas. Can you come up with a better idea and beat your competition?

Turn to ClickBank: Just as their tag suggests, ClickBank is the world’s biggest marketplace. So, they have a finger on the pulse of the market. If it is selling hot, it will be on ClickBank. Visit their website and click on “Buy products”. This will open up a large category of products. Clicking on any of these categories will take you to the sub-categories of that category. Click on any of the sub-categories and see what kinds of products are selling in that niche. Read through the sales pages of these products and discover their USP. This will give you a good idea of what you should select.

Once you have identified your niche, half of your business structure is in place. But you need to build the other half too.

The power of niche marketing comes from the fact that the market consists of consumers looking for a particular product. Even if you develop a product, you can’t succeed till you shine a torch on the fact that you are the best in your field. You need to reach out to people.

For this, it is essential that you know your target audience. Knowing who you are marketing to, makes it easy for you to channel your energy and marketing $$ only on that section of people.

For example, take a car dealership. The first thing you have to decide is where the dealership is located. If it is in New York, chances of consumers coming from Seattle to buy from you are less. So, narrow your focus to people within a 50-mile radius. This increases your chances of clinching a sale.

Defining your target audience helps you to:

• Maximize your profit by targeting a defined market. Your efforts will no longer be like a shot in the dark.
• You can optimize your search engine accordingly, so your customers can easily find you.
• You can offer solutions specific to your niche.
• This makes it easy for you to develop new ideas for supporting products.
• It is easier for you to dominate the market if you know the dynamics of your niche.

This should give you a good idea of how to develop a niche and become the expert of your field.

Now that you have the product, it is time to market it. Niche marketing can be done in two ways: Membership websites and websites with no up front charges.

Membership websites obviously ask for a fee upfront, before they give members access to their site. This is a recurring income business model where members keep renewing their subscriptions if they are happy with the product you offer.

Websites without an up front charge are a little different. They offer the cake free of cost and tell members to pay up for the icing. If you like the cake well enough, you will pay for the icing.

Popularity: 38% [?]

I’m sure you got into the Internet business with only one magic formula in your mind: Internet = Business = Huge profits.

But to fully integrate this formula into a working model, you will need another component: Traffic, and loads of it.

In the competitive business of making money on the internet, timing is essential. You should always be at least one step ahead of your competition. Strategies to improve your traffic should have been done on a war footing, starting yesterday!

So let’s move ahead quickly.

Top 6 methods to build traffic that pays:

1. Build a website: This would be the logical first step. Your website is your identity on the web. Choose a theme, font, colors and functionalities that nicely complement your niche. Build your website using a number of competitive keyword phrases that attract search engines.
2. Invest in ads: Yahoo’s Overture and Google Adwords are great advertising schemes that can truly pull in traffic. A Google Adwords account is cheap and it has a number of great tools like the Traffic Estimator, which helps you analyze the effectiveness of your keywords. While many people shy away from spending money on ads, these are surefire ways to boost incoming traffic. Believe me, every penny you spend on Google and Yahoo ads is worth it.
3. Exchange links with other sites: This two-way process rewards you and your link partner. When one site that specializes in a niche offers links to a supporting site, the efforts are doubly beneficial to both. The more links you trade, the more traffic you generate.
4. Join online communities: This increases your visibility dramatically. It also helps establish you as THE expert in your field. If you contribute material worthy of being read, seen or heard, you can be sure that you will experience an immediate ROI in terms of increased traffic to your site. Put up a Blog and start populating it with thoughtful comments and useful information.
5. Write: Put quality articles in your website. Publish note-worthy pieces in eZines and send your clients some outstanding newsletters or reports. Nothing can beat a piece of intelligent reading when it comes to attracting paying visitors. Your best option would be to write your own articles. However, if putting pen to paper is not your thing, hire ghostwriters to do the work. Or buy a pack of readymade PLR articles. The only thing to look out for, is that your articles need be 100% original and high-quality.
6. Use viral marketing: Viral marketing is a relatively new method of driving focused traffic to your site. It is low in cost but high in returns. Using video, audio and RSS feeds on your website can multiply the volume of people coming to your site.

These are some of the methods in which you can build traffic to your website.

But there is yet another crucial factor that decides the kind of traffic you get. I mean, while your ads can bring you visitors, it need not bring you targeted visitors, the kind of visitors who actually spend money. To do that, you have to concentrate on your keywords.

Popularity: 34% [?]

I am thrilled to share with you some information on how to maximize profits from your membership websites because I’m sure these keys will help you multiply your membership income.

In the last couple of years, membership websites have literally taken the internet by storm. Today, paying for online information is the norm rather than the exception. More and more ‘infopreneurs’ are making money with membership websites because this business:

• Guarantees steady, recurring income.
• Has high profit margins.
• Requires negligible to low startup and ongoing cost.
• Can be expanded easily as your business grows.
• Allows you to make a supplemental  income doing something you love and know.
• Allows you to earn extra money through affiliate marketing and cross selling.

In this era of super-specialization, a membership website is the easiest way to get paid for what’s in your head. What’s more, if done correctly, you can develop several highly paying streams of income from a single website.

So let’s get started straight away and look at Key #1: The Internet’s Best Paying Niches.

Obviously, the very first step towards creating a highly profitable membership website is to figure out the products that sell. Notice, I am not talking about finding a niche market. I’m talking about finding a niche market that sells. There is a difference.

These days, you can easily find a niche using tools such as ClickAdEqualizer. But just because you’ve identified a popular keyword phrase does not mean that people are willing to spend their hard-earned cash on it. The trick is to find topics that people are willing to spend money on, and develop them.

