Affiliate programs are one of the quickest and easiest ways of making profits online. But if you don’t market effectively, they can also prove to be the black hole that sucks away all your money and effort.

Affiliate programs work in two ways to make you money: they can be used as a full-time career option or can be used as a supplement to beef up your main income. Your aim should be to start slow and then make your way to bigger bucks.

Affiliate marketing is a source of multiple streams of income. You can choose to be a product producer with an affiliate program or you can take the easier route and just become an affiliate yourself.

You can promote as many products as you want. You can choose a single-tier program or a multiple-tier program.

All of these factors decide the amount of money you make. Most of the affiliate programs you see are single-tier. You sell a product and you earn a commission on it. End of story.

In two-tier programs, you earn a commission when you refer someone else to your website. When that person sells the product, you will earn a smaller commission on that too. So, you earn every time the people below you make a sale. These programs are comparatively rarer.

What should you do to become a top affiliate marketer?

• Do build a base: Your first step as an affiliate is to set up shop. That means you have to set up a website or a blog. This is the place where your customers come to find you and your affiliate ads. The easiest way for you to kick-start your program is to set up a blog through a reliable free blogging service. You can have several websites or blogs recommending your products.
• Do select your product carefully: Select a product through one of the clearinghouses like ClickBank.
• Do track your efforts: Ideally, you should not have to spend all your time tweaking your affiliate links or strategies. You must invest some time in tracking your efforts and maintaining links.
• Do choose a catchy name: The name of your blog should be short and catchy, so people can internalize it quickly and remember it at will.
• Do put up your affiliate links carefully: Remember, these links are the lifeblood of your income. Get them wrong and you’ll be throwing good money out of the window, literally. Copy and paste the text of your links carefully.
• Do drive in traffic: Being a super-affiliate is all about being able to drive in hordes of traffic. You can use multiple websites or blogs to drive traffic your way. Increase your web presence by starting an eZine through popular eZine creation websites. Feed your websites with fresh content using RSS feeds.
• Do use social networking: Social networking is the hottest item online, as of today. With a nice profile in sites like MySpace, TagWorld and others, you can drive traffic to your blog. Use search engines effectively to build up your web presence.
• Do use viral marketing to improve sales.

In my next article, I will be discussing something that is rarely talked about. Nevertheless, it is one of the most powerful tools available to affiliates to attract volumes of traffic - a well-written sales copy.

Popularity: 100% [?]

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: 92% [?]

In my last article, “Discover The Easy Way of Building Link Directories” I told you about how search engine optimized directory pages can attract more traffic to your website, when people search for those related products or services that you have listed on those directory pages. I also told you that by maintaining well laid-out and organized directory pages, you could get reciprocal links from those websites. Or, in other words, you can get more inbound links to your website.

Link Popularity Means High Page Ranks!

Let’s face it - the greater the number of links pointing to your website, the higher is your page rank with most search engines! Google, AltaVista, HotBot - they all use the number of inbound links parameter as a very important factor in determining your page rank. As such, link popularity still plays a vital role in getting those top ranks and search engine positions for your websites.

Moreover, if those links are coming from high quality, related websites, then there’s nothing better than that! Search engines will love your site if all your links - both inbound and outbound - are completely relevant to the content of your web pages! And if your inbound links come from pages having a high ranking, then that automatically increases your page rank too! If such high-ranking pages consider your site worthwhile enough for linking to it, then your site must be offering some really good content!

The Catch

The only catch here is that acquiring a decent number of legitimate inbound links, from good-quality, related websites, requires a considerable amount of ingenuity and expertise. You don’t want to irritate the search engines by accumulating generic links, so that they throw you off their grid completely! Neither do you want to end up linking to a banned website!

As we discussed in the previous email, accomplishing this task can consume a lot of energy and leave you tired, even more so when you have to maintain more than one website! Besides, there is always the time factor that is essential for gaining the upper hand over your competition.

Use Of SEO Software For Link Maintenance

Using a reputable SEO software program, for establishing and maintaining your link partnerships, can greatly ease the burden off your shoulders! It can accomplish within days what would manually take months to achieve! A good link maintenance program -

• keeps track of the locations you’ve already submitted your site to
• prevents being linked to banned websites and thus, keeps you out of trouble
• allows you to manage information about all the sites connected from your website
• generates highly targeted directory pages automatically, based on the information specified for your outgoing links
• automatically uploads the link files to your web server
• customizes the structure of your link pages through automatic category creation and management
• has an internal link check feature, that easily and conveniently ascertains whether your link partners still have reciprocal links to your site or if they have been dropped
• effectively manages all your link email campaigns - handles all email tasks of contacting and managing prospective link partners, and also keeps them notified of any updates

Popularity: 92% [?]

