Continue reading »]]> This article describes the techniques I use to earn money (affiliate income) from datafeed driven websites in 10 simple steps. It is quite a long article as there is a lot of ground to cover, and even with this length there are things that we will simply skirt across and other things we will not cover at all.

I am working on this article and hope to turn it into an e-book that will hopefully help up and coming affiliate marketers.

The article uses the Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress.

I hope this helps someone who is looking for a simple how-to, keep checking back for the full e-book. I will post about it here when I have completed it.

1. Identify your niche

Identifying your niche is the single most critical step, and the biggest hurdle that you are going to have to overcome, and yes, it is the very first thing that you are going to have to do. Many people fail at this stage, make yourself different and dedicate time and effort to this and you will find that perfect niche for you to work in.

My advice is always look to the things you know, the things you are interested and can write about. You really do not want to work in a niche you have little or no knowledge in, if you do you will need to research every point, when you write you will not seem authoritative, whereas, if you write from your own passion and knowledge it will certainty come across in your writing, your readers will pick up on that and give you a level of unconscious trust based on the feeling they get when they read your pages.

I tend to use mind map software in these cases, but you can simply create yourself a mind map by jotting down some ideas on a page and then feeding ideas off ideas, until you have a number of niches that you feel confident that you could work in with your current knowledge.

Once you have narrowed it down to a maximum of three ideas, it is time to look into those niches and see which has the most potential for development, you need to do some leg work here, get yourself onto the search engine of your choice, and do some research, there really is no short cuts here, you need to put in the time to look and trawl, the likelihood is that if you are interested in your chosen niches  you will already have a good idea of what is out there, but be sure that you are going beyond the usual websites you visit and look deeper into the search results to get a feeling for the market place. The questions you should be asking are:

Who else is operating in your specific niche

• What are people looking for that is not provided by those already operating in your niche
• What are those people already in your niche doing well
• What are those people already in your niche doing badly
• Is there room for another to operator?

I would also, at this point, do some keyword research, for example if you are looking to market pink cars, look at search phrases round the subject of pink cars. The Google Keyword tool can help here. You are looking for all the phrases that people search for that are related to your niche and the types of search volume there is for that niche.

There is no golden rule about what figure represents a good search volume. A search term may have a huge search volume, but also be very competitive, for example ‘Credit card’ has an exact local(uk) search volume of 22,200 (May 2011), which on the face of it looks great, but consider how difficult it will be to break into that niche, every man and his dog operate in that niche, including some big, big players, alternatively, a niche may have a very low search volume of 200 searches per month, but no-one else is operating in that niche meaning it will be fairly easy to rank number 1 for that search term and Hoover up most of those 200 searches, which, if you then turn into sales could mean good affiliate income.

It will also depend on the products that you are planning to promote, what is their value? are they high value items and as such one sale per month will bring in a good affiliate commission, or are they low value items meaning you will need to sell those in volume to get any reasonable return.
Obviously the ideal is a high value product, with a high search volume and little or no competition, however, the likely hood of you finding one that perfect are very slim so we have to work with what is out there.

Don’t let a competitive niche put you off, it maybe that you have an angle on that niche that no-one else has thought of, but be extra sure that you have got your research right and you are going to provide something that is both wanted and missing from the market place.

There are no real rules again about which of your ideas you should choose, which niches you should work in and which you should not, but the research detailed above will allow you to come to an informed decision. Much of it maybe a gut feeling that you can provide something new in that niche or that you will enjoy working that niche and as such the success will be secondary, and ironically, an operator who enjoys working is one that is usually successful.

2. Find some hosting

A fairly easy step, but make sure that you go with someone reliable, remember Google have recently changed their algorithm, to include page load speed, a great deal of this is down to the host, if they put large numbers of websites on a single server and over load it due to cost cutting, the likely result is a slow website.

I would recommend GoDaddy for WordPress Hosting, they also provide a domain registration service and also a ready installed WordPress hosting package, if you go for this you can skip the next two steps, making the process even easier!

Signing up is a very simple process, it is a click and buy, they will take you through step-by step how to setup your hosting, and you will be emailed all your connection details

3. Register a domain name

The registration process of a domain name its self is fairly simple, the trick is finding a good domain name.

A domain name can make or break your affiliate business, some of the best affiliate domain names simply say what they do, i.e. moneysavingexpert.com, they are memorable domain names, but they are also built on reputation.

When choosing a domain name, your keyword research that you conducted in the first place will help you. Good keyword domain names will help you in your search engine ranking, Google uses keywords in domain names in their ranking algorithm, so look out for keyword or phrase domain names where the keyword or phrase has a high search volume.

You will have trouble here finding domain names that have not been registered, however, there are two alternatives, buying a domain name from someone else, or ‘catching’ domain name that someone has failed to re-register.

I will blog more about buying domain names and catching domains in the future, but monitor the lists published by DomainLore and use DNViper to catch domains that you are interested in. Both those sites already have the relevant information on what you need to do so I will not re-publish that at this stage, but it is well worth your while getting registered on those sites, you may get that gem of a domain name that will make marketing your project that much easier.

4. Setup WordPress

Why install WordPress its a blogging platform? Well WordPress is so much more than a blogging platform, it is now a CMS, and the developers of WordPress are always trying to push it further into the CMS field with the new features that they provide.

WordPress is Open Source and as such it is free, you simply download the latest version and install it, you do not have to pay a programmer to write you a website, you are in control. It comes with many of the features you need for a good website already built in, menus, categories, tagging, image management, inbuilt search, plugins to extend its functionality and themes to change how it looks.

The setup of WordPress is a very easy simple thing to do, I will not re-post here what others have described far better than I can, follow the tutorial on the WordPress.org website and create your WordPress install.

Once you have WordPress installed you will want to get the plugins that you require to make your site do what you want it to do. There are many thousands of custom written plugins to extend its functionality, so it you have a particular requirement it is likely that there is a plugin to do it.

Make sure you do install the following plugins as a basis to any WordPress install:

WordPress Firewall2
Login Lockdown
WordPress SuperCache
All-In-One SEO

These plugins secure WordPress and make it more efficient in terms of the application. You may also want to read this article about making WordPress more secure. Do not worry too much about this but do make sure that you install the Firewall and Login Lockdown plugins as these will protect your site and your hard work from people who may attack.

There are also many thousands of themes pre-developed, themes change the look of your site so you can make it suit your nice well, for example for our pink cars website, you will want a theme that is pink, probably has a picture of a car rather than the default WordPress theme which is white with pictures of trees!

There are also many premium themes, these are themes that you will have to pay money for, but usually they are a fairly small fee of up to $100 (£50 ish), which is very little for a good looking designed site. I use the following premium theme sites which provide a good range of themes to suit all needs

Elegant Themes
WooThemes
WP Remix
WPZoom

Custom Theme Development

If you can not find a theme to suit your needs you can get one designed and developed by a WordPress Developer. At Digitalquill we do quite a lot of custom theme development for various companies. There are many companies that offer custom WordPress development, but make sure you get a WordPress specialist to do it for you.

You can either have your own designer create static designs what can be converted into a WordPress Theme or a brief can be followed, and the theme created from scratch.

Custom Plugin Development

If you have a particular requirement for your site that is not met by any of the plugins available, you do have the option of getting one written that will extend the functionality of WordPress. This will cost you from as little as £100 depending on the complexity of your requirements. Again make sure that you choose a Specialist WordPress Developer for this task and not just any web developer, as you will find it cheaper to get a specialist who already knows their way around WordPress and its Code. At Digitalquill we develop numerous WordPress Plugins so if you have a requirement please do let us know and we will try and help.

5. Install Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress

This is where the magic starts, he holy grail for Affiliate marketers has always been to be able to create a website rapidly without the need to invest a great deal of money in development costs, this is the very reason why this tutorial has focused around WordPress.

The Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress allows Affiliate marketers to create a website from an affiliate datafeed in a matter of minutes, and not only that it will keep your sites content up-to-date.

The Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress is a premium plugin, but it only costs £25 and you can use it on as many websites as you like, and it includes free updates, meaning that when you buy you will continue to get updates for the plugin for as long as it is developed, ensuring it will work with future versions of WordPress and you get all new features created.

The Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress is very simple to use. I will describe this later in section 7.

The datafeed import plugin will import any well formed datafeed in CSV, Pipe separated, XML or RSS format and create blog posts for each product in that datafeed. Unlike other plugins it gives you control over what data from the datafeed you use.

Typically a datafeed will have a large number of columns with a range of different types of data, title, colour, description, price, weight, size, image, thumbnail to name some. You may only want to use the title, description, price and image. The Datafeed Import Plugin uniquely allows you to select those columns from the datafeed you want and choose where you want them to appear in your site.

The datafeed import plugin for WordPress will create categories and tags for you and insert the post it is creating into the relevant category and add the relevant tags, it also works with the All-in-one SEO plugin so you can improve the Search Engine optimization of your site using the plugin.

6. Find a datafeed

You will need to sign up to the main affiliate networks, I would advise the following:

Commission Junction
AffiliateWindow
TradeDoubler

There are more and you will be able to find them with a simple web search. Once you have signed up you can search for a affiliate merchant that suits your niche. Ideally you will have already done some of this research in step 1 and identified companies with affiliate programs that you can promote.

These days the affiliate networks are generally very good with the quality of their datafeeds, in the early days of affiliate marketing, we struggled with getting quality data from merchants. We do still have some problems with some merchants who do not keep their datafeeds up-to-date, but this is getting less frequent.

Once you have found the merchants you want to promote you will need to apply to become an affiliate with them, I generally drop the affiliate manager an email to introduce myself and let them know what I plan to do with their affiliate program. This way you will have a greater chance of getting accepted onto their program and you will also get the affiliate manager on your side. This is good because they may then provide you with your own discount codes to promote or other promotional material that could be useful for you.

When you have been approved, find their datafeed, select the relevant format (XML is preferred, but CSV or Pipe separated formats are also fine) and copy the URL or Link to that datafeed. You are then ready to start an import into your WordPress site.

7. Setup an import

The datafeed import plugin for WordPress is very easy to use, the interface has help throughout incase you get stuck. In our case, once we have installed the plugin we are going to choose create feed from URL. This allows us to create a site that will automatically update its self.

The plugin allows you to schedule updates, I would suggest that you set it to update weekly, unless you are working in a niche where prices are constantly changing. I know of a colleague who uses this for a websites selling plumbing items, these literally change on a daily basis and sometimes during the course of a day, but the norm would be to set it to a weekly update.

Just to explain what this will do, it will re-import the data from your datafeed, and update posts where required, keeping prices and specifications up-to-date. It will also create new posts for new items added to the datafeed and delete posts that do not exist in the datafeed anymore.

