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 »]]> Search engine ranking has been one of the challenges faced by an internet marketer or any web master for that matter. Techniques of search engine optimization have to be carefully adhered to if an affiliate marketer aims at improving search engine ranking of his website or blog.

Search engines adopt certain criteria by which they would rank the websites depending on factors such as the popularity of webpages, quality of content and the number of unique visitors that haunt the site or blog in a given period of time.

What are the techniques that have to be adopted by the website owner or the affiliate marketer in order to get a higher search engine ranking? Traffic to the site is the most important result that is aimed by any marketer. The techniques that promote traffic to the site include selection of keywords by proper research, building a quality content that suits the selected niche, use of meta description tags and title tags, simple URL structure of the site, building up popularity of the site and building up backlinks.

As far as building up backlinks is concerned, care has to be taken to see to it that they are not procured through spamming but obtained through legal methods such as article marketing and forum posting. URL of the website may be included in the signature used in the forums. Blog commenting should be done on relevant blogs only. The concept of reciprocal links can be put to good use in driving quality visitors to the site.

E-mail marketing done with precision will certainly improve the quality of the visitors to a site or a blog. Care has to be taken in e-mail marketing too against the situation of being called as a dreaded spammer. Pay per click programs also assist in the positioning of a website in search engine result pages. This method is of course expensive as it involves cost per click in the advertising service provided by the program.

Continue reading »]]> Search engine rankings are extremely important for any web master. For a majority of the blogs and websites, search engines are the biggest source of traffic.  To get a good ranking in search engine rankings especially of Google, there are a lot of factors that come into play. However, there have been continuous increase in our knowledge on what are the factors that are important for a blogger to improve their search engine rankings.

Here are five important factors that affect search engine results placement of a site:

External Links: The number of sites linking to your site is the most major factor of your search engine rankings. But you should always go for high-quality links rather than focusing on the quantity of links you get. If you are getting two to three links from PR6 and PR7 blogs it is much more valuable than a hundred links from PR1 and PR2 blogs. So always focus on getting your blog as many links as you can from high page rank sites. Also remember never to get linked from link farms or bad neighborhoods as Google and other search engines will blacklist you.

Domain Age: Google loves aged-domains that have been in use for years. It has been seen by experience that Google trusts domains that are aged. So you can either buy domains which are old or you can get links from aged domains that will help you improve your worth in the eyes of search engine bots. It is always observed that older domains rank higher in search engine results.

Frequency of Posting: The frequency at which you post on your blog can be more important that you thought. Google is always in the look out for fresh contents. Google generally gives you a lot of authority if your blog is updated regularly. But this does not mean that you begin to post short or unoriginal content on your blog as it will only make you rank lower. Update regularly, but with unique and useful content. A posting frequency is important not only to keep your readers engaged but to maintain a good position in search engine results.

Page Load Time: This is the latest factor which Google has become to consider in their search engine algorithm. Senior engineer from Google, Matt Cutts has already confirmed that the page load time of a site will also be considered in the search engine rankings from now on.

Research Content: It is also known now that research related content to any topic is preferred by Google. Meaning long articles will always be ranking better than short articles that only last between 100 to 200 words. Keep your articles long and keyword rich. This will help you rank really well for a lot of keywords for Google’s search engine results.

So these are among the most important 5 factors that Google has begun to consider for placing your site in its search engine results. It is important that a blogger focuses his efforts to improvise on these factors so that he can get more traffic out of strong search engine results placements.

Continue reading »]]> Great search engine optimization is a very important goal for any website that lives on the traffic it generates. There are many factors when it comes to search engine optimization, one of them being correct usage of url links.

An optimized link will help direct search engines to their correct destination while providing you with greater search engine placement based on your chosen keywords.

It’s not difficult to develop an optimized link habit but many people still neglect this simple trick that is costing them thousands of visitors each month.

Here are 3 ways you can create highly optimized links that search engines love.

1. Avoid String URLs

Many ecommerce websites use dynamic page generation for product pages and articles.

These pages often look like http://www.example.com/?=9821_Article.

This type of link structure, although still possible to index, is highly troublesome and irrelevant for search engine spiders.

Most CMS systems provide a method to change dynamic links to keyword rich strings. Modification through the htaccess file is also possible but does require additional technical knowledge.

To build a highly optimized url (without strings) you should focus on the main keywords you want your page to rank for.

