SEO, AFFILIATE AND INTERNET MARKETING

It’s true “most people don’t want to work” is a universal truth. So, if you don’t want to work, why are you selling yourself into slavery for relatively low pay? You might as well get the most out of something that you dislike doing. I’ve never seen any clerk who is happy where he/she is. They usually complain about low salaries and too much work. If you’re getting paid to work (something you don’t want to do) doesn’t it make sense to aim for something higher?

There are plenty of opportunities for making money in the internet. You can do this for something on the side, or, you can make it your full time job. It just depends on how much time you want to commit to earning money in a rather easy manner. As for myself, why am I writing this article for relatively low pay? Well the dollar has a pretty high value from where I am sitting. If I worked in an office, I wouldn’t be earning as much I am now.

The point is that you need to maximize your earning potential. If you happen to be in a country like mine whose local currency is struggling against the dollar, then doing this writing job will earn you more than you normally would in day at the office. As far as potential earnings in the internet is concerned, there are plenty of avenues and opportunities to choose from.

The first opportunity with the most potential for earning big bucks is by turning yourself into internet salespersons. Unlike salespeople of the physical world, you don’t have to go around the city commuting, sweating, huffing, puffing and talking your throat sore. All you need to do is to choose a form of internet marketing that you think you can be good at. Once you do make your choice, exhaust all the possibilities until you get very positive results. Nothing good comes out of something half-baked.

A fast way to earn a commission is by affiliating yourself with major vendor sites. You sign for their program and they will give you instructions to set up an affiliate account. Basically, you promote the vendor site and their products in your own website or in articles that you write and submit to ezines. You will need to place links into your website or ezine article that will lead to the site or product you are promoting.

If you decide to go into affiliate marketing, you will also need to learn how to compose search engine optimized (SEO) articles. The web is teeming with instructions on SEO composition. These articles will help you with search engine results.

They will contain keywords that the search engine will identify and index according to its relevance to the searcher’s query and your article.

Then, there are the make fast money programs which you have to pay for before you can join. (`nuff said)

By the way, don’t be fooled by those paid to read email advertisements. One does pay you to just read but it sends an average of one email a day and gives out 2 cents. Other similar programs require you to accept offers or deals from the sites that they advertise before they give out cash.

Making good money in the internet can be easy. But if you really want good money, I suggest you try the different affiliate programs of major vendor sites in the internet. Remember its good money so you will have to spend time to make your program a success. Once you have it set-up, you can ask for your retirement or separation pay.

The majority of the world’s working population perform their jobs in offices and most of the world’s working population do not like their jobs because, well, who wants to work? So, if you don’t like to work but have to work anyway, why stick yourself into a job with low pay? The best solution would be to find a high-paying job, work hard and then start your own business if you can. The problem is, even with a high paying job, you can’t earn enough money to start a business.

The World Wide Web, being an economy in itself, offers a variety of opportunities for making money. You can try your hand at freelance jobs like data encoding, medical transcription, article composition and programming. There are a number of freelancer websites that you can join so you may work at home and put some extra money in your pocket. Start-up capital = $0

There are supposedly expert moneymakers who, for a small fee of $100 to $200 will teach you how to earn $2,000 to $10,000 a month. You can try out their system for free, but, you will have to place a deposit to be able to get the free trial.

Start-up capital = $49 to $100 depending on deposit requirements.

Finally, you can be a passive internet salesperson. I call it passive because all you have to do is establish a base of operations in the internet. Once that base has been established, you have the potential to earn from $0 to unlimited income.

All you have to do afterwards is maintain or update that base once every three months. And yes, this advice is free. No trial offers, and no deposits required. Read on please.

Vendor sites like Amazon offer internet surfers the opportunity of earning additional income in exchange for the promotion of their website and products. This is how it works. You will need to sign-up for affiliate membership. Most vendor sites that offer affiliate programs do not charge you for this. This is only fair since you will be selling them to people. Be wary of vendor sites that charge fees for membership to their affiliate programs.

Once you join-up, they will give you a reference number or an ID number that you will paste into your html scripts. Your vendor site will give you instructions on how to paste them.

Normally, an affiliate will have to have a website where they can promote the vendor site. You will promote the vendor site by adding links to the site’s home page and some specific products which you think will sell more. You will need to design your website to accommodate these links as well as alter some of your websites graphics to make way for banners, or picture links. Don’t forget to add the ID or reference number to the link so that the vendor can identify your referral.