Once you have imported the datafeed, the datafeed import plugin for WordPress will analyse the datafeed to find out what fields it contains, it will then present them to you giving each field a reference that you will later be able to use in the template youa re going to build.

The plugin gives you some options to filter the datafeed, you can choose to only import products that include a keyword, or exclude those that include a keyword. You can have as many of these filters as you like so you can make sure that you only import the products that you want from your datafeed. I have datafeeds that have 10,000+ products in them, but I am only interested in 5-10 of those products for my niche, so I use the plugin to filter those out and only import the ones that are in my niche.

You can also choose to only import a range of products from the datafeed, this was implemented for people who have slower servers, meaning that if your system struggles to import, make it only import the first 1000 of the datafeed, and then 1001-2000 etc. It is unlikely that you will need this if you have a fairly modern server.

You are now ready to create the template, this is the bones of the Datafeed Import Plugin, this is what it will use to create the posts from the datafeed, and it is where this plugin differs from others in that you are free to choose which columns/fields in the datafeed you use. You can choose to use them all, or like I do at times just choose to use the product name and price.

Creating the template is very simple, you just add the #1# reference to the template where you want that data to appear, for example if #5# is price you could add:

Price: £#5#

This will then be replaced for each product post created with the relevant price:

Price: £9.99

You will notice in the example above, I not only used datafeed data in the template but also static text. You can add as much or as little of your own text in the template as you like, this text will appear in all of your posts for all of your products.

The template designer in the datafeed import plugin for WordPress also allows you to add HTML content either visually using the buttons provided, add images, bold, italic, links etc, but also if you are confident with HTML you can go into the HTML view of the template designer and write your own code.

Once you have created the main body for the template you will need to tell the plugin which categories to post those products to, you can use either datafeed data or static data in te categories field, for example, if #7# is the merchant category, you could use:

#7#, Ford,

This will then put each post in what ever category is in the field #7# and in the category ‘ford’. The plugin will create categories if they do not exist.

You can do the same with tags, either add a datafeed reference and/or your own static text.

The final part of the template designer (if you have followed my advice from step 4) is the All in one SEO plugin fields, these can either be populated using static text or they can use datafeed data using the reference the plugin has given that field.

Once you are happy with the design of your template, simply click the process button and the Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress will then process through the datafeed that you have imported and create posts for you in your site. It will do this in the background and give you a counter on the screen so do not be alarmed if you go to your site and the posts are not immediately viewable. Also if you have followed my advice from step 4, and you have installed the SuperCache plugin, be aware you maybe seeing a cached version of the site and you may need to force a re-build of that cache.

8. Write some unique content

Writing unique content is the most critical thing you can do with your datafeed driven website, anyone can follow these steps and create a website, but the chances are that would just replicate what is already out there. The Datafeed Plugn for WordPress has done all that hard work for you, but there is no shortcut to you adding value to the site.

This content maybe reviews of the products that you have listed on your site, tutorials about using them. Don’t forget that content does not have to be just words, images and videos are also useful for users of your site, if you can add value to the content that has already been automatically imported yourself you will be onto a winner. Customers want to know what you think, people buy from people so be friendly, avoid the trap of just writing ‘This is a great product’ type reviews, give a genuine opinion, better still give a glimpse of your experience with that product.

Adding unique content will not only please your customers but it will also please the Google Gods, who hate sites that simply duplicate content from else where, after all what value do they have for the internet user?

9. Promote your site

Promoting your site should be what you spend the majority of your time on. It is something that really gets people running scared, but there is no real magic formula or magic wand to promoting your site, you need to do the leg work yourself.
There are many options open to you to promote your site, I will briefly describe some of them below.

Google Adwords

I have started with Google Adwords as this is the only shortcut you can make. If you have some cash to throw at your project then Google Adwords or similar Pay Per Click advertising maybe the right solution for you. I am not going to go into details here about how you should manage that process, but make sure you know what you are doing before you go headlong into an adwords campaign as this could result in you spending money hand over fist without any rewards.

It goes without saying, no-one minds spending £100 on advertising if you earn more than that on commissions, but you need to be sure that you get your sums, adverts and keywords that you are biding on right.

Link Building

Link building is the single, only way to build up the reputation of your site and to build traffic. If your site has not inbound links, no-one will find you, Google will not see you as being authoritative. However, if you have hundreds of in-bound links then you will not only generate direct traffic from those links but you will also be seen by Google as someone that people want to link to and as such someone who is authoritative in the subject.
It would be very easy to go out and get 1000 link backs from random sites that are here today and gone tomorrow, there is absolutely no use in doing that at all, no use in paying for link building services unless they are reputable and are going to create good quality links.

The only link-backs that make any difference both for your generating traffic an in the eyes of Google are those from relevant sites, sites that are already authoritative and have a good reputation.

How can you build links? There are many ways, I always advise participating in forum discussions, and blog discussions, monitor the web for people talking about your niche subject matter and join in with the conversation. Don’t post ‘Come to my site’ style posts, but engage people in conversation, give them advice after all we have already established that you are knowledgeable about your subject otherwise you would not have chosen this as your niche in the first place. Link backs can come in the form of signatures, or pointing people to relevant products or advice on your site. Make sure you build up a good reputation on the community otherwise you will be in danger of being a spammer.

Engaging in this type of activity can also beneficial to you, it will allow you to talk directly to potential customers, find out what they are wanting, what they want to know, what they need and you can add those things to your site.

Social Media

Social media has become very, very important to your marketing strategy, twitter, facebook, linkdin all provide you with opportunities to promote yourself and your blog, tweet about new products, new reviews, new content, again engage with twitter users who are posting tweets relevant to your subject, follow others in your niche so you can stay on top of your subject.

Make a facebook and Linkdin page for your site and post information to it, you will find that all these pages will rank highly in Google and you will generate a great deal of traffic from them.

YouTube

I have already commented that content in your site doe snot just have to be text, more and more these days video content is becoming a great draw to people. Not only does it give you the chance to do something more dynamic than you can in text, it allows you to sell yourself, but it also gives you the chance to get a good ranking in Google. Remember those ‘Video results’ in the search engine results, your YouTube video could be there.

What is the use of all this other than to give information to your customers? What if they find my video from searches on YouTube its self? Well you can embed links into your video, and as we discussed above in the link building exercise you can engage with your potential customers.

Post video reviews of products, video tutorials and simple introductions to your site and what you are all about, these add to your site and give it a richness that otherwise could be lacking. Remember people buy from people.

Off-line promotion

Remember that just because your site is online and your service virtual, you can still do offline advertising, moneysupermarket.com spend millions on TV advertising, ad when you break it down all they are is an affiliate site.
I am not suggesting you start trying to product a TV advert, but local advertising, letter heads, business cards and the like all help to promote your site.

10. Keep updating and working on your site

As an affiliate marketer your work is never done, the fatal mistake that many make is not to have longevity with their projects, they do not see immediate rewards so abandon the project or simply flit from one project to the next, never bringing out the potential of any of the work they do.
If you have this mind set, my advice would be simply don’t bother, you will just waste your time. You have to b in this business for the long run. No rewards will not come immediately, and yes you will no doubt become disillusioned, but rest assured, you will start to see rewards if you continue to work at it.

Do not think that I have done all this work so I will leave the site to tick over, even if it is bringing in good affiliate income. You need to continually update, develop the content, add new products and offer a better service to your customers. Do this and you will be assured a happy future.

Continue reading »]]> I have just written an article over on my other blog, MattHouldsworth.com about how I promote each blog post after I publish it. Much of what you read on the net about promoting your blog takes a holistic view point, however, in my opinion you also need to look after the finer detail, if your manage the promotion of each blog post well then you will not go far wrong.

I have uploaded the check sheet I use to prompt myself on the post so if you are an affiliate blogger you may find that useful, either way if you have any more ideas on this please do leave a comment.

Continue reading »]]> Youtube now boasts an amazing billion videos watched every day. In fact, Youtube is now the second largest search engine, just behind Google. If that wasn’t enough, since Google owns Youtube, they place a high rank on videos appearing in their search engines.

Because of these facts, your business could be using Youtube to effectively driving more customers and increasing revenue with a minimal amount of work.

1. Create how-to and instructional videos

It’s no secret that how-to’s and instructional videos are highly sought after on the web. Millions of web users want to learn more about products and services; they turn to Youtube to learn more.

For your online business, take content you’ve already produced, create instructional videos on how to use your products and services, keep it short and sweet – you’ll soon gain more views and more customers.

2. Include your link with every video

In the description area within Youtube, you can place your URL link back to your website. Whenever you release a new video, make sure to include this link so during or after people watch your videos, they will click through and visit your website.

3. Brand your videos

Embedding videos from Youtube is one of the large reasons why it’s become such a successful online video service. Unfortunately, your link within the description doesn’t cross over; this cuts down on the traffic you could be getting to your website.

To combat this, brand your videos with your website address and logo so when people do watch your video, they could still type the URL into their address bar or search for your online business through search engines.

4. Create a viral hit

Viral videos spread like wildfire on the web. A viral video is often funny or downright so amazing that people have to share it with their friends.

Although it can be tricky, try to think of what amazing things your online business provides. Try making an amazing video out of it, do something funny, make people question what the video is about – spread your video like a virus and you’ll have traffic coming to your website.

5. Video sells

Most people don’t want to spend all day reading long sales copy or articles in general – they skip around content.

However, video helps captures people because it’s passive entertainment. Instead of trying to convince people about your product through text, create a video which highlights the benefits, have existing customers provide video testimonials, share content through video – this will keep watchers interested and can lead to new customers.

There’s no denying it; Youtube can be a moving factor for online businesses. Through great content, share-ability and engagement through video, your online business has the potential to drive a flurry of customers through its Youtube.

With only a minimal amount of investment in creating the video, the lasting effects will be exponential – don’t skimp out on creating video, it’s the future of the web – be there and your business will strive.

Continue reading »]]> Finding a profitable niche for your affiliate marketing campaign takes work but landing the correct one has the possibilities to earn you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

In a nutshell, a niche is a highly targeted interest for a product or service.

Instead of reaching for a large market dominated by corporations, niches allow you to reach a passionate community without such competition – giving you the added edge to market your affiliate product.

The following are 5 ways you can find profitable niches for your next affiliate marketing campaign.

EBay

Ebay offers one of the largest marketplaces online where millions of users search each day on very specific items within their interested niches.

Many use eBay to buy and sell products related to hobbies and niche interests; this allows you to see exactly what these people are demanding and have an interest for – talk about competitive edge.

Within eBay, drill down within each category to find micro marketplaces. Each of these marketplaces presents you with niche.

Assess each of these categories that interest you by seeing how many products are listed, which sell, past auctions and if there are active discussions related to the category.