Omit unwords such as:

•    the
•    and
•    of

Converting your string url structure to a keyword rich url will help with your search engin optimization, placing you higher within search results, driving you a fair amount of traffic.

2. Use Keyword Rich URLs

The previous example touched on the use of keyword rich urls but to further explain the importance of these urls here are a few more reasons.

Search engine optimization is often broken down to:

•    Off Page Optimization
•    On Page Optimization

When you provide a link in a blog comment, author byline or anywhere within your previous articles, using a descriptive and keyword rich url string instead of the traditional “click here” helps tell the search spiders what the next page is about.

Instead of using “Click here to jump to page 2″, you could use “View Additional Information About Bicycles” if you happen to write about such topic. This method can be applied across any niche or topic, simply substitute out the words.

The point is to create a link that users want to click that also provides additional information.

3. Go For The Long Tail

The long tail keyword is simply a search phrase instead of one or two keywords internet users type when searching for information in search engines.

It’s very difficult to rank for a single keyword because major businesses pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to rank high for the term.

The more practical way to rank well in the search engines and improve your search engine optimization is to target long tail keyword phrases users type.

Instead of “bicycle” you could narrow down your urls to include phrases such as “how to ride a bicycle”. This method of optimizing your urls will be much easier and give you more relevant traffic as you know people are searching for specific information.

Adopt An Optimized URL Habit

Once you become accustomed to creating keyword rich urls, you’ll be able to interlink, back link and develop your url structure that converts sales and gives you better search engine placement.

Apply these tips across your website to give search spiders an easier time to find your content and rank it for the correct terms you aim for.

Continue reading »]]> Everyday thousands of blogs appear on the net, giving each writer a voice and a platform for readers to share their opinions.

The fundamental difference between a blog and a static website is the interaction. Blog commenting gives readers the ability to continue a topic of discussion while simultaneously promote their own links.

Proper and respectful blog commenting is a very simple and effective way to drive traffic to your website.

With millions of niche websites and blogs on the net, becoming an authority and being active with blog commenting will put you right in front of the same rabid visitors that are eager to learn more – by directing them to your own website.

The following is a few ways you can use blog commenting as a way to increase your search engine optimization and drive wild amounts of traffic to your website.

1. Use Correct Etiquette

Blog owners use their precious time to write articles for their readers. Commenting is a natural way for readers to extend the topic but there are certain guidelines you should obey when leaving your own comment.

First off, you should never spam comments. Comment spam is detrimental to both the blog owner and blog reader. Spamming links will place a negative image within the minds of people interested in your niche while being promptly deleted by the blog owner.

Second, you should try to keep the topic flowing. Derailing the topic with hateful speech or drama is a quick way to break proper blog comment etiquette – don’t do it.

Lastly, don’t leave a comment that doesn’t fit within the scope of the blog. If a blog is talking about tech news, it doesn’t make a bit of sense to leave a comment and link about a diet product, it comes across as spam and is very rude.

2. Provide Helpful Insight

Blog commenting is utilized to keep a discussion going. Although a writer will do the best to their ability to cover the topic of the post, blog commentors will be able to pick up from where it left off, lending helpful and insightful information.

To drive traffic to your website, comment on blogs within your expertise, continue the discussion and give more than you take. When users come to know how helpful you are, they will follow through your provided link, landing on your page.

Likewise, a reader which provides excellent comments can sometimes be highlighted by the blog owner. As appreciation for your interaction on the blog, they may talk about you in later posts, giving you additional links and spotlight to drive traffic to your website.

3. It’s All In The URL

Common blog format calls for:

•    Name
•    Email
•    URL

The URL is your opportunity to share additional websites that fit within the scope of the blog or blog post. Readers will be eager to seek out additional information and when you are on the forefront with your link, they will follow through, driving free traffic to your blog.

Why Blog Commenting Matters Most

When you provide helpful, respectful and informational comments, you capture readers that are already hot on topic.

These “hot” readers are now emotionally driven to find additional information or products. Being active on blogs within your niche will help add authority, branding and traffic to your website.

Not just random traffic, but highly motivated readers that will devour your content.

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 »]]> This weekend has seen coverage of the ‘New Social Networking site’ Twitter.

Although I have only recently started using it, I was under the impression it has been around for some time, but hey!

I have also been reading some ‘black hat’ online marketing methods exploiting Twitter, this has brought me to thinking where is the line between legitimate online marketing and Spamming.

