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 »]]> 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 »]]> Photography is a great passion of mine, a hobby which I try to engage in as much as I can. Unfortunatly due to work and Business commitments my time for photography is limited to holidays.

Never the less, recently I have identified a way to combine, my making money onine word with my photography hobby. This article is a ‘How to earn money online from your Photographs’. It gives you some pointers where to start earning money from your photographs and suggests some hints and tips along the way.

As with all things this assumes you are willing to but the time and effort into your project, you do not have to be interested in photography but it sure helps! You dont nessiceraly need a camera that costs thosands of pounds, but an eye for a good shot and a creative streak will help you.

Selling your Photographs

There are two ways that you can sell your images online, firstly by doing it yourself, creating a website and marketing it, and secondly selling your images through a commercial online gallery.

Why would anyone want to buy my photographs? 

As a designer this is not a difficult question to answer, in graphic design we are always looking for an image to best illustrate the artwork we are creating, very often we are looking for somethign very specific and will trawl through thousands of images to find the perfect one. Why should that perfect one not be your image?

Ok people wont want to buy pictures of your latest party, but if you have some aptitude for photography you will have something in your portfolio that someone might want to use.

How to Sell – Own website

Creating your own website has the advantage that you cam have the look and feel of the site exactly as you want it, visitors to your site will only have a choice of your images and you will keep the all of the sale price.

If you are not a web designer and do not want to  employ a web designer to create your site, you can get open source web designs that will get yo started.

The difficulties with this method is that you need to market your site yourself, you will need a budget for this or you will need to find a target market or niche for your images.  You will also have to work out a method of charging for your images, this might simply be a paypal system or you may want to develop an ecommerce site with a shopping basket. Either way this starts to get complicated.

How to Sell – Commercial Galleries

There is another way, many of the large online commercial galleries will sell images on your behalf, once you have signed up you will be able to upload your images. The prices will either be fixed by the gallery or you will be able to set your own prices from which the gallery will take a cut.

The advantages of selling your photographs this way is that you need no worry about the website, or the marketing of your images, or how to take payment, or control copyright, you simply upload the images and away you go.

The following are online galleries who will either buy your photographs directly or will give you a cut of the sale price of any of your images they sell. As with all the recommendations I make on this site, these are all people I have used or am using.

SmugMug Pro – Not really a commercial gallery but allows you to have your own space, share and sell your photographs

Big Stock Photo – A very simple to use photo gallery

Fotilia - I find this site not as easy to use, however it is well worth persevering with as you will get the results.

DreamsTime - A good site, easy to use and seems to be the quickest to upload pictures to.

IStockPhoto - One of the best sites, the user has a control panel on whcih they can manage all their account.

How much money can you make?

How much money you can make is very much down to the quality and quantity of images that you have for sale. The variety of the images could also affect the performance of your earnings, getting your images into a wide variety of different niches will increase your market.

Really what we are saying about how much you can earn from selling your photographs online is how long is a piece of string.

In the short time that I have been selling my images online, I ave uploaded probably about 150 photographs to the various galleries listed above, where possible I have uploaded the same photograph to multiple galleries, however you do need to check the terms and conditions and ensure that they don’t have an exclusivity clause.

Although int he very early days sales were very slow, they have begun to pickup. With the number and types of photographs that I have for sale I am not about to pay off the mortgage, but it h given me enough cash to upgrade my camera!

I have spoken to several photographers on photography forums who make their living exclusively from this type of work so depending on what your targets are, you can archive either a nice hobby that pays for its self or a good living.

Its up to you to make it work, put in the time and effort and you will reap the rewards.

Continue reading »]]> In many of the articles on this site you will have seen me banging on about the quality of traffic or the importance of getting quality traffic. It is about time that I wrote a little about what we mean by quality traffic and how we can start generating that quality traffic.

What is Quality Traffic?

Depending on who you talk to or where you read, you will find that people have differing definitions for the quality of traffic, this can be based upon many factors such as the source, demographic, length of time that person spends on your site or if a conversion to a sale is made from that person. In reality it is probably a combination of these factors.

In the early days of my affiliate marketing, I purchased traffic from a company who placed adverts for your site on expired or expiring domain names; they sent me 2500 unique hits in one day, for the cost of $25, great! Or so I thought, the graph on Google Analytics flew up and everything looked fantastic until I looked at the time on site and bounce rate which said that on average those visitors spent 0.001 seconds on the site, clearly they did not stay about long enough to read anything on the site, so it was a mistake which I will never make again!