If you find a micro marketplace that suits you; you’ve found a profitable niche for your next affiliate marketing campaign.

Affiliate Marketplaces

Did you know the same location you find affiliate products to promote also provide you with incredible insights about niches that are highly profitable?

Within many affiliate marketplaces such as Clickbank, Commision Junction, E-Junkie and Neverblue are ratings for which products are hot and selling.

Do you think you could use this data to find a profitable niche? Of course!

Simply filter your searches to view which products have high amounts of sales, affiliates or gravity and you’re onto the next hot affiliate product to promote within the same niche.

SpyFu

SpyFu is perhaps one of the most powerful tools that is rarely used in affiliate marketing. In short, SpyFu allows you to peer into what advertisers are paying for pay per click campaigns – knowing this, you can easily determine which keywords are highly competitive.

As a test, type in the name of a major competitor featuring a product you may be interested in. Within the results of SpyFU you can see which other businesses bid on these keywords and what price.

If you notice a keyword is doing rather well, drill down deeper to find the root niche of this keyword. If a business is spending a high amount for each pay per click, you can conclude the niche is very profitable.

One final bonus of SpyFu is the top 100 paying advertisements. This list shows the highest paying advertisements which you could use to determine new profitable niches for your affiliate marketing campaigns.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker comes in a free or paid version that tracks the search habits of web users from a variety of search engines.

Wordtracker is great to find highly targeted keywords within a profitable niche but to find the niche begin by typing in the broad word related to it.

For example, “Dog” would be a very broad topic, “Dog Care” would be closer but “Dog Flea Products” has the potential to be a very profitable niche based on the focus and passion of those searching for the term.

Wordtracker is an amazing tool but do take the results with a grain of salt as they display only a fraction of what has been searched upon. However, wordtracker does give you a very great idea for profitable niches and affiliate products.

Twitter Trends

Last, but not least, Twitter trends show you real time results of interests, hobbies and niches people are actively talking about on Twitter.

With millions of users, Twitter gathers many people from around the world that discuss the ins and outs of niche interests.

Not all trends are profitable but if you see an untapped niche topic spring up, you may have yourself the perfect opportunity to make money with your affiliate products or services.

Displayed on the front page, Twitter Trends are constantly changing. Click on a few of these trends to see what questions are being asked by people, see if there is a void of information or products and enter the niche.

In total, these are just five ways you can find profitable niches for your affiliate marketing campaigns. The real power is when you use each of these in tandem to solidify your research before you begin.

Use each of these tools to drill into interests shared by passionate groups of people. Talk to them and find what they are missing, what they need or what they desire.

If you can fill this need for products or services, you will find yourself the authority of a very profitable niche.

Combined with affiliate marketing, niches are the future of making money online. No longer will you need to fear the big budgets of a large corporations – the market is in your hands.

Continue reading »]]> A blogger is always is in a dilemma about which niche to choose for his blog. A good niche can make or break his dreams of making money online. Niche blogging is a great way for you to ensure that your blog gets a loyal readers base and has a firm footing in a particular topic. Unfortunately, most bloggers make poor judgements while choosing niche for their blogs. This is where intelligent thinking is required, so as to select a niche that will reward you well.

Here are 4 secrets to select a money making niche for your blog:

Your Interest: this is the point of paramount importance before you select a niche. Are you interested in what you are blogging or are you simply typing meaningless words on your blog without any passion? Always choose a niche which you are interested in – it need not be something always that you are very passionate about, but it should be something that you would like to give attention. Your interest is important in any niche you choose because otherwise you will lose interest in writing on your blog – which will be a big loss to you.

Trending: You must make it a point to study the trending of the niche. Because not all niches are evergreen, furthermore, there are also a few niches that are seasonal. So you must be sure to understand what is the trending of the niche. Is it a niche that will be able to provide sustainable income in the future as well or will it just be a temporary asset for you. You must carefully ponder upon this and then choose the niche.

Income Sources: Everything is based on this fact – what is the scope for money making from a niche. There are various monetizing techniques of a niche – such as PPC campaigns, text link ads, affiliate products, banner ads etc. Keep in mind that all niche cannot make use of these monetizing strategies. Some niche perform well in affiliate products while other perform well for PPC campaigns. You must do the required research on this parameter before deciding any niche.

Competition: All smart bloggers take this point seriously before jumping into any niche. Even if you find that the niche has an evergreen value and that there are lots of ways you can monetize it – you might want to reject it. The reason is – competition. If the niche you plan to enter is a hyper-competitive market then you might want to think again. Creating your own set of readers or simply getting noticed in a crowded niche can become cumbersome for you and can affect your enthusiasm adversely. This is a major reason why many bloggers fail in few niches – it is because of the sheer competition in those niche.

No doubt that selecting a niche is not an easy task. There is a lot that goes behind the thought-process. No one should finalize any niche before a thorough research on the market demands and its trending is performed.

Continue reading »]]> Out of all the promises of how to make money online, there is really only one way that the average web user can truly make a living and that’s by finding a niche market.

Wouldn’t you love to write about a topic you love and make money online from selling products to others that are just as interested?

It’s a very enticing thought but there’s one MAJOR problem, how do you find a niche?

If you are passionate about making money online and gaining passive income, continue reading to find out how to find a niche market.

What is a niche?
To learn how to find a niche, you have to understand what a niche is.

A niche is simply a highly focused interest in a product, service or idea within a larger market. The easiest way to understand a niche is to think of it as a hobby, something that people place a lot of their time discussing and, if it’s a product, using.

For example, ‘Shoes’ is a large market, something that everyone will generally search for and buy. Running shoes is a micro market, it’s more focused but still has a broad consumer market. Women’s orthopedic running shoes, that’s a niche market.

See where I’m going with this?

A niche is singling out a single product or service and providing a solution to the problems within the niche.

How To Find A Niche Market

So let’s try and example to understand how to find a niche market.

Open a tab on your browser and type in ‘Shoes’ within Google, what do you get? Nearly 200,000,000 million results!

200 Million searches sounds like a fantastic idea to aim for a market but the problem is that your competition is very fierce and aiming to monetize on such a large market is virtually impossible for the average user interested in making money online.

So, let’s try typing in ‘Women’s Running Shoes’ into Google, what do you get? Over 17 Million results, we’re getting more focused.

However, we still have the same problem with this micro market. The competition is still high and the costs would be too far out of reach for the average web user.

Finally, let’s do a search for “Women’s Orthopedic Running Shoes”, what do we get now? A little over 92,000 search results.

We’ve hit our niche market!

Understanding a niche market

Okay, we have an idea of what a niche market is, we are using the example of ‘Women’s Orthopedic Running Shoes’ but you may be asking:

Only 92,000+ searches? I surely can’t make a profit selling to so few people?!

But you can.

When you choose to enter a niche market, you are going up against few few others, meaning your costs to market and dominate the niche is miniscule compared to the mass market.

Imagine if you only pulled 1,000 customers from our example ‘Women’s Orthopedic Running Shoes’ and say you sold a pair to each for $30 a piece. You’ve just made $30,000!

You see where I’m going with this?

You don’t always have to reach a mass market because we already know that people searching for ‘Women’s Orthopedic Running Shoes’ are highly targetted and highly interested in obtaining them.

Solving a problem within a niche

Up until this point I’ve talked about how to find a niche market and gave a great examples but what do you think you could actually sell to the people within the niche?

Was your first thought shoes?

Well, step back for a second and think of what else the people within the niche are intersted in or have a problem that needs to be solved.

What about if you sold an ebook or video series about:

How To Develop The Perfect Running Schedule To Lose The Most Weight?

Now we’re getting to it!

A niche doesn’t necessarily need to be a physical product, it can also be information.

The example above solves a problem with the niche. When people buy running shoes what is their intent? Generally to lose weight and to be fit. What’s another problem? Time management because who has enough time to dedicate their valuable time just for running?

Now, because we’re so focused within a niche, we can also conclude two additional details:

•    The people in the niche need orthopedic support
•    They are interested in their health and their body

Just these two examples gives us a whole wealth of knowledge of what we can do with our niche.

How To Sell To A Niche

Now that we’ve identified the problem, let’s talk about a few ways you could sell to people within your niche.

One of the easiest ways to make money online within a niche market is to sell info products such as ebooks or video series.

Another idea, and a larger step, would be to find a manufacturer or wholesaler which sells specific products within your niche.

The easiest method of making money online within a niche is to create a blog and post valuable content for those interested. After the blog has become established and you’ve built authority within your niche, you are primed to release an info product to those that are eager to have their problems solved.

These sales could be through email marketing, direct sales, affiliate marketing and so many other methods available online.

Finding Your Niche Market

Now that we’ve run through a general example on how to find a niche, ask yourselves these few questions:

•    Do I have a hobby or am I passionate about a product or information?
•    Could I create enough content to build a following?
•    Do I know enough about my subject to build authority?
•    Can I find products to sell to my niche community?

If you can answer these questions, you’ve found your perfect niche market. I don’t want you to get caught up with all the technical details on how to set up your niche market just yet, these are answered in other posts but gaining a sense of how to find niche markets will start you off in your goals to make money online.

Once you’ve developed your ideas and know how to find niche markets, the sky is the limit, think of what you could do with an additional niche market, why not 5 or 10! You’ll soon see the power of niche marketing and how great your life is once you earn passive income from making money online.

Continue reading »]]> Youtube has now become one of the most used websites in the world, rivaling Google in terms of search traffic and website usage. But what does this mean for a website or business owner? One word: traffic.

If traffic is the lifeblood of the internet, than more traffic to your website or ecommerce stores simply means more revenue.

Youtube has many opportunities to drive traffic to your website, this article will take a look at 3 of the most powerful ways.

1. Demonstrate Your Products or Services

When web users begin their search to learn new skills or catch up on particular hobbies and interests, they often turn to Youtube. It’s a no brainer, many more people would rather watch a video than read an article.

With Youtube, you could easily create a video on-the-fly to demonstrate your products or services. This visual approach to showing what you offer can better display the benefits you can give to viewers and potential customers.

If a pictures speaks a thousand words, a video must be millions.

How-to videos are some of the hottest and most searched after videos on Youtube. By doing just a little work converting your copy to video, you’ll be able to capture viewers while using Youtube.

Google, with its caffine update, has begun placing video within top search engine placement. If a keyword is too expensive or difficult to obtain, video will help you land in that prized spot – just remember to include a link back to your website.

2. Voice Your Opinion About A Product Or Service

On the opposite end of using Youtube to promote your own products or services, you could turn the tables and use video to highlight others.

Product and service reviews are highly sought after by many web user. Traditional write ups by marketing teams are quickly ignored as they come across as too “salesy”. A honest video review will help users decided wither or not a product or service is worthwhile.