I send an update to Twitter each time I post a blog post, I also send an update of each offer I add to Subscribe To Offers, although my curl scripts are not working at the moment. Is this Spamming?

I have read about affiliate marketers using datafeeds sending each item in the datafeed to twitter, effectively sending mass updates to Twitter, clearly this is Spam. Twitter themselves call this spam, which is why people are coming up with systems to drip feed these posts to twitter.

I am not sure where the line is. However, I would prefer not to wreck another good social networking tool by Spamming it. It seems to me that this is the death of all new opportunities on the Internet. Sooner or later they are exploited.

Continue reading »]]> I took some time this evening to analyze the keywords that people have been using to find this site and I was interested to note that Google has picked this site for definitions of several keywords.

For those of you that done know, in Google if you do a search for ‘Define: keyword’ rather than doing a search for that phrase it will look for definitions for the keyword that you entered.

I use Google Analytics to monitor the traffic and have been please to see that this site is being used for definitions for:

‘Banner Advert’
‘Data Feed’
‘Paypal’
‘Affiliate ID’
‘contextual link’
‘deep link’
‘banner advert’
‘cookie length’
‘affiliate link’
‘associate’
‘unique click’

These keywords or definitions have been found in a ‘Glossary of terms’ post I wrote early in the life of this blog.

The number of visitors coming to the site from those definitions is quite considerable and is making up over half of the search engine traffic to this site.

As this is something that you can not buy, or get onto yourself I am please that my site has been chosen as a source for the definitions of those words.

This is a great tip for anyone else who has a blog or any site, a little SEO tip, write a page with relevant definitions of keywords. Make sure that what you write is your own content and then monitor your stats to see if you get any hits on those keywords.

Continue reading »]]> As another post in my series about my Google Ranking Monitoring Software. Over the last week or so I have extended this to include Alexa Ranking, Yahoo Back Links and Google Back links, I will be posting a new version very soon. However this work has got me thinking about how you monitor and judge the success of your site.

I guess the simple answer is the success of the site is reflected in how much it earns, however I like to look deeper than this. There is of course the age old methods of number of unique visitors, page views and how long each user was on your site, however I think that there are now other was in which, if not judge the success of a site, monitor its performance especially in the success of SEO.

As indicated above my software now monitors Google Page Rank and back links, Alexa rank and Yahoo Rank. I plan to add other search engine rank monitoring into the software such as MSN, Altavista and others, but also something that is of critical importance these days rankings and link backs on social networking sites.

This may present too much information at too finer a detail, however this is proving to be a little experiment for me. With this level of detail I am hoping to see effort I am putting in to a site on building its social networking presence for example. I am hoping that these efforts will be reflected in the results of my SEO monitoring software.

Eventually I would like to see if there is indeed a correlation between increases in these various results and the sites performance in its number of visitors and income. I would like to get to the situation where I can graph these results and prove either way if the efforts are worthwhile. My instinct tells me that yes, the effort will pay off right through the chain, in terms of increasing rankings right through to increased revenue.

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 »]]> The Google Rank Monitor Software I launched a few days ago has raised some discussions as to what page rank to monitor. The software actually allows you to enter the exact URL that you wish to monitor, therefore if you want you can monitor several sections or individual pages on a site.

This has lead to deeper discussions as to how your link back strategy should work. In my opinion consistency is the key. If I am building link backs to Earning From Affiliates for example I will always use http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com and not http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com/wp/?p=183 unless I want to refer to a specific post.

More over I will also always use the www and on sites where I have two or more domains I will focus all my marketing strategy on one domain while the others just cover miss-types and the odd incidental visitor.

I wonder what others opinions of this is. Are you consistent? Indeed does it make a difference?

Continue reading »]]> I have packaged up the scripts that I have put together, modified and written that check an record the Google Ranking of a list of sites in a database. It then presents you with the results in a table view allowing you to monitor then changes occur. I have uploaded them and they are available now for Free download.

The script is not perfect, I know there are style issues in Firefox and there are probably better ways of doing things but I thought I would release it so that you can all try it out and see if it is of any use to you. Please do email me or post a comment and tell me what you think. If you have any ways to improve it please also let me know either with your ideas or with code improvements.

Future improvements

I do intend to do some more work on the software and the following enhancements would be nice if I can get the working.