Are you using keywords that give you excellent returns?

Hopefully you already know that traffic is the secret to Internet success. Keywords are the easiest and the most effective way to attract hordes of traffic to your website. Why? Simple. Search engines crawl through your content and pick up your keywords. So, if you happen to use a popular keyword, you will be listed as often as the word is searched.

Next, how many keywords do you need per website? I’d say roughly 80-100! Your Blog or site is a collection of pages and each page should have a different set of unique keywords. The obvious advantage: each of your pages will be working to pull traffic, instead of just the index page or the “About Us” page doing all the work.

Using multiple keyword phrases will give you more numbers of filtered traffic.
Hint: Including your most relevant keyword or keyword phrase in your title works wonders in getting your pages ranked and listed.

So, what’s the secret behind selecting keywords that pull traffic?

Selecting targeted keywords or keyword phrases is a little tricky because of two things:

• You obviously don’t want to use words that nobody is looking for, unless it is a high-priced specialty item. So you have to devise a way to know what ‘phrases’ people are looking for. For example, using a word like ‘natural Isapgol Fiber’ will not pull many hits. Swap it for something like “Diet supplement for speedy weight loss” and you will see a drastic increase in web traffic. Why? Because that is the phrase people search for.
• You need to keep away from the top 10 generic keywords in your niche. Ranking among the top 10 for the most competitive keyword/keyword phrase in your niche may be impossible. For instance, using a keyword phrase like “Make money online” is highly competitive. It is extremely difficult to feature in the top 10 in this category unless you are doing solid work.

So, you want to select a keyword or phrase that gets a decent slice of traffic without being too competitive. A nice keyword that has low advertiser competition is something worthy of exploitation. This way, the keyword bids for paid searches through search engines like Google could be low.

Experts suggest that you should try to build 8-10 websites around certain keywords and go back to those sites that click. You can use a number of tools like Wordtracker or Google Keyword Selection Tool to find the half a dozen or so keywords to optimize for your webpage.

Type in your keyword in the service of choice. This will give you a list of total number of daily searches. Just multiply the figure with 30 for the average figures for a month. Try this with every tool you have, so you can filter your list down to the choicest few.

After that, it is time to dig deeper to collect a crop of related keywords. You can search for your keywords in Google and Yahoo listings. Then, look for keywords and phrases that your competitors are using in their meta tags and articles.

As you can see, keyword research is an important part of your duties if you want to make money online.

Popularity: 31% [?]

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: 33% [?]

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% [?]

A major advantage of social bookmarking sites is their complement to search engine optimization which is something no website can do without. Who doesn’t like being Google’s favorite? These social bookmarking websites are easy to use. They work wonders for generating massive traffic to your websites when you add a bookmark tool on your web pages. Your visitors do the rest of the work - the ones that come by read your content, love it, bookmark it with the bookmark tool, and start the link building process. Does that sound sweet?

You’ll find social bookmarking most popular at the social marketing sites mentioned earlier - YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Squidoo etc. one of the best ways to begin benefiting is to sign up with social networking sites that are suitable to your business and create a profile. To get the best out of your association, there are certain vital things you need to do that will help your website, which we’ll cover in a later part in this training series . If you are too impatient to wait, just go ahead and grab your copy of the complete Social Bookmarking Guide at right away.

Social bookmarking is a vital marketing strategy that has a major impact on the following for you, as an online marketer:

Links - You know inbound links are the biggest things that influence your website’s rankings. Using social bookmarking can give you millions of new inbound links to your website. And you what is really wonderful about these links? They are neither pushed nor forced nor bought - they happen independently and naturally.

Managing your reputation - Google just loves these social bookmarking sites. Depending on what you give your visitors to talk about on Digg, MySpace, YouTube and the like, you can literally shoot up in search engine listings very quickly.

Page Ranking - We all know just how long it can take for a new website to get ranked by the search engines. But with social bookmarking and media sites, you don’t have to wait. You can get the word out there by uploading videos on YouTube, creating profiles on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter -and build some links to these.

Search engine optimization or SEO - social bookmarking complements seo quite nicely. Here’s how it works - you bookmark your site or blog, creating an inbound link. Others visit and bookmark your content - so more links. Search engines love quality links. If your content is optimized well with the help of keywords - you are well on your way to seo success.

The collective outcome of the above benefits of social bookmarking is traffic that will convert to sales and profits. Mission accomplished! But how do you actually go around achieving what we’ve discussed above with the help of social bookmarking? You can get the complete guide right away and get started. Social Bookmarking Guide is an investment well worth it!

Popularity: 24% [?]

In this article, I’m going to discuss the importance of AdWords when working with ClickBank. I’m also going to be looking at some popular strategies affiliate marketers use to sell their products. But perhaps most importantly, I’m going to take a look at why some of these strategies work and some don’t.

