How To Make Money With Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs can either be a way to put a little extra cash in your pocket or, hopefully, become a full time job. However, it's not like you can put up a bunch of affiliate links and expect to start making a mint. If you want to make a full time job's worth of money off affiliate marketing, you have to work at it full time. The great thing about affiliate marketing is that it works 24/7—but this doesn't mean you should also put in several hours a day of your own time.

The affiliate marketers who have had the most outstanding success are normally those who have more than one site working at once. It's much harder to make a decent amount of money if you have one affiliate site at a time. Experienced affiliate marketers will have a number of different sites running at once, all with different types of affiliate links. What this means is that each affiliate site will need separate SEO: new content in the form of blogs, forums, articles, and other techniques.

A key to a successful affiliate marketing program is to make the affiliate site a useful resource. Just posting a bunch of links is not going to impress many web surfers. They'll leave and likely never come back. The trick to any web business is to keep people on site—this is true for the affiliate partner and it's true for affiliate marketers. An affiliate site shouldn't necessarily scream, "affiliate site." Instead, it can be a trusted resource on a particular topic.

Useful content is the best way to make this possible. Take a site that has a number of links to sports-related businesses (apparel, equipment, tickets, books, etc.). The affiliate marketer can then set up a forum that talks about different sports teams, strategy, and so on—potentially, this forum could bring in sports fans from across the country. Blogging is another great medium for affiliate marketing. On the same site, the blogger could write reviews of new equipment or write in depth trade talk about a variety of sports. These are just a few ideas but they show how affiliate marketing can—and should—be a serious, long-term proposition.

What it comes down to is that affiliate marketing is no different than running the host site. Both are about running a business, even if an affiliate marketer has no direct product or service to sell. An affiliate marketer should set up a site that is useful and informative—a destination that people will come back to again and again. In some cases, an affiliate site might even be more informative than the partner's website.

Only until these issues are covered can an affiliate marketer hope to make a good amount of money with affiliate marketing. Sure, you could put up links and hope for the best, but you should think about investing some time into the site if you really hope to turn a respectable profit.

Top Resources For Affiliate Marketers

Top Resources For Affiliate Marketers

By and large, the top resources for affiliate marketers aren't so different than the resources for standard businesses. Of course, affiliate marketers have some unique concerns: payment scale,
new affiliate opportunities, where to place links, etc. But affiliate marketers are the most successful when they don't think of their sites as "dummy" sites, but full-fledged business opportunities. Another way of stating this is an affiliate marketing business and the host business are one and the same.

For both affiliates and marketers, one of the most important tools available is the site meter. Affiliate marketers should check in and out clicks. In-clicks will tell you what searches are being used the most often. You could then write some additional targeted content around this search term to bring in even more web surfers. Out-clicks are just as important. Out-clicks will show you which pages are the least popular. You will want to write some new content and/or redesign the page to help with a page's popularity.

The key to any web business is driving traffic. This traffic needs to be monitored to determine where the site has been most effective. Remember, anything can be improved. Even if you're very satisfied with the amount of traffic you're getting, there are still thousands of web surfers out there who have never heard of your site. Improved content, site functionality, and useful affiliates can all drive repeated traffic to your site.

A website should never be static. You should never just design a site, leave it alone, and hope for the best. It should be monitored and improved—possibly even on a daily basis. Blogging has been an important and highly succesful addition to the affiliate marketing industry. Every day, affiliate marketers can write new content aimed at drawing in a different demographic, or expanding the customer base of a current demographic. Forum software is another good tool for keeping people on site and interested in the site's contents. Both forums and blogs are good for bringing in new registration. An affiliate marketer should keep track of past browsers just like a standard business. Lead generation and organization are important for marketers as well.

Affiliate forums are some of the best places to find information on new affiliates. Certainly, there is stiff competition between affiliates, but there's also a willingness to help each other out. If an affiliate has a particularly bad reputation, you can get the lowdown in the forums. At affiliate forums, you can also find web design tips, read about past successes, and basically start to get a foothold in the industry. As link popularity is enormously important for search engine rankings, you can begin link-partner relationships in forums as well.