Think about it for a second, how many times have you bought a product or service simply because a friend or family member raved about it? That’s the power of video.

If you can tell an honest story and review to your viewers, you’ll easily be able to convert them to sales. Be sure to add a call to action within your videos, telling the user to visit the destination website, click a link or subscribe to your channel.

3. Go Viral And Build Links

The greatest benefit of video is the ability to go viral. Viral video spreads across the net at an incredible speed.

Often enough, these videos are created by average users however many companies have tried their hand at crafting viral videos – with great success.

As your video spreads across social media, blogs and websites, people will be able to identify your brand, click your link, visit your website and drive massive amount of traffic for next to nothing.

You’ll be the talk of the net with the correct video hit, it just takes a little bit of massaging to create a video that is viral worthy.

As you can see from these 3 powerful examples, Youtube gives website owners many great options to drive massive amounts of free traffic to their websites.

Video production is becoming easier each day with simpler programs and outsourcing. The cost of an ad campaign could easily cover the costs for a handful of great videos.

The web is transforming from a dominant text medium to multimedia, video is the future, how are you going to harness this powerful way to drive free traffic to your website?

Continue reading »]]> In recent posts I have been referring to projects that I have been working on for the last few months. One of those projects is the Datafeed Import Plugin for wordpress. This is a plugin that I have developed myself out of a need that I have in my affiliate business.

In Early 2009 I was looking for a way to rapidly create websites from affiliate datafeeds, I tried Datafeedr and they proved expensive, I tried popshops but again expensive, I tried free plugins for wordpress but they never lived  up to what the promised so I decided to create my own. I was forever coding and designing affiliate sites, and although they were in different sectors and the sites looked different, the principles of he sites were the same, so I needed some way or re-using the wok I had done on many sites.

With that I started development on the datafeed import plugin for wordpress. At that time it was very basic, but it met most of my needs and as I needed more from the plugin I added additional functionality.

After giving the plugin to an affiliate marketer friend who loved what it did I decided to put the plugin out on the market so that all affiliate marketers could benefit from it, and again since it was launched the plugin has developed vastly from its simple days to the sophisticated premium plugin we have now.

Why WordPress for affiliate websites?

WordPress was the obvious platform to use to develop my software around, it has been in use for several years and it has developed and evolved its self into a very sophisticated piece of software that has many features. It is open source and as such it is free to use, but more importantly there are millions of other people using the software and thousands of people working on the code, as such development of the software is relatively rapid and any issues with the software are soon found by the many millions of users,.

Another big reason that I chose WordPress above developing my own application was that it is already built, and in use and as such there is allot of documentation on the Internet of how to use it and many affiliate marketers are already familiar with its functionality, as I run several blogs it was more of a progression to carry on with wordpress for my other affiliate sites.

History

Initially the plugin was very simple and the affiliate sites it could produce were quite basic, however, over the last few months I have released many upgrades including a major re-write of the plugin to bring it to version 2.0 which I termed the Multifeed plugin. This included the ability to have many datafeeds importing at the same time, each with their own template and the interface was re-written to make it more usable.

What the affiliate datafeed plugin does

On a simple level is it takes an affiliate or other datafeed file and creates a post from each row or record in that datafeed. The user has full control of what and how and what is imported and essentially when it is imported.

The plugin will import any CSV (comma) file, pipe separated or tab separated file and makes posts based on a template that you create, the system imports the datafeed file and tells you what columns are available, you can then use each of those columns in the template, add your own custom content to each post and use the columns to create categories and tags.

You do not need to edit any datafeed before you import it, the plugin can handle all the importing, the plugin has filters so you can choose to either conditionally import records based on a keyword or exclude rows based on a keyword.

The plugin will also allow you to schedule the posts that are created with the plugin to be published over a set time. You can also set the plugin to re-import the datafeed from the affiliate network.

You can also use custom fields to use the imported data in innovative ways.

The Future for the Affiliate Datafeed Import Plugin

Over the past few months the plugin has moved on drastically from what it was originally, I do not intend that to be the end of development. I have many features planned for the plugin, the ability to import XML feeds, SEO improvements, content re-writing and affiliate URL masking.

All users get the chance to request features so the development of the plugin is now very much controlled by the people who are using the plugin day-to-day so any suggestions that are made benefit everyone.

What You get

Other than the plugin you get free upgrades to any future release of the plugin and you will also get free email support which I aim to answer within 24 hours.

Online Demo

I have created an online demo of the plugin and a dedicated site for the plugin. You can view more details of the datafeed import plugin for wordpress by clicking here.

Continue reading »]]> I have started another blog, On The Allotmentспални комплекти which is a blog tracking the progress of my new allotment. I am using this blog as an experiment in many of the things that I have learned about blogging.

I thought that I would report back on a small success I have had with that blog. This weekend I decided that as I was going down to the allotment to do some work I would take some video of the plot and the first bits of work that I did on the allotment. I then uploaded them straight to YouTube and posted the videos on the blog.

I created a youtube channel, on which I put a description of what I am doing, ensuring I used some keywords in the description, and placed a link back to the blog. I also used the tagging facility on all the videos and he descriptions of the videos to provide more links back tot he blog.

I was please with the positive response in the numbers of hits this has generated for the blog. Which in the last few days has seen a ten fold increase in the number of visitors.

Now, this is a new blog and as such only has a handful of visitors at the moment, but it was nice to see the positive impact on the work I had put in.

In addition I was pleased to note that the site now ranks 4 in google for the phrase ‘Allotment Plan’ not bad for a site that is only a month or two old.

Continue reading »]]> Following on from my post about consistency in your link back strategy which was a brief post looking at what URL you give you when asking for a link to your site, and suggesting that the best thing it to be consistent.

Our discussions have moved on and have highlighted an error, perhaps a fundamental error I am making with this very site.

When I originally installed wordpress way back in those early days of learning Linux hosting etc, I installed wordpress in a folder. Therefore as you will see from the address bar, the blog is actually located at http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com/wp/ I then redirect traffic with Apache from http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com to the /wp directory.

Although I still maintain that I am correct in giving out just the domain name as the address and being consistent in what I give out i.e. http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com and not http://earningfromaffiliates.com etc. I am probably suffering from Google not liking the fact that this is redirected to the /wp/ directory.

I am now in a quandary, do I change this and thus breaking any links that are linking directly to a post? Can I write something into Apache to catch these old addresses and route them to the post without the /wp/ folder? indeed will this have any affect what so ever and is it worth the effort?

I think I will ponder this for a little while and do some research to find what others think. If you have any opinion please do post a comment.

Continue reading »]]> I have just written some software (with some help from a friend!) which goes away and checks Google ranking for a given URL and records this ranking in a database. I have set this system up to run each week and loop through a table of urls meaning that each week I can record the Google ranking for each of my sites.

I then have a html view in a table and each week the results are emailed to me.

I can then see progress of ranking changes over time for each page I am monitoring.

Its a useful little script and one that i hope will help me monitor performance, admittedly only in one small discrete area of performance but useful none-the-less.

What I now want to do is publish a sum of all my page ranks on this site somewhere… now how would I go about doing that?

Continue reading »]]> As a follow on from the last post about using domain names that you have parked. I have been running through my portfolio of domains, in doing so I came across a domain name I have been holding onto for several years Broadbandlocal.co.uk.

While with most of my portfolio of parked domain names I have being simply adding a couple of adverts, I decided that Broadband Local would be perfect for a quick exercise to see how quickly I could put together a very simple affiliate site. The result was Broadband Local. A very quick site I have put together to compare broadband prices in the UK.

I chose a template from OSWD and modified it to suit a broadband site, then created a simple database with two tables, one for suppliers names and one for offers, with relationship between them based on supplier ID.

Then in the PHP page i created a simple SQL query joining the two tables getting all the offers and formatted the results in an easy to view HTML table.

The I signed up to some broadband merchants and entered the details of their offers into the database, and hey presto a working site.

All in all this took about 2 hours including finding a template, modifying it, setting up the database, writing the php and entering the data into the DB.

One could argue that this is not the greatest site in the world, it does not automatically update its self, but for 2 hours work I am pleased!

I will not be heavily marketing the site, again this is not one of my main affiliate projects, I will concentrate my efforts on those, but I will submit broadband local to search engines and I will create links from my Web Design company and Web Hosting Company websites, all I need is one sale and that is better than having the domain parked doing nothing!

Have a look at Broadbandlocal.co.uk

Continue reading »]]> If you have been in the Internet business for as long as I have I am sure like me you will have built up a whole range of domain names that you have parked away.

Some will have been bought for that brilliant idea you just haven’t got round to as yet, some will be domains you have bought speculatively in the hope they might be worth something, some maybe ones that clients no-longer wish to continue with and you have decided to keep hold of.

Perhaps more embarrassingly if you are like me some will have been bought when surfing while drunk, you wake up in the morning and that brilliant idea you had last night after a couple of bottles of wine just does not seem so good in the morning, but when you check your email through the fog of a hang over you can just about make out that invoice for the domain name you bought for your not so brilliant idea!

In all seriousness, I have built up a portfolio of domain names reaching into the thousands, some good and some not so good, most of which are just parked, so I thought why not make these pay? Even if that is only a few pounds per year at least they would pay for themselves covering the registration costs. This got me thinking about possible ways to monetise them, so here are my ideas, if you have anymore please do post a  comment. Indeed if you have a funny story about one of those not so great ideas please do post those too!

 1. Sedo or other Auction site – The option that sedo provides is actually a way of selling domain names, however many people use it simply as a parking service, you see you point your domain at sedo, add some details about a price you are looking for and then Sedo put pay per click adverts on the domain name, you get a cut of that revenue. The service is intended to sell the domains, however you can simply reject any bids and earn from the PPC. If that great bid happens to come in you can always decide to let it go.

2. Create your own ppc or affiliate landing page. Simply creating one static html page, put some PPC adverts or banner adverts related to the domains subject and leave it alone. You may want to track with Google analytics to see what people are searching for and custom your banners to them, but all I am doing is setting up those pages and leaving them. The aim of this is not to generate myself extra work, but to do something quick and simple that might drip some money in.

3. The final option that I can come up with requires some additional work but not much. If you have a merchant that provides a product data feed related to your domains subject, grab yourself a copy of AffiliStore (setup takes minutes), setup a data feed from a URL (which updates automatically). This will create an online store with all the products of the merchant. This advantage here is you are more likely to make commissions, but the disadvantages are that it takes a little longer to setup and also takes up more server resources if that is an issue.

With all of these I have decided to simply setup the sites or holding pages. I will not market them in anyway other than submitting them to search engines (which in most cases is already done). Then I will leave them until such a date that I decide to use the domains for something more productive.

