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Friday, May 28, 2010

Make Money with Affiliate Marketing: Get the Good Result

Many people turn into affiliate marketing and a lot of them have given testimonials that they have really earned from it in just a few months of marketing affiliate products. Others even earn a few hundreds daily. How is this possible? What steps are they taking and what kind of marketing strategies are they following in order to drive traffic to their landing pages?

Affiliate marketing certainly can make you money. But patience is necessary and a lot of works have to put in. However, once you have left your mark in the sites where you want to gain traffic from, it stays there for long period of time and people would keep on visiting that page and you would get free traffic and affiliate sales from time to time.

So, what are the ways the professional marketers are taking in order to market their affiliate products effectively? Marketing a product needs careful planning and concept development. There are many sites where we can post a link to our landing pages which rank higher in Google. Below are some of them and it’s up to you to fully utilize and use the opportunity.

Squidoo Pages - Professional affiliate marketers use Squidoo pages to write a review about their products and to post links to their landing pages. Squidoo ranks high in search engines and if you use the highly searched keywords in your product review, there are great chances that your Squidoo page will land in the first or second page of the search engine. Squidoo is a reliable and trusted site so reviews written in the lenses are mostly preferred by most buyers.

EzineArticles – this article directory site contains hundreds of reviews and related articles about the products being endorsed online. EzineArticles has a pagerank of 6 and it also ranks high in search engines. Internet marketers find it a reliable site to endorse their products online where they get positive results. Creating an article about the product you are endorsing and submitting it to EzineArticles is a great step in marketing your affiliate products. It is important that you make your article as informative as possible so it won’t come out that you are only marketing your product but readers would also find your article very useful. This kind of article generates clicks to your given link at your author page. Readers usually become curious to know more information from the homepage of the author of the article.

Blogging – creating your own blog and creating backlinks to it is also an effective strategy. Once you have created your blog and added articles to it, you can write a review about the product you are endorsing then adding a link in the middle or bottom part of the article to your landing page. You can then join social bookmarking sites, microblogging sites, forums, social networking sites and other sites where you can generate traffic to your blog. Once you have thousands of backlinks to your blog already plus if you use keywords which are highly searched and with very less competition, there are great chances that your blog will be found. The reviews you post in your blog will then be read by buyers and if you have good quality review, there are big chances that your product will be purchased.

Article Directories – aside from EzineArticles, there are thousands of article directories online. The process is similar to what you will do with your articles at EzineArticles. It is important to note also that the article or review you submit to these article directories are modified, that is, no duplicate content if possible as Google penalizes posts which are in duplication with the others that they will find online. It is best to submit your articles first to article directories with higher pagerank as they are found first than those articles from directories with lower pagerank.

Submit to Social Bookmarking Sites - social bookmarking sites are reliable and effective in driving traffic to our blogs. Once you submit your post to thousands of social bookmarking sites online, you are creating thousands of backlinks which increases your blog’s pagerank. This boosts your blogs traffic and gives it a greater chance to land high in search engines.

People who search products and product reviews usually search first in Google or other search engines before they purchase it. Once they find your review and go to the link being endorsed in your review, there are greater chances of getting a sale. Affiliate marketing is the best and fastest way to earn money online if only you are doing the right method and strategy of driving traffic to your landing pages. It is important also to write high quality reviews and information about your products. People do really buy an item once they are satisfied with the review they find about the product they want to buy. The above ways are some of what professional internet marketers are doing. It is up to you if you will try them out. If you research about the ways and steps on how to market your affiliate products, you will always read about Squidoo pages, EzineArticles and the other methods discussed above. It is up to you to give it a try. In the end, you would be thankful you did.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

5 Practical Tips for Generating Targeted Traffic to Your New Blog

You have been inspired by the successful bloggers who have made a nice living from blogging. You began to like the idea of blogging for cash and started to sign up for courses, blog RSS feeds and newsletters to learn about blogging. You followed the steps and finally got your first new blog launched on the Internet. You published a post daily. But after week, you found that only a few visitors have read your posts. You started to think about how to drive targeted traffic to your new blog.....

In this post you'll find several ways that you can use immediately to get targeted traffic.


Blog Commenting

Commenting on large traffic or popular blogs is any easy way to get some targeted traffic to your blog. I'm sure you have no problem finding the popular blogs in your niche. Take time to read about their posts and probably you'll learn something more which can help in your content creation. When you like to express your opinion, you can post your comments in. Most blog allows your name to link to your blog. So, your comment could potentially attract traffic when the visitors are reading your comment.


Participating in Forum Discussion

There are also popular forums in your niche as well. You could find the popular forums of your niche through Google search engine. These forums can be your quick sources of targeted traffic. Forums allow member to add link in their signature. So, you can make sure of the signature to get traffic.