Let’s start with the basics- first of all, why is AdWords so important to your marketing strategy on ClickBank? Affiliates use AdWords in two very important ways. One, they are used to find out what people are looking for on the Internet. In that way, you can choose to promote a product that people actually want to buy. Secondly, affiliates use these same AdWords to market and promote their products. If your Adwords match the ones people tend to use in the search engines, you can drive a lot of traffic your way.

It used to be pretty easy to use AdWords in affiliate marketing- all you had to do was set up a direct link campaign, put your feet up and cash the checks when they came in. Today, the search engines have made things more difficult. In fact, Google now won’t allow more than one affiliate on the same page. This has simply meant that different strategies are needed to make AdWords and ClickBank work better together.

Choose A Strategy

One of the popular ways to make AdWords work for you is to bid on a specific product name. This approach can be very competitive, especially when you are bidding for a very attractive name that drives enormous amounts of traffic- you could end up in a very aggressive bidding war. The benefit of this kind of strategy is that, it gives you a direct link to traffic that is interested in making a purchase. However, the cost per click for these words could also be high.

Another option is to use keyword lists- this means, consolidate as many keyword phrases as possible and track the sales of each one. This is a very thorough strategy and will put you right on the pulse of what’s hot and what’s not. However, this can be a time-consuming job as well. You’ll probably have to invest in some keyword software to help you along.

Some affiliate marketers create campaigns, which are targeted towards sites that are AdWords enriched. This is probably one of the most difficult strategies of all, since it tells Google which web pages should hold your ads. Another drawback of this method is the click through ratio- this means that if you don’t generate enough sales, you’ll end up paying for the impressions, even though they didn’t translate into clicks.

An effective and relatively easy method to work your way around affiliate bidding wars is to write a review for your product, then offer visitors a gift or bonus if they buy using your link. It’s even better if you can harvest names and email ids, so you can do direct follow-up sales later on.

If these methods still seem too time consuming for you, you can visit CB Affiliate Revenue for a quicker way to start attracting traffic for high-profile products.

Popularity: 28% [?]

While keyword optimization plays a vital role in getting you access to those coveted “top positions” in search results, competition analysis is an equally important factor too. Once we know exactly what our competitors are doing, only then can we figure out how to do it better than them! Therefore, the 3-step program to success is:

1. Search for your competitive websites
2. Analyze the competitive websites
3. Surpass your competitive websites

Now that we get the big picture of what we need to do, let us look into the details of each step.

Searching For Your Competition

This step is fairly easy. If you have already read “The #1 Keyword Secret That You Always Wanted To Know“, then you must have already worked out the most competitive keyword phrases in your particular product segment. So you must already be familiar with the list of keyword phrases that seem to be doing the trick for your competitors.

So simply search for those exact keyword phrases on various search engines, and make a list of the top websites displayed in the results. These are your competitors - the ones you have to beat, in order to get their traffic directed towards your website. You have to work your way up, to a position higher than these websites. How? Read on.

Analyzing the Competition

Analyzing the competitive websites in your market segment is probably the most difficult and the most time-consuming part of the process. That’s because you have to go through each of your competitive websites individually, for a whole set parameters, like:

• The design and layout of the site (color scheme, fonts, positioning of important page elements, level of interaction with the users)
• The keyword combinations on which the site pages have been optimized
• The content of the top ranking pages, and the positioning and density of keyword phrases in those pages
• Finding and analyzing the link partners of your competitive websites (how high they rank, the kind of content on their pages, their traffic, what kind of content pages on your competitive websites are they linking to)
• The product range of your competition, and the ways they have used to encourage their visitors to take action and become customers

As you can see, this is a mammoth task, requiring several man-hours of hard work per website you analyze.

Surpassing Your Competition

Once you have completed this process however, that’s when you reach the stage where you can actually work out ways to make your website better than your competitors in all respects mentioned above.

However, time is a crucial factor here. In today’s dynamic world, statistics tend to become “outdated” at the drop of a hat! So if it’s going to take you weeks, or even months, to go through the research and analysis of your competition, by the time you have worked out any substantial improvement methods for your own website, they would have made improvements in their websites too. You don’t expect them to be sitting idle, do you?

So the whole purpose of doing this elaborate research and analysis on your competition stands defeated if you cannot take advantage of their weaknesses right now! You have worked out what seems to be working for them and where they lack. So if you can act faster than them, and exploit their areas of weakness immediately, you can beat them at their own game.

Well then, is there any quicker method of doing the competition analysis? As a matter of fact, there is. There is a way to automate the entire process of competition research, analysis and implementation of improvements. Find out how you can do this with SEO Equalizer right now.

Popularity: 21% [?]