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How To Become An Affiliate

How To Become An Affiliate

Becoming an affiliate is one of the easiest business propositions out there, which is why it is so quickly gaining in popularity. Businesses want to have as many affiliate marketers working for them as possible, after all, it's really just a form of free advertising. For this reasons, businesses make it very easy to sign up for an affiliate program. Find a program, sign up for free, and just like that you're an affiliate.

The most important part of affiliate marketing boils down to one word: relevancy. In order to be a successful affiliate, you need to choose partnership programs that correspond to the nature of your affiliate site. So if you are running a travel affiliate site, link to affiliate sites for airfare, travel packages, clothing, and other relevant sites. Linking to a pet product affiliate doesn't make so much sense.

This is core to why experienced affiliate marketers will have a stable of sites. They'll have their travel hub, pet hub, book hub, and so on. Some affiliate marketing links will cross over, for instance, everyone needs credit cards and even airfare deals could find a home on a pet site. The basic rule of thumb is that affiliate links should be on topic.

If you're just starting out, one method to starting an affiliate site is to thumb through affiliate marketing directories and see what affiliate marketing programs interest you: do they offer a good product, do they have good terms, do they have a good rating? You could then design your website around a particular type of product based on the affiliate program you have found in an affiliate directory. If you already have a running website, check directories for new affiliate marketing programs that correspond to the site.

At times, less is more. There are literally hundreds of affiliate deals out there with good terms and a good product. Don't just cram hundreds of links onto one page. Your affiliate links should be easy to read and access, and they should be organic: they should appear to be a part of the site, rather than an obvious moneymaking opportunity. The more relevant these affiliate sites are to the main theme of the site, the more likely it is web surfers will click on the link and make a purchase.

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Difference Between An Affiliate and a Super Affiliate

Difference Between An Affiliate & Super Affiliate

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Super Affiliate! Corny, but "super affiliate" is the new buzzword for affiliates who are both ambitious and successful at affiliate marketing. There are wild claims online about affiliate marketing: Make Millions Overnight! Never Work Again! Unfortunately, these claims are usually false. To go from being a plain affiliate to super affiliate takes a lot of work. In short, you need to be an affiliate of steel.


The vast majority of affiliate marketing sites online are run by people who have no great interest in turning a huge profit. For example, you'll find thousands of blogs where people put up a few Amazon listings and/or Google links on the off chance that a passing browser will click on them. That's all well and good, but this is no way to make a dent in the affiliate marketing game. To be a super affiliate, you need to treat affiliate marketing as a job, not just something that you do on the side to put a couple of bucks in your pocket.

There is a misconception that affiliate marketing is not a real business. After all, the affiliate is not putting out a product. This is patently false. Even though an affiliate marketer is not manufacturing a product, he or she is still offering the product up for sale. An affiliate marketer still needs to be in charge of search engine optimization, custom content, quality web design, financial management, and everything else that goes into running a successful e-business. As with any business, an affiliate marketing plan is only as strong as the amount of work you put into it.

A super affiliate will be able to turn as hefty a profit as a standard business—several sales a day on a number of different fronts. Remember, successful affiliate marketers don't necessarily stop at one site. They set up a variety of affiliate sites with a good web address, quality web design, and lucrative affiliate marketing opportunities. Additionally, once you start selling at an accelerated rate, some affiliate programs will promote you from regular affiliate to super affiliate. If you start sending sales and traffic to a business, they will reward you with better terms.

This isn't an easy proposition, but it is possible. Make sure that an affiliate program has a corresponding super affiliate program in place—better terms for more sales. Even if they don't, an affiliate with good terms up front can really pay off if you're able to make a several sales a month. Affiliate programs with great terms are also sometimes referred to as super affiliates. Find these and you know you'll have a good marketing in place at the start.