In the mean time if each domain earns £5 per year, and yes my expectations are very low, then on the 2000 parked domains I have this will earn  10,000, this will cover the domain registration fees. If they earn any more then that will be great.

Useful links:

Web Hosting

Fasthosts Internet
1&1 web hosting
123Reg Domain name Registration

Affiliate networks

TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future

Text and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)

Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks

Continue reading »]]> I have just signed up for the PayPerPost service, which allows bloggers like you and me to earn money from writing reviews and posts on their blogs. I signed up this evening because I had a spare 5 minutes and decided to look into the whole payed per post and reviewed post angle of affiliate work. I found the PayPerPost site and wanted to know what it was all about, so I signed up. Once I get my account up and running I could go through all the available opportunities or people wanting reviews and posts writing and see if they suited my site.

I am in the process of attempting to move into the ProBlogger range, this is one of the first steps in that direction. It is my intention that I will earn enough from Paid Reviews and other affiliate work to make this my full time occupation. I am very sure that is is possible. 

 I will keep you all updated as to how it goes, you will no doubt see Sponsored posts on this site along with some of my other blogs. I have selected several of their opportunities and after I finish this post will be sketching out those reviews ready for me to write the posts that will hopefully bring in some good cash!

blog marketing

Continue reading »]]> If you are running a Google AdWords campaign, you can make your ads targeted to your keywords using Googles keyword insertion tool.

In the title of your ad use:

 {keyword:}

This will insert the keyword that hit your ad and this will become the title of your ad. So if the user searched for Ford Mondeo your title would become ‘Ford Mondeo’

Of course you can make this more effective using something like:

 Buy {keyword:} now

 which using the above example of ‘Ford Mondeo’ will create an ad title of Buy Ford Mondeo now’.

 Another tip is to use a backup title or word in your keyword insertion, this is so that if the keyword is too long for the title or for some reason the keyword cannot be shown the default will be shown, for example:

Buy {keyword: a car} now

In this example if ‘Ford Mondeo’ can not be shown the ad title will become, ‘Buy a car now’.

You can also capitalise the first letters of the inserted keywords using:

Buy {KeyWord: } now

Note the capital K and W, which will create an ad title of ‘Buy Ford Monedo now’ rather than if you used:

Buy {keyword: } now

Which would create an ad title of ‘Buy ford mondeo now’

Market your site with Text-Link-Ads and get $100 worth of free advertising while earning from referring others. The text link ads are a great way of both marketing your site and generating yourself income by referring others to the Text-Link-Ads program, Text-Link-Ads are both my number one choice for advertising and my number one earner. Sign up for Text-Link-Ads

Continue reading »]]> Tools for Generating Keywords

Before you start on your AdWords campaign you need to pay very close attention to the words that you are going to target. This is not as hit and miss as you may think as you will already have words that are obviously associated with your product or service and you can then use these to generate more. Wordtracker and Nichebot are two paid for subscription services that you can use to research keywords but there are also free services such as Keyword Discovery, Hit Tail and Wordtracker’s free tool, FreeKeyWords. Yahoo offered Overture but this is no longer supported and produces outdated data so best to be avoided. Of course Google offers a free keyword tool for AdWords as well, but I strongly recommend that you try several tools so you can gain a broader picture of the context within which you AdWords campaign is going to be operating.

A simpler and very effective method for generating keywords is to look at your competitors and see what they are using for their sites and especially the landing pages. If you take “mp3 download” as a search term you can then see what is ranking highly on the search results. Examining the pages of these high ranking sites will give you a wealth of keyword and key phrase data for complimentary search terms. Performing this manually is possible however time consuming and costly as a result. The answer is to use a comparison software tool such as IBP/Alexa which will run comparatives of your existing site against

the top ranking URL’s and identify the factors that are accounting for their high search engine rank and recommend steps for you to take. In relation to your AdWords campaign this will generate a large number of keywords and phrases with a relevant weighting that has been arrived at in an objective fashion and usefully presented.

Why should we be so concerned at generating different keywords for our AdWords campaign?

For a start think of the popularity of the keyword that first springs to mind with your product or service. If you are selling music downloads just consider how popular the terms “mp3” and “download” actually are and you will then gain an idea of the task in front of you to gain exposure. Not only does the very heavy search volume for these terms make them expensive ads you will also be competing with a myriad of other products and services offering themselves on the same page and revolving around these terms.

It makes sense to think laterally and move outside of the box. Here’s a good example of how a slight difference can make a huge impact. This is a search engine example rather than AdWords but the principle is the same. Place “supermarkets” in google.co.uk and you will see Sainsburys come up at the top of the page but if you drop the plural and place “supermarket” into Google you will see something very different – try it and see for yourself.

Mispellings

The point is that slight changes in the word you are using can dramatically affect the impact of how you appear. If there is a difference between singular and plural spellings, consider the differences between English and American spellings for your keywords. This is particularly relevant if you are a UK company selling to the North American market where there are not only different spellings but words also hold a different meaning – just consider the word “randy” and try not to snigger when you meet an American by that name.

Another consideration with selecting your keywords is to look at common misspellings of search terms. Many people do have an issue with their spelling and this is reflected in how they use a search engine. It is not only the deliberate misspelling that you should be considering but the vernacular that is being used by your target market so try this example with Google. Input “cars” and you will have a mainstream car search engine come up but try “carz” and you get something very different.

How Many Keywords Should You Use

Answering this question is rather like solving how long is a piece of string.

In setting the parameters for your AdWords campaign I believe in keeping a very tight rein on the number of keywords that are being used. AdWord campaigns tend to reap the greatest success when they are tightly focused on a relatively small number of carefully chosen keywords rather than simply using a shotgun scattering method that blows your marketing budget. By carefully monitoring the ROI on your campaign keywords you can change the balance of the keywords used and let your campaign evolve over it’s life.

How Does Google Match the Keywords?

Google provides four ways of using your keywords and though all are important I recommend you pay particular attention to the last – negative keywords.

Broad Match

This is Google’s default setting so if your ad group has within it the terms “mp3” and “download” then your ad will appear for any search that contains these terms no matter what order they are in and also a wide variety of variations. You may find your ad displayed if “upload” or “mp4” was used in the search term or anything that is broadly related to the keywords you have selected.

Phrase Match

This provides more control over when your ad will be displayed. If you use quotation marks and enter in your keywords “mp3 download” then your ad can be displayed when that phrase is used but not when “download mp3” is the search term nor when plurals or synonyms are used by the user.

Exact Match

This allows your ad to be displayed only when an exact match to your keywords is used. Placing brackets around the key phrase [mp3 download] will only allow the ad to be displayed when and only when “mp3 download” was the search term. If the user specifies other search terms or they are not in the right order then your ad will not be displayed so you can see immediately that this is the most targeted and focused tool for your campaign.

Negative Keywords

Now we have covered how Google is matching keywords but we are looking to maximise the click throughs that are from potential buyers of our product or service. This is where you need to be thinking outside of the box so consider the following.

Earlier we used an example “mp3 download” so it would seem obvious that we are going to be using “mp3” and “download” as two of our keywords. This means that if “download” appears in a search we may ave our ad placed up there in the hope of a click through. Sounds good except…..

What if the search used is “computer anti virus download” ?

Is someone looking for an anti virus download really a prospective customer for an mp3 download?

What if someone uses the search term “mp3 accessories” ?

Are we really looking to market a music download to someone who is actually looking for a new set of headphones?

The question becomes how to stop our ad from being displayed to searchers that are using a keyword we’ve specified but in fact have little prospect of clicking through and purchasing from our ad? The answer is to use negative words. Negative words act to block our ad from being displayed if one of the negative words we specify is used in the search.

So with our previous examples, if we input “-computer”, or “-accessories” in our AdWords keywords then the searches “computer anti virus download” and “mp3 accessories” would no trigger our ad display.

In short, negative keywords allow you to target you ads far more tightly and allow you to qualify your traffic to a much larger extent than simple keyword matching and this will avoid wasting your PPC budget.

Market your site with Text-Link-Ads and get $100 worth of free advertising while earning from referring others. The text link ads are a great way of both marketing your site and generating yourself income by referring others to the Text-Link-Ads program, Text-Link-Ads are both my number one choice for advertising and my number one earner. Sign up for Text-Link-Ads

Continue reading »]]> Building links to your web site is a key task when promoting your online presence and you cannot expect to thrive in the virtual internet community without good quality, relevant links to your site.  Links to your site help generate traffic in two key ways, firstly by attracting traffic that clicks on the link and is carried through to your site and more importantly, indirectly by getting you a higher rank with the search engines.  Search engine ranking is determined by a number of factors and the number of links pointing to your web site is one of the top two methods of achieving a high ranking with interesting SEO optimised content being the other.

While this is simply restating what has been written about by the bucket load,  how to go about finding good link partners and completing the process is a topic upon which a deafening silence falls.

What Are We Looking For?

Sites that you are looking for to create inbound links for your own site need to be:

• from web pages that are relevant to your web pages
• should contain keywords and phrases which your own web site is looking to rank highly for
• should not have the same link text as other inbound links – this replication of the same link text does you no good with the search engines
• should have varied but relevant link text to show the search engines that your site does in fact have content that is relevant and worth ranking

The key thing to bear in mind is that quality by far beats quantity so concentrate your efforts and don’t just link with anything.

Inbound Links Come in Different Flavours

Having different types of inbound links is thought to be a good idea though we don’t know for sure because the search engines do not tell us what they are looking for exactly so it’s hit and miss.

Common types of inbound links include:

• links that have been obtained in exchange for a link from your site
• links from users who find your site interesting
• links from internet directories such as DMOZ
• links created by including them in articles, Press Releases and blogs that you may or may not have a hand in producing.

How Do We Find Sites That Will Link to Us?

The inexpensive way to find sites that are relevant and will link to you is to look within your own business sector.  That may seem strange as why would one of your competitors consider sending traffic to you?  The answer is simple, as though you are in the same business you may in fact not be competing directly.  Someone selling widgets in John O’Groats can safely refer traffic to a widget supplier in Lands End with no loss of business to themselves.  That would constitute a good inbound link and you can easily find dozens of potential link partners in this way.

Another tack to explore is by looking at providers of complimentary but non-competing products in your own area as well as more widely.  A mortgage broker linking with an estate agent makes good sense and also would constitute a good inbound link.

These methods require no expense except some time on your part, but there are service providers who can take the sting out of all of this for a moderate fee and who use professional SEO software to manage link building campaigns.  We’ll continue to focus here though on cost effective link building i.e. free.

We’ve Found a Site We’d Like to Have Link to Us.  Now what?