Once you have the links in place, you will need to write some 250+ words about the product you are selling. I recommend allotting 1 web page per product as this will help you in search engine result rankings. The content you write will have to be relevant and filled with keywords that pertain to the product itself. Once everything is done, you need to find out if your website shows up in search engine queries when browsing for your product.

If you think this is too much work, you can try writing newsletters about a product on a vendor site that contains links to the product. You then post the newsletter on the internet and hope that a search engine indexes it.

Mind you, this isn’t a get rich quick scheme. Times are hard and we need all the financial assistance we can get. This is just one option where you can possibly earn a lot more than your current income.

The problem with most affiliates is that they don’t last long because they fail to maintain and update their product links.

Some of the products that you have linked to before may have already been discontinued. You need to check on your links at least once every 3 months or once a month at optimum. Finally, don’t be content with what you have. Look for additional products to sell.

Don Resh is CEO of WebForce, Inc. For more on Affiliate Marketing see: Affiliate Software Tools.

It is amazing to think how popular affiliate programs have become in recent years. Today nearly every ecommerce website has an affiliate program.

Although it is normally very quick and easy to join an affiliate program for free, you can save yourself a lot of time and money in the long-term by making sure that you start of with the right company.

I normally always base my decision on joining an affiliate program on the following 10 factors:

1. Product (or Service) - Must be a high quality product that is useful and can help people. You must be able to create a need for the product, at least in your own mind.

2. Company - You should have a positive feeling about the company. If something bothers you then rather walk away.

3. Price - The more affordable the price the more products will be sold through your referrals / promotions. Remember that the cheaper the price the larger your target market will be. Do not waste your time promoting a product that costs thousands of dollars. Rather focus on products that retail for between $10 and $500. That is where the money is.

4. Commission - I would never agree to promote a product or service for under 20% in commission. There are many companies out there with great products and systems that will pay their affiliates 30% and even up to 50% commission. Why settle for 10% when you can earn 50%. Chances are the amount of time you need to put in will be the same.

5. Training and Tools - All good companies will offer their affiliates free training programs on how they can make more money with the program. They will also offer free tools such as banners that the affiliate can put on his own website or they will give the affiliate his own affiliate website. The better the training and tools you receive the better the company.

6. Support - You often need to make quick decisions or revert back to a potential client as soon as possible with an answer to his question. In order to succeed you need great support. You should be able to contact the company any time of the day or night by phone, online messaging or e-mail and get a reply back without delay. A company that does not take the time to reply to my enquiry within at least 24 hours is a company I would rather not work with.

7. No obligation to purchase - You should never have to buy a product before you can become an affiliate. Don’t get me wrong, it makes a lot of sense to buy and use the product yourself before recommending it to others but I have never come across a good program that insists its members must buy the product first. I do suggest you seriously consider buying the product once you have checked out the affiliate program as well as the training and support you will receive and made up your mind that you really want to participate.

8. Earnings visibility - Don’t waste your time with a company that cannot offer you the online tools of monitoring your referrals and commissions. It should be totally automated and accessible with the click of a button 24 hours a day.

9. Protecting affiliates earnings - Any good company should do their best to look after the financial wellbeing of affiliates and this means ensuring that affiliates receive credit and by implication commission on all referrals that result in sales. As an affiliate you will normally receive a special affiliate code when you join the affiliate program. Lets assume the company’s website address is www.abc.com and your affiliate code is 123. You will normally receive your own url to refer people to. In this case the url can be www.abc.com/123. Problem is that some people will think you are a middleman and that by excluding you they will get a better price (which is generally not the case). They will recognize your affiliate code as 123. They may use your url to visit the site but will often try to
sign up by re-typing the url without your code. Many companies protect their affiliates from this practise by having systems in place that will recognize the IP address of a computer and associate it with your affiliate code. Even if the potential customer visits their website weeks afterwards it will still
credit you with any sale that takes place. The time period varies but most good companies will protect the income of their affiliates for between 6 months and even 3 years from being “stolen” by other individuals.