Having a huge amount of traffic may be impressive, but it it does nothing for your sales or profits then what is the point, your efforts have been wasted.

My definition of quality traffic is that the user is interested in the content of my site and eventually participates in the sites discussion. On this site I would not include anything about converting any of those into sales of any form as that is not that this site is about, on other sites converting to a lead or a sale would clearly be in the definition of quality traffic.

Generating Quality Traffic

Lets first consider the source of the traffic, clearly word-of-mouth will generate a great quality of traffic, personal recommendation, from one interested party to another has a high chance of generating good leads or sales.

If we compare this to search engine traffic or traffic from banner or text adverts all the user really knows about your site is what information you have included in your advert or in the description of your site that has been picked up by the search engine.

This is not to say that advertising can not generate good quality traffic. Placing your advert on a specialist site directly related to your own site is clearly going to generate a better quality of traffic than if your advert is on a general site. The reason for this is that the user is already interested in the subject and is more likely to be interested in your content.

Commenting on blogs which are in your niche is a great way of getting targeted traffic, again here the users are already interested in your subject matter and are firstly more likely to click the link, and secondly more likely to convert to a lead or sale.

Demographics is also important, if your site is selling goods directly targeted at the older generation, you want to try and generate traffic with a majority of people in this demographic. Although this may not always be the case, take a gadget site, one would immediately assume that the key demographic here would be 15 – 35 year old males, however although targeting this traffic would certainty be a good idea, you may also get good quality of traffic outside this demographic, women or older males would also be interested in this type of product.

The message I suppose is to consider where you are getting your traffic, especially if it is traffic that you are paying for, make sure that the traffic you are buying is targeted, interested in the subject of your site. Don’t be infatuated with the traffic graph; concentrate on the income/profit graph! This is much more interesting; after all, you can convert profit to beer!

Poor Quality Traffic is ok for Pay-Per-Click

No, no, no, no, no, It is a common misconception that if does not matter about the quality of your traffic if you are earning your money from pay-per-click campaigns as the user does not have too buy anything for you to earn. Remember that they still have to be interested in the subject of the ppc advert in order to click on it. For a long time with Super Proxy I struggled with PPC and earning from them, and more recently I have struggled with earning from AuctionAds. Although this is a slightly different point these failed because too small a proportion of the users were interested in the adverts content. This was not strictly quality of traffic but more a specific problem for Super proxy in that it attracts a very wide and varied user base who are all using the service for different things.

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)

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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 »]]> Affiliate Boot Camp is the first weekend Affiliate Marketing Conference to be held in the UK.

“An event not to be missed” – Jess Luthi, Affiliate Program Advice

The Affiliate Boot Camp is being held at the luxurious Ettington Chase Conference Centre, near Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire from Friday July 13th until Sunday July 15th 2007.

Conference registration fees include all education seminars, accommodation, meals and evening entertainment.

Delegates will also have full access to the leisure facilities at Ettington Chase, which include a spa, jacuzzi, steam room, gym, tennis courts, golf facilities, archery and clay pigeon shooting.

The packed seminar programme includes sessions on the following topics:

Understanding Affiliates and the Affiliate Marketing Space
Managing Affiliates and Pay Per Click
Optimising Affiliate Commissions and Incentivising Your Affiliates
The Agency Perspective
New Technologies
Top 10 Do’s and Don’ts of Managing an Affiliate Programme
Working with Incentive Sites

There will also be case studies from established merchants in the retail, travel and finance sectors.

The event is being supported by all of the top UK affilate networks including Affiliate Window, Deal Group Media, Online Media Group, Commission Junction, Tradedoubler, Buy.at and Affili.net.

Online marketing agency R.O.EYE and reward site rpoints are also playing a key part in the weekend proceedings.

There will be an opportunity to ‘Ask the Experts’ with a panel that reads like a who’s who of UK Affiliate Marketing, featuring well known affiliate marketing personalities including Keith Budden, Nicky Iapino, Matt Reid, Matt Bailey, Kevin Edwards, Zak Edwards, Pete Norwood and Richard Yendall.

The conference is also about fun – there will be a gala dinner on the Saturday evening with a guest speaker famous for his appearances in the hit BBC TV series ‘Allo Allo’.
After dinner on the Saturday there will be a table football competition, a snooker competition and a giant Jenga competition, with prizes for the champions.

Booking is open now and there is an early bird discount of £70 per person until 31st May 2007.