First check to see if they have a “link page” which will tell you how to go about asking for a link. If they have a link page then follow those instructions.  If there isn’t a link page then you will need to contact the webmaster with the request and how you want the link to be set up.

You can email any webmaster simply by using “webmaster@thesite.co.uk” and that should get through and place “Link Request” or similar in the subject header.  Better still, do a little digging to find out who is behind the site and again this is not a big issue.  I use www.dnsstuff.com as this will give you an email address and a named contact for whoever administers the web site and possibly you will also find the owner of the site and their email too.

Experience has shown that when emailing a webmaster for a link, following some basic rules will help you get a positive response:

• Do not ask too much of the webmaster and remember you are the one asking for the link not the other way around;
• Don’t teach Granny to suck eggs by telling them all about SEO – they probably already know why you’re asking for the link;
• Keep your email short;
• Don’t bother webmasters if the site has no relevance to yours;
• Provide a link to their site first and tell them you’ve done it with a hyperlink to show it;
• Be polite;
• Offer an incentive if they link to you such as a blog post reviewing their product or service offering; and
• Include your contact information including a telephone number as well as your email, and try not to use a free email account such as hotmail – it makes you look like a spammer.

Guaranteed to have your link request rejected is emailing the webmaster a couple of days later asking why they haven’t set the link up yet.  Don’t!  Leave it about a month and then drop them another email and I find that bringing to their attention something on your own web site that may be of interest tends to elicit a response.  Tact and diplomacy are the way forward in these instances.

While You Are looking for Link Partners Others Will Be Looking for You

I’ve already mentioned that you should check a possible link partner website for a link page with instructions on how to ask them for a link.  It’s easy to do and simplifies the whole process so why don’t you set one up for your own website?

Cheap and easy to arrange and if you want inbound links it makes sense  to simplify the process for link partners.  Provide clear instructions on what needs to be done together with a contact email for the webmaster or whoever will make the decision.

The Holy Grail – Links from Higher Ranking Sites Than Mine

This is not as hard as you might think!

You are looking for sites that will link to you and who enjoy high ranking because this makes them more authoritative as far as the search engines are concerned.  Such links provide you with a greater boost in search engine ranking as well.  Getting a link with them may be as simple as following the process outlined already but there are other ways you can get links from higher ranking sites.

Take a look at these two sites – www.Zimbio.com and www.Squidoo.com – both have very good rankings and are considered authoritative by the search engines.  Both also allow you to post articles and blog style posts on their sites with links back to your own web pages as well as the ability to leave comments that also include linkbacks to your web pages.  These count as inbound links that are one-way and count towards your link rating as well as being completely free.

Using Press Releases with links to your web pages achieves the result in a similar fashion and taking it further with social bookmarking sites such as reddit.com, del.icio.us, MySpace and Technorati.  These sites are all high ranking and provide numerous opportunities for growing your links.  You can establish a blog off your main site which covers what you do and every post is linked back to your web pages where relevant and appropriate but it may take some time to gain a high rank on it’s own account.  That does not mean you cannot find a high ranking blog and ask them to feature your business or products and in some cases, a blogger may actually do so for a fee.

Leaving comments on other peoples posts and articles is an excellent way of driving traffic to your web pages and it is easy to find a relevant topic thread that dovetails with your own business.  Using this practice of linkbaiting to place flattering comments on someone else’s work is a sure fire method of getting the attention of the writer and who knows, maybe they’ll feature you in their next post or article.  This may sound corny but it works and it’s how it gets done in the real world.

Summary

Link building is not something that can be just done overnight.  It takes time to build up good links and it takes planning and preparation to maximise the benefits from gaining relevant links.  Don’t go for quantity with your links, instead go for quality links to sites that are relevant to your own.  Manage your link building efforts and get yourself organised in terms of how you perform link building and following up link requests. 

We’ve covered some of the common methods for building links but there are many more techniques that can be used.  These methods as described here do not cost you money but there are many SEO service providers who do this on a professional basis and can achieve impressive results but you must manage them carefully.

Market your site with Text-Link-Ads and get $100 worth of free advertising while earning from referring others. The text link ads are a great way of both marketing your site and generating yourself income by referring others to the Text-Link-Ads program, Text-Link-Ads are both my number one choice for advertising and my number one earner. Sign up for Text-Link-Ads

Continue reading »]]> Questions and things to do before starting an email marketing campaign 

1. Have the users agreed to receive your mail? They must opt in, they must want and expect your email.
2. Be targeted, don’t mass mail, target to those interested in the specific subject, don’t ever buy databases of email addresses, these are far too general and you don’t have permission to send email to these people, besides the success rate is lower than 1%. Target those people who have willingly signed up to a newsletter or those who are existing customers.
3. Subject is essential, the subject brings the user into the email, a bad subject means it goes in the Deleted items with all the other junk.
4. Personalise the mail, this is relatively simple to do but making the recipient feel like you have emailed them specifically improves your chances of success
5. Make the email interesting, don’t waffle, get to the point, you have a chance to pre-sell here, use it wisely, make your user want to read more.
6. Make the email attractive, think about layout. HTML emails are good but think about how it will look in other email clients. Be sure to have a plain text alternative. Remember to think about size, don’t send out massive emails this will frustrate your potential customers.
7. Make it clear, be blatant about where the link back to the site is, after all this is the point right?
8. Ensure you provide an opt out system within the email that is clear and simple to use, spamming will lose your credibility
9. Read your email before sending it out, read your email before sending it out, yes, read it again, and again, be sure you don’t get egg on your face. Once that send button is clicked you cant get them back!
10. Ensure you have some method of tracking your campaigns success (we will discuss some methods to do this in a later article)

If you have yor own list or any other golden rules that should be considered please do add them to the list.

Market your site with Text-Link-Ads and get $100 worth of free advertising while earning from referring others. The text link ads are a great way of both marketing your site and generating yourself income by referring others to the Text-Link-Ads program, Text-Link-Ads are both my number one choice for advertising and my number one earner. Sign up for Text-Link-Ads

Continue reading »]]> The title should be “Forget the Search Engine…for a moment” as Search Engines generate a huge amount of traffic if you use them right.  What we are going to look at here are the marketing techniques that you should also be running alongside the mainstream SEO.  Too often the SEO tail starts to wag the marketing dog and needs to be placed back in it’s kennel from time to time, especially as you should be focusing on building a web site for humans and not for a search engine algorithm.

As soon as web marketing is mentioned, SEO gets mentioned as if it was a mantra and your site will die a slow death without it.  SEO experts have become a huge cottage industry, so much so that  site owners forget the basics about drawing in customers and that SEO is important only as  part of a broader marketing and advertising strategy.  Would you place all of your marketing eggs in one basket with an offline business?  Of course not !  So why would you do it with an online one?

Non-search engine methods for attracting traffic to your site revolve around creating a link to your website of one form or another.  SEO with good link building are essential components for traffic generation and one does not operate in isolation from the other.  We are going to look at some of the non search engine marketing methods you can use to help drive targeted traffic to your website but bear in mind, that just as you should not use SEO on it’s own, neither should these techniques.

Email Campaigns & Newsletters

Spamming is a BIG NO ! 

That is rule number one with email campaigns and one hint of spamming and all your website marketing can end up down the toilet. That being said, there is nothing wrong with emailing information to email addresses that subscribe to such approaches.  Email lists that are compiled from users opting in to your site subscription offer the best results.  You can also buy lists of email addresses that have been gathered by third party companies who have obtained opt-in permission from the users to receive marketing offers.

Direct email campaigns are high volume and low return exercises.  Response rates of less than 1% are the norm and despite the claims that an email address owner has opted in, you walk a finely perceived line in terms of being viewed as a spammer.

Informing email subscribers in the form of a newsletter used for constructive and informative communication provides an opportunity to generate regular traffic to your website with news of special offers and deals.  Combining newsletter communications with links to landing pages on your website will help you obtain the best results for both direct traffic generation and search engine ranking for your additional content.

Forum Posting

If you are in the widget industry then find forums and message boards that handle widget issues.  Contribute to the discussions that you find there and every time you do, include a link to a relevant part of your website that can help deal with the issues raised or offer a product that is being searched for.  Not only will you receive traffic in response to your posting (providing you are being relevant) you will also be enhancing your link rating which again, helps with the search engines.

Many forums have rules on what can and cannot be posted.  Some forums prohibit link backs or any form of commercial promotion and take drastic action to enforce their rules which may well get you banned.  Make sure you abide by the rules and if you cannot post a link as part of a message thread, then approach the moderators or site owners with an offer of a discount for their members and have them post the link in their own way.

Blogs

There is no other technique on the web to generate traffic than a well written, well managed and informative blog.

That is a pretty bold statement to make however I stand by it and here’s why.

Blogging satisfies the demand for surfers to have refreshed and up to date content.  As a story unfolds users will subscribe to the blog to see what is being posted up next while other subscribers may just like the style.  Commercial blog posts will include several links in each post back to the main website providing a conduit for qualified users to look at a particular product or service.  Why would they follow such a link?  Simply because they were interested in doing so by the blog post itself.

You don’t need to run your own blog either.  There are millions of blogs out there that allow you to comment on their posts and so join the discussion that a good blog post should look to provoke.  That provides you with an opportunity once again to link back to your website within the body of your comment but try again to offer something that is relevant to the discussion thread.  If your product or service can satisfy a need that is being highlighted by the blog post then you are more likely to receive that much more traffic.

There is a lot of debate in the blogosphere about the “morality” of paid posts, that is, where you pay a well known blogger to write about your site and offering.  There is nothing wrong in terms of affecting your search engine rankings by doing this and if a blogger is prepared to write about you and you are prepared to pay, that’s the free market in operation.

Social Networking & Bookmarking Sites

Unless you have been living in a cave for the last couple of years, you will have heard of MySpace, probably the best example of a social networking site at the moment but there are others.  As with many things, social networking sites have followed a well trodden path of being a youthful spotty teenager fad that has been adopted by the older business community as a conduit to getting themselves and their business noticed. 

I can provide an excellent example of a MySpace supported website that has virtually no search engine traffic – http://www.circusenvyband.com – Circust Envy band is a UK band who have a MySpace profile that they keep updated rather like a blog.   This is a successful website with little search engine marketing!

Bookmarking sites take a slightly different approach to building a community in that they act as an aggregator of news and happenings-of-note postings that the rest of the community either rates as newsworthy (and so sending it up the ranks and getting more exposure) or voting it down (and effectively burying the item).  Digg is probably the best example and some marketeers actively look to promote their sites with them but you need to be aware. If you get caught artificially manipulating the voting system, say by creating multiple accounts, expect to find yourself banned from using the site.

Write an eBook

There is nothing that people like better than free stuff!