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Importance And Benefits Of Link Popularity

Importance And Benefits Of Link Popularity

Everyone likes to be popular. In a way, the web is just like one big popularity contest. It wasn't fair in high school, and it might not seem so fair now. You can have the best-designed, most informative site online, but if no one links to you, you're going to have a harder time getting a high search engine ranking. Ranking high with search engines relies on two things: content and link popularity.

Of course, if you have the most informative site online, your job is half done. One of the keys to bringing in new links is having a well-designed site. If you go after link exchanges and your site looks like it belongs in the last decade, you're going to be hard-pressed to find any takers. People don't have all the room in the world to add links on their site. You need to provide a site that is worth linking to. On the flipside, you should find link partners with quality sites of their own.

Link popularity is not just about quantity, but quality. Certainly, it is a good idea to have a great number of links coming in, but search engine spiders also take into account the quality of those links: i.e. how many sites link to the site that links to you. Spiders hold a premium on sites that link to you without a corresponding reciprocal link. When search engine spiders surf your site, they're looking for the type of content that you have on your site and the number of links going both in and out.

An easy way to start building link popularity is to add your site to a number of directories. These directories may or may not require a reciprocal link. The higher the quality of the directory, the more the directory listing will be worth. Really, you should spend a good amount of time adding your site to as many directories as possible. Look for other immediate avenues for link building as well—post in forums, on blogs, or create a blog of your own. All of these will be indexed by search engines, which will help increase your ranking.

One of the major advantages of having a blog is you have one more place to add a link to your site. In addition, you have one more place where you can trade links—contact other bloggers in a similar field and trade links. You should not only be looking to increase link popularity for the host site, but for blogs and other sub-sites as well.

It is absolutely imperative that your site is useful. The more content you provide, the more you can get a foothold in your industry. When you write new content, promote it: Digg.com the article and add the article to directories and other sources. Websites can then potentially place the article on their sites, linking to the site where the article originated. A link doesn't necessarily have to be permanent—a temporary link to an article can help search engine ranking as well.

What this all means is that link popularity is an evolving process. You should always be corresponding with site owners looking for a link trade. And you should be frequently providing new content to ensure that your site is worth the link.

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The Essentials Of Keyword Planning

The Essentials Of Keyword Planning

Remember the web in the old days? You could cram in a bunch of keywords at the bottom of the page regardless of grammar, and pretty much devoid of any aesthetic sense, and search engines ate it up. It's probably a good thing those days are over because websites have become a lot more professional. That still doesn't mean that people are using keywords to the best of their advantage. In fact, because it is much harder to write keyword-targeted content, many site owners avoid the issue.

This is good news for anyone looking to improve their page ranking. The market is wide open for people who use an effective keyword strategy. The main issues are both quality and quantity. A few pages of keyword-driven content just aren't going to do it anymore. If you're really looking to improve your search engine ranking, and ultimately improve your sales, you have to provide dozens of pages of content.

To do so, you need to first research keyword strategies employed by competing businesses. Type in the most obvious keyword for your industry. What comes out in the top ten? What have those sites done to achieve that ranking? Keyword planning tools will tell you the popularity of certain keywords, but you should do some brainstorming on your own. Try and think every possible permutation of a possible search, including misspellings—even for easy-to-spell words.

Each search engine will provide keyword planning tools, potentially for a fee—you can check the keyword relevancy in Google, Overture, Yahoo, and others. It's not a bad idea to check how keyword popularity compares in different search engines. You should be looking at potentially a hundred or more keywords—though this can vary according to the site. If a site sells a variety of different products, or provides different services, you're going to be able to multiply that keyword list.

Each keyword list should be tailored to a specific demographic. Once you have the keyword list together, it is time to optimize content so that the site provides relevant content surrounding that list of keywords. The most important part of content optimization is the title. What this means is you should title the article with a specific keyword in mind—the HTML link for the article is vital for page rank. This keyword should then be repeated in the article—but not so much that the text becomes unnatural or, worse, unreadable.

If that's the case, you could risk the site being banned by search engines outright. In addition to keyword popularity tools, you should also use keyword density tools for your site's content. If the keyword density is too high, the site could be red-flagged as offering unnatural, inorganic content. All of these issues are core to keyword planning.