The key to getting traffic from forums is participation. You should be active in discussions. Be helpful. When someone started a thread asking for help or advice, you may take the opportunity to post your reply with answers to their questions. You might also start your own threads to discuss about something interesting. This way you'll get good exposure in the forums and people who read your messages will see your signature link as well. Those who click your signature link will be directed immediately to your blog.


Pay Per Click Traffic

The advertising network like Google AdWords can generate quality targeted traffic for your blog. As far as I know, Google often offer $100 or $50 free advertising credit to 'first-time' advertisers. So if you haven't used AdWords before, think about signing up a new Google AdWords account to get the free advertising credit and start testing drive targeted traffic from AdWords. If you are happy with it , you might continue your campaign. Make sure you do some calculations to find out how much you can spend on AdWords every month.

However, if you advertising budget is tight, you can look for those cheaper ppc advertising networks. Bidvertiser can be a good option when it comes to buying cheap ppc traffic. The quality isn't as good as AdWords but traffic is still targeted.


Guest Posting

Quite a lot of blogs are accepting guest posts for publication these days. My blog MoneyMakerInfo.blogspot.com is one of them. You can write a few posts exclusively for the publication on the blogs that accept guest post. You'll include a few lines with your link in the author bio of your post for promoting your blog.

The good thing about guest posting is that your post will be display on the homepage which can potentially generate a good amount of traffic for the first 24 hours of publication. But guest post often needs to be quality and unique. So, make sure you take the time to do research to come up with some good quality posts so that your posts get accepted for publication.


Article Marketing

Article marketing works much the same with guest posting. You write articles and public on article directories. You are allowed to included your anchor text links in the author bio of your articles. The article doesn't have to be great quality to get accepted for publication. Informative articles with more than 400 words are ideal for publishing on article directories.

If you can write articles on daily basis, then article marketing could become your source of traffic as well. When you submit your articles, only look for large traffic article directories such as Ezinearticles.com, Article Dashboard, Isnare and etc. These are the article directories that can potentially generate consistent traffic. Try to submit at least one article daily. Keep this practice for a month and you'll targeted traffic coming from article directories then.


Press Release

Press release sites are great places to announce your new blog. While PRweb.com seems to be good press site to announce your new blog but it's quite expensive to publish a press release on the site. There are alternatives. In fact there are free press sites that you can publish your press release on. Go to Google and search the 'term' free list of press release sites and you get to know what press sites are free. Also if you run a contest on your blog, you can publish a press release on the press sites as well.

Press release in different than articles. If you haven't written press release before, you are advised to hire someone to create the press release for you because press release is in different format.

Once you see targeted traffic flow in to your blog consistently, it will be good idea to monetize those traffic. There are several ways to make money from your blog. You can use AdSense, sell ad space on your blog, promote affiliate products and etc. Make sure you do testing to find out what works best for your blog to generate income online.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

How to Increase Direct Ad Revenue for Your Blog

If you have been blogging for a while, you know that selling ad space directly to the advertisers on your blog can become one of the lucrative sources of revenue for you. When you have started selling ad space on your blog, you always want to sell off all the available ad space or ad spots on your blog to make the most out of direct ad selling. In this article, I'll be sharing with you the techniques that I have used to maximize my blog direct ad revenue. These have been good ways for me to maintain and increase my blog ad revenue. I hope you'll find them useful too:


Create an Advertising Page

An advertising page is basically a page that tells what ad space you are selling. It usually describes everything you are offering (text link, banner ad, sponsored review, etc) with price details included.

With an advertising page posted on your site, the visitors who are interested on placing an ad in your blog can find the advertising info they need immediately. This will potentially generate some fast sales for you.

Writing an advertising page isn't very difficult. The content of advertising page usually starts with an introduction, followed by the info of the ad options you are offering and lastly providing your ordering details and also your email address for the prospective advertisers in case they need to contact you to get more advertising info.

You might want to see example of advertising page before writing one fir your blog, you could take a look at my advertising page at:

If you need more examples, you can visit other blogs that have an advertising page posted. By looking at other blogs' advertising page, you'll get an idea of how to write your own advertising page.

The important information you must include into your page are the introduction, your blog traffic stat or other stats, (e.g. Google ranking, Alexa ranking, etc), The ad options you are selling with price details included and details of how to order an ad spot on your blog.


Set the Right Price

It's important that you are charging reasonable prices for the ad spaces you are offering for sale. This is not just to appeal your prospective advertisers to advertise on your blog but also to keep them as your long term advertisers which will ensure steady ad revenue for you.

It seems to be easy task to set the prices for the different ad spaces you are offering. The assumption is that the banner ad on highest position such as banner ad on the header of your blog should be charged at a highest price and ads on the lower location such as at the sidebar should sell at a lower price because ad on higher positions will generate more traffic for advertisers. Well, this isn't always right.

An effective way that can help you set the right price for each ad space you sell on your blog is by putting up your own affiliate ads (Clickbank, CJ, etc) on the ad spaces of your blog to test the click-through rate and traffic before opening those ad spaces for sale. The testing period doesn't have to be long; just one week is good enough.