Write an eBook on whatever area of expertise you cover and have it converted into eBook format and offer it for free to whoever wants it.  Within the eBook there will of course be plenty of links and plugs for you and your website and an opportunity to provide in depth information and reasons why customers need your products and services and how they can be used.

There is no excuse not to become an author as there is an army of ghostwriters who will deliver an excellent eBook for a fee that will rival the cost of advertising in the local newspaper.  There is also nothing better than potential customers and the general community seeing your name as the author on a book – that will mark you out as an expert and can be leveraged for other things such as being an “expert commentator” for the press and other discussion media.

Good Old Fashioned Link Building

The last technique we will cover here is simply that – good old fashioned link building.

You sell widgets in Glasgow but you get traffic from customers in London who will not buy from you.  Waste of traffic and a waste of web budget if you do nothing about that.  It makes a lot of sense to look for reciprocal link arrangements with websites that are in your line of business but where you are not competing by virtue of geography.  You’re simply referring customers to one another and a step further on with this is an affiliate marketing scheme.

Think for a moment about how often you see accountants and solicitors passing clients between each other.  Think about mortgage brokers and estate agents working hand in hand.  Receiving referrals is the best source of business you can get as it tends to provide motivated, qualified buyers from a trusted source.  Usually there is a commission paid to whoever refers the business on and that is the basis of an affiliate marketing scheme.

Taking this paid referral system to the web simply involves working out a commission system for other website owners who refer business to you.  Some of this works on a pay-per-click basis or there is a commission paid on a sale being made, but the mechanics are pretty much the same online as in the real world and you get a whole set of links back to your website.

Summary

We have touched upon some of the primary non search engine marketing methods but by no means have we exhausted them all.  We have not touched upon paid link advertising or Google AdWords and the like but nevertheless they are out there.  What we have tried to do is demonstrate that as soon as you mention “website” your marketing and business sense should not fly out the window at the sound of the words “Search Engine Optimisation” or “SEO”.

Marketing methods and techniques are only limited by your own ingenuity and imagination.

Successful, profitable websites have three things in common – they have great SEO, they have great non-SEO marketing and they have a great website offering for users – ignore any one of these three at the risk of your success.

Market your site with Text-Link-Ads and get $100 worth of free advertising while earning from referring others. The text link ads are a great way of both marketing your site and generating yourself income by referring others to the Text-Link-Ads program, Text-Link-Ads are both my number one choice for advertising and my number one earner. Sign up for Text-Link-Ads

Continue reading »]]> This brief article is to look at the basics for SEO, explain the use of a landing page and why you need to make absolutely sure that SEO techniques are used properly to optimise your landing pages if you are to get the very best out of your advertising budget.  This article is suitable for an absolute beginner or those who have a little experience with web marketing.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation in full, is the practice of getting your web presence noticed by the search engines.  The big search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN and while there are hundreds of others these are the three you need to concentrate on.  The reason why is because the bulk of traffic to your website will be driven there by the Big 3 search engines.  If you do not optimise your web pages for them then effectively your online store will achieve low rankings when users are surfing the web.  Most users do not even look at the second page of a search so ranking high enough to be included on the first page is vital if you do not wish to miss out on valuable traffic.

A landing page is a web page that is designed for use with your advertising campaign and it is the page that visitors will go to when they respond to an advert, especially synonymous with PPC (or Pay Per Click ads).  A landing page may also act as a mini-hub within your website if it is large, but here we’ll restrict ourselves to their use in ad campaigns for traffic generation.  Landing pages will hold the information on whatever it is you are selling, including links to buying the product as well as information on the product itself together with any “special offer”.

A cornerstone of SEO work is the identification of keywords and key phrases that will be picked up by the search engines and used to establish the ranking order of your web page.  Someone looking for a car may firstly search for “”new models”Ford”, this is a very basic search for research on  Ford new models.  Later, they may search on “”car dealer” Ford new warranty Focus” which would demonstrate someone who is closer to the buying decision as they are looking at a specific model and a new car – they are actively researching the specifics prior to buying.  A buying search will look something like ““Ford dealer” Focus Discounts “Special Offer” Birmingham” – someone is now looking to choose who they are going to buy the car from. 

In the mass of searches that are being done by users, common terms will stand out – these are your keywords and key phrases and you need to identify them.  You will need to identify especially those keywords that are being used by your own target market – if you’re a Ford dealer in Birmingham say so! Once you’ve done that you can then optimise your landing page for the keywords and you do this broadly in two ways.  First by making sure that the landing page coding and design is itself optimised for these keywords and here we’ll introduce some technical terms – the meta tags and headers, in short the web page building blocks – this is referred to as “on-site” SEO and is done by web programmers as part of the web design. 

Secondly, there is the “off-site” SEO and this is where your content becomes king together with building good links to the page.  In practice, this means using the keywords you have identified within the content of the landing page and hyperlinks in a way that a search engine looking at the page will rank it highly because it appears to be more relevant for that search term.  Using our earlier search phrases, the user is definitely looking for a Ford – if you don’t have the word “Ford” on your landing page you aren’t going to be ranked at all!  Using keywords and finding differing combinations for them takes time and it is usual to see the keywords and phrases evolve over a campaign period as you gain some understanding of what works and what does not.  Bear in mind that the content of the web page (and especially the landing page) needs to be interesting to the human reader and this is not simply about stuffing a keyword into your content so many times that it simply makes no sense when read.  How long would you stay on a page that reads “Ford, best deals, Ford, new car, Ford in Birmingham”?  Make your content grab your readers and that means interesting, informative, well-written and presented content looking to give them something they can’t get elsewhere.

Building good quality links to the landing page will also get it a higher rank, especially as the search engines perceive that you as the owner cannot directly control the links that are being made to your landing page.  If there are good links being made the search engine will think that your landing page is more relevant and rank you even higher on the basis that if some people find your landing page interesting then even more will.  Combining the actual links with keywords in what is known as the “anchor text”, the text that you see highlighted when you see a hyperlink on a web page, helps you even more in getting a higher ranking.

This has only been a very cursory introduction to SEO for landing pages and there is a great deal more to be said about them.  The key thing to bear in mind is that you need to make the landing page visible and interesting to two viewers, firstly the human user, and that means an offer that grabs them which is where your copywriter figures.  Secondly, the landing page must be easily searched by a search engine spider that can see it is relevant to the search terms you are targeting and have good inbound links so it will get a higher ranking and that requires good SEO work.

Continue reading »]]> I have in the past couple of weeks started some initial investigations and tentative steps into direct marketing of affiliate products via pay per click (ppc) adverts.

What is direct PPC marketing?

Direct PPC marketing is when you the affiliate take one or more merchants products, create adverts for those adverts and pay for traffic to be sent to the merchant via your affiliate encoded link. The most common method for this is to use Googles adwords, however there are many other ppc services (Adbrite for example)

Levels of success

Although I am only in the first steps of my marketing, there are some things that are becoming clear, some lessons that I have learned that I should share with you.

After two weeks the figures are not staggering, indeed I have only just about broken even, and thus I have sat back to consider the position, what has gone wrong, what has gone well and where can I streamline or focus to make my campaign profitable.

The first mistake I made was choosing the wrong product, I started advertising dedicated web servers for a web host who I am an affiliate for. It rapidly became clear that there is no space on the advertising networks for any more people in this field. Although the returns are high if a refferal purchases, the PPC cost is driven up to such a level that it is impracticable to compete. In this campaign I had to drive up the bids for clicks to 75 pence per click, which with the limited budget was not generating enough traffic to make reasonable returns from those click that made a sale. This being said, sales were made and thus this inspired me to re-focus and try again with other products.

The second mistake was being lazy! I simply setup PPC adverts on Google, putting the affiliate link into the advert direct, this sending traffic directly from he advert to the merchant. You maybe thinking, like I was, What is wrong with the? This is where the key to all affiliate marketing comes in, Preselling. I intend to write a full article on this subject in the near future.

In simple terms pre-selling is what all affiliates should be looking to do, it is warming up your visitors and getting them ready to buy. As mentioned above, an article on Preselling will be posted soon, but in this case preselling means rather than simply creating a PPC advert that sends traffic directly to the merchant, and therefore loosing out on that traffic and those visitors, you create a web page that contains your presell. You will direct your PPC traffic to your Presell page, and warm up your visitors making them much more likely to buy from your affiliate.

The third mistake was not tracking the keyword performance, Google have created great tools for this. Googles Analytics is a fantastic piece of software that I am not utilizing to its full potential. My plan is to do some work on this, see how it performs, see what it can do for me. I will post about this int he future.

Plans for the next steps

I have found a very good merchant for whom i have been accepted as an affiliate, they sell fine wines, and have 5 shops in the UK. They are new to the net and are looking to expand their business in this area. I will be creating presell pages, not only for the whole range but also for individual wines within that range, I will then setup PPC adverts for each of these presell pages, set budgets and cost per clicks (CPC) and after researching Google Analytics I will track the performance of each keyword so that I can modify those words and CPC’s where needed.

Continue reading »]]> I have recently been looking at a slightly different form of affiliate business, that of working with drop shipping suppliers.

Drop shipping suppliers are suppliers who allow you to promote and sell their products in the traditional sense of ecommerce (or other method of trade), you own the website, you promote the website, you control the pricing structures, you receive the orders and you receive the payment. Where it differs is at the point of sale, when you make a sale and receive the payment you pass that sale across to the drop shipper, who will then ship that product to the customer under your name.

This has the great advantage that you do not need to carry stock, but you still purchase the items at a wholesale price and you control all other aspects of the business.

Minefield

I have rapidly found that area, as with many other areas of affiliate business, is a minefield, it is saturated with people who are out to make a quick buck selling databases of drop shipping suppliers. Try yourself for a search on Google for drop shippers, you will find that there are thousands of results of people trying to sell you effectively a contacts database.

Take my advice… Don’t buy them.

Think about it, how have they compiled that database? Well in the same way that you are now looking for a drop shipper, they have searched the web using Google and others.

You are much better off sticking with your search, you will, as I have come across some gems, you will forgive me for keeping these to myself! But persist in the search and you will find what you are looking for.

Basic advice and questions to ask before your start

Some basic advice while looking for your drop shipper.