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Five Reasons Your Company Needs A Solid SEO Plan

Five Reasons Your Company Needs A Solid SEO Plan

Five Reasons Your Company Needs A Solid SEO Plan

Here's the major reason that your company needs a solid SEO plan: profitability. Search Engine Optimization is just another way of marketing. If you don't market a product, you can't expect name recognition or sales to come pouring in. Most people surfing online go to search engines to find information or new products. Without a decent search engine ranking, your site, and products, will be passed over time and again.

There are five core reasons that SEO is important, all of which can help a business's profit margin. Let's begin with what is the basis of SEO marketing: content. The idea of providing unique content is so that the site becomes a trusted resource on a set of topics. So how does content help profitability?

First is search engine ranking. Search engine spiders love content. If the content matches the HTML title tag, an important optimization technique, and the content contains common keywords plugged into a search engine, there will be more opportunities for the site to land in the top listings of search results. Providing quality, targeted content will draw in potential customers looking specifically for what you have to offer.

Driving traffic has a two-fold purpose. Not only does a content-rich site help search engine results, but the content will leave a lasting impression on visitors. Imagine a site that's in the top three results that provides no useful information. Traffic can be useless if the site doesn't have some sticking power. Web surfers will come back to the site time and again. SEO will lead to both new and repeat visitors. Inspiring repeat visitors is reason number two for a solid SEO plan.

An offshoot of this is number three: referrals. The more content-rich your site, the more you'll be able to get referrals. Web surfer one goes to a site and finds useful information, he then refers web surfer two—it's a type of traffic that works independently of search engines, the basis of viral marketing. Part of SEO is providing an easy way for people to refer other web surfers, possibly with a reward system.

Fourth is linkbait. Again, this has two purposes. Quality content can lead to other sites linking to the original article. This will both drive traffic from the linking site, as well as help elevate search engine ranking. Search engine spiders love relevant links.

The final way SEO is useful is general: it improves the site. A website is a form of advertising--it represents the company. A site should be feature-rich and informative in order to increase brand recognition and ensure repeat visitors. Too often, website owners are caught up in how to "fool" search engine spiders. You might fool a spider, but you'll rarely fool an actual web surfer. SEO should be about providing a content-heavy site that will become a trusted resource in your industry.

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Why Affiliate Marketing Is So Important

Why Affiliate Marketing Is So Important

Why Affiliate Marketing Is So Important

Much of the information you'll find online is aimed at affiliate marketers: Make millions online! While many of these claims are overblown, they also get the attention of small and medium-sized businesses that also want to cash in on the affiliate marketing gold rush. Becoming an affiliate is as lucrative a proposition as becoming an affiliate marketer. For this reason, you'll see new affiliate opportunities arising each and every day.

Look at what a business is getting if it starts an affiliate program: free advertising. That's the simplest way to put it. The marketer signs up with the business and agrees to put a link on a website. The business only has to pay for this service if a sale is made—normally for a reasonable commission. As this is a sale that wouldn't have been made without the affiliate marketer's site, it is money well spent.

Even if a sale is not made, the link provides a method of advertising that can increase name recognition. Most business owners know that people might not make a purchase until the fifth time they see a brand name or come surfing to a site. An affiliate program can spread the word about a business on dozens upon dozens of sites. When combined with more traditional types of advertising, this can be a great way for a new business to get a foothold or an established business to expand its reach. These links can help search engine ranking as well.

The trick to a good affiliate partnership is finding quality marketers. While you obviously want to have your link on as many sites as possible, you also want those sites to be adept at generating traffic and sales. The fact remains that a large number of affiliate sites are posted and then never updated again. A business wants to find marketers who will design a professional-looking site and market that site effectively. At affiliate forums, businesses can hook up with marketers to start a relationship. A business owner can get a sense of the marketer's skill and drive from his or her stable of sites.