Once you have tested each ad space, you would know the average daily clicks of each of your affiliate ads that placed on the different ad spaces on your blog and so you can set the price accordingly. Let says your 125 x 125 banner ad which places on the top right sidebar of your blog get an average daily unique clicks of 10. This means the advertiser who places a 125x125 banner ad on your blog is estimated to get 300 unique visitors (10 x 30) monthly. So you can decide what is the reasonable charge for a banner ad that generates 300 unique visitors for the advertiser each month.

If you think each unique visitor that you direct to your advertiser should cost $0.30, then the price for a 125 x 125 banner ad on your blog will be $90 per month (300 x $0.30). $90 for 300 unique visitors every month, seems reasonable enough right. But you certainly can charge more if you are in a highly profitable niches such as Forex, debt consolidation and etc.

By setting your price based on the traffic level, you can also avoid over-charging for different ad space on your blog. For instance, a 468 x 60 banner ad on the header of your blog seems to be expensive than a 125 x 125 banner ad at the top right sidebar because the 468x60 banner ad is located at a higher position. However, when you test the traffic level, you might find that the 125x125 banner ad is actually attracting more traffic than the 468x60 banner ad. So, the 125x125 banner ad was supposed to be expensive than the 468 banner ad.


Post Testimonials on Your Advertising Page


You know the Internet users like to find supporting information about the product or service they're interested before really buying it. It's no different when it comes to buying ad spaces on blogs. The real testimonials from your previous satisfied advertisers are much like supporting information which will convince your potential advertisers to order an ad spot on your blog.

Testimonials often are short and sharing the real positive advertising experience on your blog. These are certainly powerful supporting information that can convince your potential advertisers.

So how you can get real testimonials from the advertisers?

If your blog has generated a couple of sales for some of your advertisers running an ad campaign on your blog, they are the happy advertisers willing to give you a testimonial if you ask for one. The satisfied advertiser may occasionally contact you to tell you that they are happy with the result from the ad campaign they run on your blog. You may reply the advertiser and invite him/her to publish a testimonial on your blog advertising page. You will include the advertiser's name, photo if possible and the advertiser's website link. The advertiser will certainly be happy to send you back an testimonial because they can include a link in the their testimonial.

Another way is to send a thank you email to the advertisers who have advertised one month on your blog and decided to renew their ad campaign on your blog. These are probably satisfied advertisers as well. Your email will thank them for renewing their ad on your blog and invite them to publish a testimonial on your blog. Tell the advertisers you'll be including their website link in the testimonial. You might then get one or two replies from them with a testimonial for you to publish on your blog.


Provide Helpful Customer Service


The prospective advertisers can be your paying customers. Many advertisers often like to ask questions before they place an order. So, make sure you read their questions and give the answers that they are looking for.

Also advertisers often like to test the click-through and conversion rates. This is to find out the performance of their ads. When they aren't satisfied with the result, they'll request for ad changes. Thus, you should allow ad changes on anytime. This way the advertisers can test different ads and landing pages to get the performance that they expect. When the advertisers are freely to request changes, they will probably renew their ads. This will secure your ad revenue.

Moreover, you might think about running discount campaign from time to time. It's helpful to boost up your ad sales. Also offering something like one week trial or two week trial could also push the advertisers to order ad space from you.

The above are the techniques that I have applied to maintain and boost up and blog revenue. Hope these techniques will work on you as well.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

How to Find Focus for Your Online Business

It requires time and effort to create an online income. You cannot expect to get anywhere if you just bounce from one idea to another. The only way to really accomplish success with an online business is to understand that it will require focus. If you are having trouble concentrating on one idea at a time you can consider these concepts:

It’s important to choose a business that you enjoy

There are many people that will tell you that online businesses don’t succeed. But there are also many who will tell you that they do succeed. Which of these groups should you listen to? You should actually listen to both. It is true that some types of online business will work for some but not for others. Each online business requires a different approach and different techniques. Never choose a business that requires you to perform a task that you do not like to complete. For instance if you dislike writing it doesn’t make sense to choose eBook creation as your prime source of income. Always take negative comments with a grain of salt and choose the business model that is right for you. Choose a business that is based on your interests and stick with it. It has to be something that you are willing to build long-term. This step alone will allow you to take your business far.

Choose someone who is successful and learn from them

There are gurus in every possible business field. Most of them swear that their way is the right way. The truth is that everyone does things a little bit differently. If you listen to everybody you will get confused quickly. Choose a successful person and learn from them. You will find that your business will run smoother and you will be much happier.

You have to actually work at online success

It is quite common for web masters and business starters to create a plan to create a successful online business. Too often these businesses fail when the actual plan is not executed completely. They may decide on several different strategies for several different models but then choose to nap, read a book, or watch TV instead. Don’t allow yourself to do this. Once you decide on an online business stick with it and follow through with all of your plans to reach your goals. Force yourself to do whatever it takes and you will achieve real results.

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