10. Payment - In the end you have to be physically paid. Chances are that 10 companies will have 10 different ways of paying affiliates. It is normal that companies will only pay commission once the amount reaches a certain minimum. Remember that processing commissions cost money and it does not make sense to, for example, make a wire transfer for a commission of only $1. Make sure you fully understand how and when commissions are paid before you start promoting the program. Most companies will not change the way in which they pay commissions only to make you happy.

You may want to add additional factors to personalize exactly what you are looking for in an affiliate program. Do not compromise on your criteria. The old saying that goes: “There is a lot of fish in the sea”, also applies to affiliate programs. By taking your time and being patient you will find program(s) that will help you to become a money maker and grow your own home based business.

Francois du Toit is the owner of http://www.money-maker-advice.com, a website designed to help new entrepreneurs succeed by offering free advice, help and guidance on how to become a successful money maker with the right business opportunity or opportunities while working from the comfort of your own home. Visit http://www.money-maker-advice.com to subscribe to the FREE Newsletter and receive a FREE copy of The Affiliate Masters Course, and 10 Powerful Secrets to Make Money with Adsense in 2007.

So you think you understand the power of free content and articles? Then how come your traffic is still so pitifully low? The truth is that people who truly understand the power of free content know that a single article can open the floodgates of traffic to their sites.

An article written to promote your online business will essentially be based on an idea. If your idea excites the people who read it, they will tend to react in the following way;

a) Get interested
b) Then excited
c) Will then visit your site seeking more information
d) Still excited, they will click on the Adsense ads on your site like crazy seeking even more information. “I’m on to something here,” they’ll say to themselves.
e) Others will be unable to contain themselves anymore and will immediately order whatever it is that you sell online.

Ideas are very powerful things and the ideas you choose to use in your promotional articles are the real key to success or failure for your site. Ideas are so powerful, that a single idea in a single article you do distributed as free content can lift up the traffic of a site from single digit figures to five digits or more. That is from between 1-9 unique visitors a day to 10,000-99,000 a day.

I know everybody talks about having lots of content and pages and pages of it, to make an impact with search engines. This is true. But it is also true that the World Wide Web is full of sites with plenty of content that nobody reads. Maybe your site or blog falls under this category so you can vouch for this statement of truth.

So why not change your focus today and start creating one article at a time whose objective is to lift up your traffic to between 10,000 and 99,000 hits a day. Chances are that none of your articles will ever reach that goal, however as you keep on trying, you are bound to get articles that make a huge difference to your traffic.

Remember that the secret is basing each article you do on an idea that excites your prospects. The kind of free content that will get people linking to you like crazy and the hit counters turning like some slot machine in Vegas.

Get 3 or 4 traffic-generating articles written for you by a gifted traffic generating content provider. Or alternatively get a cash generating blog created for you.

The most common and the biggest challenge that affiliate marketers have to encounter is get potential traffic. Your income depends on the number of traffic and the number of time they make visits to your website. It is really very difficult to get traffic for your websites when there are so many sites out there struggling for the same. There are many ways to build traffic on your website provided that you do the role of a customer and give thought to their needs and requirements from your websites and at the same time you as a marketer give thoughts to your services that you are going to provide the customers so that they visit your sites several times. Obviously your services should cater their needs.

Prior to services you as an affiliate marketer should keep in mind that people run after the brand name and so whenever you make a site make it memorable and branded with targeted information that directly hits the potential customers. Affiliates getting a high traffic flow have branded themselves and established trust in their sales area by sending out informational newsletters, information reports, ebooks, or any other type of regular contact they can think of that will convey information the customer wants and keep reminding them about the products.

To make your job faster and easier you can set up an auto responder to your website. Auto responder will help you to keep track of all transaction and getting the information out to the customers. You can also keep their attention and establish your trustworthiness by sending them items in between. Everyone uses search engines, because it helps the traffic to get their required information from the sea of knowledge in less time so let that concept work for you to bring you interested seekers that may very well become frequenters. For that make sure that your site is search engine optimized. Get the appropriate keywords and keyword on every page of your site, which will help the search engine to drive traffic to your site.

Always remember that a site without a blog will not be of great help. Blog is such a place where you can review the products you are selling, talk about the industry that the products pertain to and other information related to different fields. The content should be interesting so that people get hooked up and is persuaded to visit your site several times.