There's a lot of competition for marketers out there, especially established, quality marketers. Your best bet is to offer very attractive terms—a higher commission than the competition or a unique link layout. It should go without saying that your own site is well designed. An affiliate marketer wants to make a sale just as much as you do, and marketers won't sign up with a site that is poorly constructed. Offer a good site and a good product and you'll bring in more affiliate marketers. All this said, it is no surprise that affiliate marketing is growing at such an exponential rate. It is as important to business as any other type of marketing.

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Web Site Optimization

Web Site Optimization

All optimization is not equal. There is such a rush to optimize a website for search engines that people don't realize that some SEO techniques can be self-defeating. Either a lot of work will go into a particular type of optimization that is fruitless or it can be downright harmful for search engine ranking. A high search-engine ranking is the holy grail of search engine optimization, but make sure you put your energy in the right place.

The first two issues involve web design: don't use flash or frames when designing a website. These won't get you banned by search engines;but the site might be ignored entirely. While you can use some flash animation within a site, overuse of flash should be avoided. Search engines like text, not fancy graphics. A flash-heavy site could be passed over. The same goes for a site written with frames;frame-heavy sites confuse search engines so the sites are not properly indexed. The text on a framed site is hidden within the frame, so even if there is ample content within the frame, it will not be read correctly. Verdict: avoid it.

When writing content, make sure the content makes sense. In the early days of the web, people went keyword crazy. They would cram a huge paragraph of keywords throughout a page. This worked for a little while. Now search engines are wise to it and this technique can lead to a site being banned. Website owners try to trick search engines by including the keywords within actual content, but if the keywords are too close together, this could also lead to problems.

Another issue is spamdexing. Never use keywords that don't apply specifically to a site. This can most often be seen with site owners using adult-themed keywords to bring in unrelated searches. This will cause a site to be quickly red-flagged. Using invisible text is a bad idea as well. Invisible text is the same color as the background. It can be read by spiders, but can't be read by human eyes. The problem here is that spiders now recognize this technique and it will be red-flagged.

Generally, content should be useful and informative. You can include specific keywords within content, but if you provide enough content, these keywords will be covered automatically without jeopardizing the site with picky search engine spiders. The use of quality content is two-fold: it's a better way to optimize with search engines and web surfers will spend a longer time on the site reading articles or other content. The trick is to create trust;both with spiders and real people.

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Why Custom Content Is So Critical

Why Custom Content Is So Critical

Think of the alternatives to custom content: no content at all or content that has been taken from another site. If those two options seem unusable, you're getting a good idea of why custom content is so important. Looking at it another way: not having content is like designing a web site with the exact same layout as Amazon. This just isn't done—your site needs to be unique to be effective.

The two keys to custom content are uniqueness and authority. An informed buyer is an active buyer. Don't make a web surfer go elsewhere to find information on products and services. Everything a customer needs to know should be found on your site: informative articles, glossary definitions, reviews of products, answers to Frequently Asked Questions, and more. When all of this content is in place, a site will rank more highly in search engines, so a potential customer will have a better chance to come to the site and start perusing the information.

The idea is not just to sell specific products, but to sell the website itself, as well as sell the entire company. All of these things work in conjunction with each other. If people trust the information on the site, they'll be more willing to make a purchase. In addition, there's an element of gratitude for having direct questions answered. A site should never cover the bare minimum, but the gamut—every possible piece of information surrounding an industry, no matter how small.

Along with custom content there should be content organization. Just plastering long paragraphs of text on the screen will exhaust a web surfer before he or she even starts reading. Content needs to be well organized with relevant links both within the article and on the sidebar leading to information that corresponds to the original article. Just as the content needs to be well informed and well written, it needs to be well presented, or a web surfer is going to click out and move on.

All of these issues can make a website stand out from the vast array of sites online. People are more and more looking to the web for both information and shopping. At a content-rich site, surfers can kill two birds with one stone. These days, web owners are hiring copywriters to handle the task of preparing custom content. Each site will have a different demographic and require a different type of writing—for instance, technical or conversational—so it is important to find a content writing firm that specializes in a wide variety of industries.

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