1. Highlight changes to ranking on the results view
2. Send an email alert when there is a change
3. CSS improvements
4. Add Alexa and other ranking systems to the monitor tool
5. Add a total page rank for all entered sites (useful as an overall performance monitor)

Please do let me know what you think and if you can offer any improvements or find any bugs ect. then please let me know.

Download

Download the Free Google Page Rank Monitor Software

Continue reading »]]> Following the recent Google rank review it seems that many of my sites have dripped by one ranking, and none of them have risen, perhaps this is due to not really doing anything pro-active on any of the sites for several months due to baby.

I don’t see this as a big issue and I am sure that I can pick things back up and move all the sites forward with a little bit of effort.

Re. my recent post about Google rank recording software that I have written. I am re-factoring it so that i can make it available as a download from this site as I am sure others will find it useful.

I just need to test it now and it will be up within the next day or two.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve recently advertised for a freelancer to generate some links for Break Away Holiday Cottages, I have asked that these links be on sites with a page rank of above 3. I have also asked for some blog posts and comments to include a link back to my site. I have given details of the types of site and site content that I want links backs from so hopefully in terms of Google they will be quality links.

Having never done this I will see how it goes, my concern is that there is a danger of the freelancer spamming on my behalf, however I have made it clear that permission should be gained and proof of that permission be given along with proof of the link before payment is made.

I will keep you up-to-date on how this goes and what sort of impact it has on visitors and in turn commissions.

Has anyone else gone down this route? if so how successful was it?

Continue reading »]]> What with the current storm over Googles changes to their page rank system I have been getting rather worried about what sort of page rank I would get for this site. As the site has only been going for a few months I have been working with a zero page rank.

Today i have checked my page rank and found that after Googles latest review I now have a page rank of 3/10 for which I am rather pleased. Ok these is still improvement to be had, but for a site of this age I am very pleased with that.

On with the work… there is improvement to be had!

Continue reading »]]>

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 »]]> Landing Pages Part 1

This article is the first in a series of articles on everything to do with Landing pages, what they are, techniques for creating them, marketing them and using them to pre-sell your affiliate products.

A landing page is a page that welcomes your visitor. It should be able to make the best impression at the very first instance because you may not get a second chance. The landing page must have all the relevant data regarding the particular product or service and must be your true representative online in every way. 

You must create a landing page that is informative yet impressive enough to make your visitor feel they know more about the product, yet it should leave them wanting more or wanting to buy. It must provide a guided tour of the product in question, explaining the various attributes of the product while making any kind of offer you intend to make in order to generate interest from your prospective customer. This is called the Pre-sell and it is what affiliate marketing is all about.

The landing page must be suitably designed so as to not only catch the attention of your visitor but also retain the interest generated. 

What Should The Content Be Like?

There are a few things that you must be clear about before starting with designing your landing page. The issues like the target audience, the product to advertise, and the reaction expected from the visitor must be clearly laid down.

• Your landing page must be so skillfully designed and written that the visitor would take a positive action towards buying the product.
• The content should be precise and to the point but should be able to drive home the idea and generate your visitor’s interest.
• The general queries that a prospective customer has must be dealt with in the landing page so as to clarify doubts if any. 
• The flow of the content must be well maintained or else it would fail to hold the interest of the prospective customer.
• It is important that the content be divided into various relevant sections with subtitles and be well organized.
• Every visitor is important and so must be handled tactfully so as to make him a customer for life. The content and the landing page should be so designed that the visitor is convinced and encouraged enough to take some positive action. 

Why Images Are Important

Images play a very important role in a landing page as they are the first object to draw the attention of the visitor and also convey a lot. The images placed in a landing page must be a smart selection so as to make a good impression and generate interest from the visitor at the very first look. 

Another thing that must be kept in mind is the time taken for the page to load. Online customer has got a short attention span and little time to give you. You must keep in mind that the Internet has several options to offer. So, your landing page must maintain a proper balance between text and images so as to ensure fast loading. With so many websites offering similar products and competition being very tough, every small detail counts and so the design and layout of the landing page, thus, makes all the difference in determining if a visitor would turn a customer or not. 

Your Landing Page Says It All

You could have one or more landing pages depending on the products you decide to advertise. If it is an affiliate program that you plan to advertise then the landing page must contain information pertaining to the respective product. 

Your landing page must be so designed that it does all the talking for you, it should be a smart salesman who is able to persuade the visitor to take the decision to purchase the particular product. So let your landing page be the mirror of your identity and speak what you want to convey!   
 

Useful links:

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 »]]> 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.