More and More people are lured into affiliate marketing and you might be one of them. Indeed, affiliate marketing is one of the most effective means of generating a full-time income through the Internet. It’s a fair deal between the merchandiser and his affiliates as both benefit from each sale materialized.

Like in other kinds of business, a great deal of the profits in affiliate marketing depends on the affiliate’s advertising, promoting and selling strategies. Everyday, as affiliate marketing industry expands, competition heightens as well so an affiliate marketer must be creative enough to employ unique and effective ways to convince potential buyers to purchase or avail of the products and services offered.

Compared to traditional advertising practices, affiliate programs are more effective, risk-free and cost-efficient. But why do many people still fail in affiliate marketing? There are a lot of reasons and a lot of areas in the program to look into.

The most critical aspect in the affiliate program is advertising. Many affiliate marketers fail in this aspect because they lack hard work, which is the most important thing in affiliate marketing and in all other kinds of business as well. Although it pays to be lucky, you cannot merely rely on it.

Affiliate marketing isn’t as simple as directing customers to the business site. If you want to earn big, of course, you have to invest time and great amount of hard work in promoting the products. As earlier mentioned, the competition is very high and customers nowadays are very wise, too. After all, who doesn’t want to get the best purchase that is, to pay less and get more in terms of quantity and quality.

Lack of preparation is also a reason why one fails in affiliate marketing, whether he is a merchandiser or an affiliate. Part of the preparation is researching. On the part of the merchant, he has to be highly selective in choosing the right affiliate websites for his affiliate program. In order to be sure he has the best choices, he must have exhausted his means in looking for highly interested affiliates whose sites are sure fit to his products and services.

The affiliate site’s visitors must match his targeted customers. On the other hand, the affiliate marketer must likewise research on the good-paying merchandisers before he signs up for an affiliate program. He must ensure that the merchants products and services match his interests so he can give his full attention and dedication to the program. He can get valuable information by joining affiliate forums, comparing different affiliate programs and reading articles on affiliate marketing where he can get tips from experienced affiliate marketers on how to choose the best merchants and products with high conversion rate.

The website is a very important tool in the whole affiliate program. As an affiliate marketer, you should plan how your site is going to be, from domain name to the design, the lay-out, the content, and ads. Some users are particular about what they see at first glance and thus when they find your site ugly, they won’t read through the content even if your site has many things to say and offer. On the other hand, there those who want information more than anything else.

Affiliate marketers with rich-content web sites are usually the ones who prosper in this business because the content improves traffic to the site. Websites with high quality contents with relevant keywords and more importantly, right information about the product and not empty hyped-up advertisements allow you to earn big in affiliate marketing even when you’re asleep. If you won’t be able to sustain the interest of your site visitor, you won’t be able to lead him to the merchants site. No click-through means no sale and thus, no income on your part.

Selecting a top level domain name is also crucial to the success of the affiliate program. Lots of affiliate sites don’t appear in the search engine results because they are deemed by affiliate managers as personal sites. Major search engines and directories would think of your site as transient ones and thus, they won’t list it in the directory. Before you decide on the domain name, know first what you are going to promote. Many fail because their sites are not appropriately named, so even when they feature the exact products the customer is looking for, the customer might think the site is not relevant and thus, won’t enter the site.

Above all, an affiliate marketer must be willing to learn more. Certainly, there are still a lot of things to learn and so an affiliate marketer must continue to educate himself so he can improve his marketing strategies. Many fail because they don’t grow in the business and they are merely concerned about earning big quickly. If you want long-term and highly satisfactory results, take time to learn the ins and outs of the business. Continue to improve your knowledge especially with the basics in affiliate marketing ranging from advertising to programming, web page development, and search engine optimization techniques. Likewise, study the needs and wants of your site users and how different merchandisers compete with each other.

Keep on trying; don’t get disappointed if your first attempts did not pay off. Thousands are attracted by the possibility of generating skyrocketing incomes through affiliate marketing and so they sign up in any affiliate program without carefully understanding every aspect of the business. When they don’t get instant results, they quit and sign up for another program and repeat the process of just copying links and referring them to others. When you sign up for an affiliate program, don’t expect to get rich in an instant. Work on your advertising strategies and be patient. You’ll never know how much you can get if you don’t persevere.

Author of this article is Johanna Piittala. Johnatan recommends Click Here FREE Info Click Here Superb Course