1. Know what you are looking for, don’t search on general terms such as drop shippers be specific.
2. In addition to the above, and it seems that this is always the advice, find a niche, a single product, something that you can work a website and a marketing campaign around, something that there is room in the market for your site.
3. Be careful when you choose your drop shipper, check out their credentials, don’t be afraid of emailing them with a list of questions. Remember that their creditability affects yours, how quickly will they ship, how much stock do they carry, how will they inform you that your product is out of stock.
4. Look at your drop shippers’ wholesale price, look at the competitors prices, is there a margin for your cut? Remember to look at the suppliers shipping costs and compare those to competitors as many people will look at the whole price for the product.
5. Where will you sell to? Look at your product and come up with a demographic of the type of people who will buy and where they are. Will you sell internationally? Does your drop shipping supplier ship internationally?
6. Consider using an Ebay store to sell and market your product, but remember to take account of the costs.
7. Paypal is a very fast growing method of payment; consider using it in your site rather than paying out for a commercial payment gate.
8. Remember to indicate in your store that the item will be shipped direct from the supplier.
9. Do not use a drop shipper that requires you to pay fees upfront to use their service.
10. Consider contacting a company that does not currently drop ship, you may be able to make a private arrangement with them, however remember that for them this may be very new and something that they cannot cope with, be sensitive and careful in your correspondence.
11. Check that your drop shipper does not require a minimum order
12. Finally, consider buying the product yourself so that you can test and fully review the product, this will make your site and marketing carry a much heavier weight. Remember, Content is king!

Continue reading »]]> By: Kevin Sinclair

What should you consider when choosing an affiliate program? You need to think about two key things: what business are you in and what can the affiliate program provide to your customers.

No matter what business you are in, the largest investment you make will be customer acquisition. If you have your own product, and have acquired a base of satisfied customers, then single product affiliate programs could work very well for you.

However, if your business is acquiring customers for other businesses, that is, purely affiliate programs, then a better choice for you could be affiliate programs with multiple products or services. This will help you to capitalise on your investment in customer acquisition.

The key to choosing successfully is to ensure that the affiliate program offers products that meet the needs of your potential customers. Coupled with this is the need for the products to be high quality and for the supplier to provide excellent customer service. Remember, your credibility is on the line every time you refer someone to buy through your affiliate relationship.

Some of the other factors I consider when evaluating affiliate programs include:

Is the affiliate program a reputable business? You can check out a business you are considering a relationship with in variety of ways. Talk to the Better Business Bureau in your local area or a similar body. In addition, I find web sites that monitor affiliate programs to be worth looking at. The best I have found is Associate Programs www.AssociatePrograms.com. Allan Gardyne pulls no punches and tells it as it is.
Does the program enable you to share in the lifetime value of the customer? Great programs will give you commissions on all future purchases of the customers you introduce. This is where the real profits are. These types of programs, in effect, allow you to partner with the supplier.

Does the program reward you for introducing other affiliates? This type of program is commonly referred to as a two-tier program. Often your customer may become an affiliate also and you will be rewarded for this.

Is the supplier interested in your success as an affiliate? The top affiliate programs engage in a process of coaching or information sharing to help you succeed. Affiliates are provided with regular newsletters outlining what is working for successful affiliates and providing updates and details on new products.

Is the commission reasonable? Commission rates on commodity products such as books and CDs are low. This is because there is very little margin in the products due to competition. Look for products that have a commission rate of 15% or more that are not commodities – that way you will be better able to recoup your customer acquisition investment.

Are statistics provided? The higher the level of statistics provided, the better off you are. This will enable you to measure the success of your marketing efforts and to determine the best places to invest your marketing dollars. Insufficient statistics is a sign that the affiliate program is not sufficiently interested in your success.

Are new products being developed regularly? To get the full value from lifetime commissions, new products need to be introduced on a regular basis. Without this, lifetime commissions can be worthless. Also, look for consistent high quality in new products introduced.

How frequently are commissions paid? The more frequently commissions are paid, the better off you are. Good quality affiliate programs will pay you monthly. In some situations, commissions are not paid until a certain level is reached. If the program you are considering has this requirement, check how many sales need to be made before the level is reached.
Have you read the affiliate agreement? This is a key area that you should look at. Some affiliate agreements are totally in favour of the supplier. Others are more balanced. Some agreements restrict your ability to promote similar products from other suppliers. Most agreements have anti-spam provisions. Look for agreements that are fair and that do not stack everything against you as the affiliate.

While there are other factors that can be considered when choosing an affiliate program, following the suggestions above will help you to make superior business choices that will lead to long-term success.

Author Bio
Article by Kevin Sinclair, CPA, of Personal & Business Success Resources. Visit his website at www.business.ksinclair.com.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com – Free Website Content

Continue reading »]]> By: Ray Clegg

Do you know that you can have your own online store featuring Amazon products? And you can have this store up and running in minutes.

aStore by Amazon is a new Associates product that gives you the power to create a professional online store that can be embedded within or linked to from your website in minutes and without any knowledge of HTML or any other programming skills and best of all there are no fees associated with building an aStore for your website.

aStore is a dedicated shopping area that you can set up on your website in minutes you decide which Amazon products you want to feature you can include all Amazon products or display only the categories that you choose you also have the option of creating your own custom product categories you can also customize your store’s look and feel by selecting colours and design that closely match those of your existing website. aStore also allows you to offer your customers a shopping cart for multiple item purchases plus check out on Amazon is the most trusted store online

aStore allows you to inform your customers with robust product details, product reviews, product images and information from Amazon including informative product descriptions, Amazon editor product reviews, recommended products, up-to-date product information, Listmania (themed product lists from other Amazon customers).

The aStore wizard will guide you step by step through the process of setting up your aStore and generate a URL to which you can link to or embed in your website. There are 3 ways that you can embed your aStore into your website the quickest and easiest way is via a simple link from your website navigation menu to your aStore as a standalone site this option also includes a link back to your site from each one of your aStore web pages or if you wish you can embed your aStore using an inline frame or embed using a frameset these two methods of embedding your aStore will appear to your visitors as if the aStore is part of your website and enable them to shop without leaving your site.

As an Amazon associate you can create up to 100 aStores and you will earn commissions for every product that is sold to a customer that either purchases directly through your aStore or who subsequently purchases at a later date direct from Amazon.

You can receive your Amazon associates commissions by either direct deposit in to your bank account, a cheque or Amazon gift vouchers.

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The author is an avid sports betting enthusiast and has written many articles on sports betting, betting exchanges, horse racing, golf, cricket, tennis and soccer see some of his work at Cricket Trader

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Continue reading »]]> We are often asked for tips on how you make affiliate sites a success, the simple answer is that ‘Content is king’, yes there are many other aspects that influence the success of your site, how you market it, the affiliate programmes you choose, and even how well you build your site, but the overriding golden key is content.

Ask yourself, why would someone want to come to my site? They are not visiting to see nice pretty graphics, lists of reviews, and content that is easily found elsewhere, they are generally looking for something specific, a service, product or information.

In order to make your site a success, ensure that you are providing good original content. If you are planning on using a blog as your source of affiliate income, select something that you are interested in, something you know a great deal about, the general rule of thumb is you should be able to sit down and write at least 10 original articles for your site before you start, if you cant then you need to choose a different topic.

If you are using an affiliate’s product database and creating an affiliate store, take the time to look at the products in the database, the quality of the images, text and descriptions.

Keep to a niche, don’t blur the boundaries of your site by making it everything to everyone, you will simply not be able to provide the quality of information and content that people are looking for. Focus on one area, an area you are interested and knowledgeable about. Once your site becomes successful you can extend it to cover a wide market.

Continue reading »]]> Receiving Payments can often be confusing, the merchant may present you with a number of options, which one should you take, which is the most cost effective, which will allow you to access your money fastest?

This paper looks at how your commission is approved, when and how you can expect to receive that payment, the implications of long payment cycles and payment is foreign currencies, how to transfer your commission, Paypal or direct bank transfer.

Commission approval

The first step in receiving your payment is to have the commission you have earned approved. All commission that you earn from your programme will be subject to approval; this is to ensure the integrity of the affiliate programme generally to stop fraudulent earnings.

The types of things that they are looking for are repetitive clicks on pay-per-click (ppc) adverts, which could be interpreted as the webmaster clicking on the adverts themselves. Limited scope of sales that could indicate a webmaster encouraging friends to click or buy through their site rather than marketing the site to a wide audience.

They will be looking for things that indicate automated scripts that mimic real activity or non-automated schemes such as sites that require users to click adverts before proceeding.

The affiliate programmes take this extremely seriously, for example commission junction have a fulltime team of compliance departments, whose sole job it is to detect fraudulent efforts.

The advice is therefore read the user agreement carefully to ensure that you do not break their rules otherwise you could loose all your commission! Also be aware that ‘test clicks’ are in most cases classed as being fraudulent clicks and should be avoided.

Payment cycle

The payment cycle for an affiliate scheme is a very important aspect to consider when deciding which affiliate scheme to use. A majority of schemes have a monthly payment cycle, therefore if your account balance (see below) has reached the minimum agreed level the affiliate will transfer all approved monies via your preferred payment method.

Where this begins to impact your decision is where the payment cycle is longer than 30 days, some I have seen have cycles of 3 months. Just imagine for a moment that your affiliate site is very successful, you start building commission and your balance with the affiliate becomes sizable. If they have a long payment period it maybe some time before you can actually get your hands on the money.

Currency

Depending on the type of programme that you are going for currency may or may not be an issue, however, if the programme that you have chosen pays out your commission in a foreign currency you should keep in mind both exchange rate and any bank charges incurred for receiving monies in foreign currency.

Interestingly Paypal do not charge the user to receive money in other currencies, although they probably do not offer the best exchange rate possible, but this is still a good solution.

I receive a majority of my commissions in US dollars and accept that I have to convert this into UK pounds at a later date, however for my situation this does not cause too much of a problem or cost implication.

Account balance

Most affiliate schemes will have a minimum account balance before they will payout, these ranges from £10 to £50 or more. Depending on the success of your site and the sum or your earnings this may or may not be something that you need to consider.

This is again an issue of cash flow. If you expect to be generating relatively small sums of commission then those who payout smaller minimum payments will work better for you.

Generally this does not affect my programmes as they are earning more than the minimum payments in any case and therefore I get a nice cash flow each month.

Receiving the payment

There are many different methods of payment offered by all affiliate schemes, below are some of the most common.

Bank Transfer

A common option used by most if not all affiliates is the bank transfer option, you provide your bank details, account number and sort code and the monies are transferred directly into your account.

Paypal

Paypal is a very easy, tried and tested method of receiving payments, in actual fact it is my preferred method as it constitutes the easiest method.

Paypal operates by sending payments electronically; all you need to do is open a Paypal account (which you can do by clicking here Clicking Here ) and then provide the affiliate scheme with the email address of your Paypal account via which payments will be made.

Once the balance has built up the money is sent to the Paypal account, you receive an email telling you that the money has been transferred leaving you the option to transfer it on to your bank account (free with Paypal with sums over £50) or leave it in your Paypal account for further use.

I tend to move most of the monies from my Paypal account to my bank each month, but I also leave a good balance in there as this pays for the webserver and other costs of the business.