Here are some of the most popular moneymaking categories on the internet today:

1. Business research, information and content sites: Includes business news, business research, corporate information for investment purposes and investment advice.
2. Community sites: Subscription based member-only websites that have been formed by a close-knit community of users.
3. Personal growth and self help sites: Information on self-improvement in specific areas like goal setting, building self-confidence, parent-child relationships and educational counseling etc.
4. Health and fitness: Concise guidance on proper eating, diet and exercise regimes are very popular with thousands of people. In fact, the term ‘losing weight’ is one of the most researched key phrases on the internet.
5. Games: Online games are opening up in a big way.
6. Home business: Nearly everybody wants to know how to make money from home. The market is huge and growing at a tremendous pace.
7. Sports: Sports news and news on sporting personalities and avenues.

How do you spot your niche?

Well, what are your hobbies? What do you do on a regular basis? Is there anything there of value to others? Zero in on a topic that you feel passionate about and start building up your knowledge base. Become the expert. How? Go to Membership Riches to find out now.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Do you Blog? If you don’t, you are making a costly marketing mistake and literally blocking people from reaching you.

Blogging started as a single-sentence commentary in the 1990s. It was a way for visitors and readers to voice their opinions. Then it slowly evolved into pages of personal take on almost anything under the sun.

Soon, blogs became the ‘in’ thing. A web persona - any web persona- had to have a blog where they talked, argued and ’sold’ gently. Moreover - and this where its power was really unleashed - the blog became the source of ever-increasing traffic between related sites. So, any web marketer with a niche made it a point to host his own blog, all the while visiting blogs of related products and leaving comments, which again earned him or her multiple streams of focused traffic.

Here are 5 reasons why you simply should participate in communities:

1. It is simple: Think of it as a virtual notepad, where you jot down your thoughts, ideas and comments. A PC and Internet connection are all that you need to become a big player in communities that relate to your niche.
2. It is authentic: Blogs, your own and others’, allow you to voice your philosophies. They are also a platform where users can voice their true opinions, fears and needs. In short, this is the place where you get to meet real people with real-life experience, unscathed by paid adverts.
3. It is free: You can set up your blogs for free, if you want, though this is not the recommended route for those looking for huge profits. To build proper traffic using Web 2.0, you will need a blogging system that is far more extensive and ‘accommodative’. Using a blogging service like Wordpress allows you to plug into the latest in building traffic to your website. But we’re not talking about Wordpress.com here. That is just another hosted website. You can get the correct version of Wordpress from Web 2.0 Submitter.
4. It builds your credibility: As you offer more and more intelligent opinions, people begin to realize that they can depend on you for the truth. You become an expert and the rest, as they say, is history!
5. Blogging helps you sell: There is a simple formula for making money over the internet: expertise=attention=making money. Before you become THE expert in your field, chances are that your mom and older sister were the only ones to read your posts. But post recognition, you can build traffic through emails, subscriptions, joining a blog network and using an RSS.

Thus, you can see how easy it is to drive traffic to your service and boost your business by participating in communities. You can also see why not participating in communities is the #1 mistake you could make if you are trying to sell a product.

Before you get too excited and start downloading Wordpress with single-minded determination, let me tell you that there are other, equally powerful Web 2.0 marketing resources that can skyrocket your sales figures. We’ll be looking at them tomorrow.

Of course, if you’d rather grab all the information in one go, all you need to do is follow this link: Web 2.0 Submitter.

Popularity: 23% [?]

You would be amazed that the number one reason why most affiliate marketers seem to fail is because they don’t identify niche markets that are desperate and hungry. The average affiliate marketer finds a product, tries to sell it. What if there’s no market, or a small market that dries up in no time?

Let’s understand that there’s no dearth of markets out there. The point is to choose a few that are highly popular and lucrative. Why not just one? Because in case it doesn’t work out for you, you can always find better ones.

Here’s the secret to finding that hungry market that’s waiting for you to sell to them. Find the right keywords. These are the magnets that will let you find your profitable markets. A keyword selector tool can help you with this activity. Finding the keywords will help you identify markets and product ideas as well as to use Google AdWords successfully. We’ll cover this in a later part of our training series.

Keywords are those words that people use to find your website. By finding the best ones that describe your business or product, you can also use them in your pay per click advertising campaign. Using these words, your hungry market finds your website in the search engine results and then comes to your site.

The keyword selector tool tells you the number of times these keywords or phrases were searched in a given month. You can also find out how competitive these keywords are. The most popular keywords are the ones that were searched the most number of times. From the information you get, you can gauge whether there’s a potential market in that niche area for related products. Now remember - just because a keyword is popular does not mean all those who searched it were customers.

However, it gives you a pretty good idea about whether there’s a market and you constantly need to monitor it. Internet markets tend to change and by keeping track of it, you can move with the profitable ones. That’s why I said - its better to identify a bunch of markets so that you have a lot of people to sell to.

To know how hot the market you have identified is, look at its demographics. Check out related forums and online discussion boards to see what these people are expecting. If what you intend offering is available for free somewhere else, then you can bet your market will go there to get it.

So analyze your market in detail. Split them into smaller categories -find niches within niches. You need to strike the balance where you want a market with a steady flow of customers, but not so intense in competition. Next comes finding those hot products. But you don’t have to wait to know - you can head over to Duvet Dollars and grab your entire package with bonuses to know everything about making money in your sleep. Go on - do it right away.

Popularity: 26% [?]