Weekly Tips

On this page I will include weekly new tips and ideas to keep you motivated.  These tips will give you the inspiration to keep going forward with your online home business and make it a success.  Remember sign up for the newsletter to keep on top of the info as soon as it is released and for special information.  Keep checking back weekly so you can gain the access you need to strive at working at home!

Week of 2/10/11

3 Things All Affiliate Marketers Need To Survive Online

Every affiliate marketer is always looking for the successful market that gives the biggest paycheck. Sometimes they think it is a magic formula that is readily available for them. Actually, it is more complicated than that. It is just good marketing practices that have been proven over years of hard work and dedication.
There are tactics that have worked before with online marketing and is continuing to work in the online affiliate marketing world of today. With these top three marketing tips, you will be able to able to increase your sales and survive in the affiliate marketing online.

What are these three tactics?

1. Using unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. Do not lump all of it together just to save some money on web hosting. It is best to have a site focusing on each and every product and nothing more.

Always include product reviews on the website so visitors will have an initial understanding on what the product can do to those who buys them. Also include testimonials from users who have already tried the product. Be sure that these customers are more than willing to allow you to use their names and photos on the site of the specific product you are marketing.

You can also write articles highlighting the uses of the product and include them on the website as an additional page. Make the pages attractive compelling and include calls to act on the information. Each headline should attract the readers to try and read more, even contact you. Highlight your special points. This will help your readers to learn what the page is about and will want to find out more.

2. Offer free reports to your readers. If possible position them at the very top side of your page so it they simply cannot be missed. Try to create autoresponder messages that will be mailed to those who input their personal information into your sign up box. According to research, a sale is closed usually on the seventh contact with a prospect.

Only two things can possibly happen with the web page alone: closed sale or the prospect leaving the page and never return again. By placing useful information into their inboxes at certain specified period, you will remind them of the product they thought they want later and will find out that the sale is closed. Be sure that the content is directed toward specific reasons to buy the product. Do not make it sound like a sales pitch.

Focus on important points like how your product can make life and things easier and more enjoyable. Include compelling subject lines in the email. As much as possible, avoid using the word “free” because there are still older spam filters that dumps those kind of contents into the junk before even anyone reading them first. Convince those who signed up for your free reports that they will be missing something big if they do not avail of your products and services.

3. Get the kind of traffic that is targeted to your product. Just think, if the person who visited your website has no interest whatsoever in what you are offering, they will be among those who move on and never come back. Write articles for publication in e-zines and e-reports. This way you can locate publications that is focusing on your target customers and what you have put up might just grab their interest.

Try to write a minimum of 2 articles per week, with at least 300-600 words in length. By continuously writing and maintaining these articles you can generate as many as 100 targeted readers to your site in a day.
Always remember that only 1 out of 100 people are likely to buy your product or get your services. If you can generate as much as 1,000 targeted hits for your website in a day, that means you can made 10 sales based on the average statistic.

The tactics given above does not really sound very difficult to do, if you think about it. It just requires a little time and an action plan on your part.

Try to use these tips for several affiliate marketing programs. You can end maintaining a good source of income and surviving in this business that not all marketers can do.
Besides, think of the huge paychecks you will be receiving…

Week of 2/17/11  (pt 1)

Traffic and how to get it…

Really, there is absolutely nothing technical about traffic. On a basic level, it’s just the flow of people to and from your website. Of course, that alone is of completely crucial importance because your traffic, as a marketer, will also be your potential customers.

 Needless to say, you want as much traffic as possible for this very reason. Unfortunately, at this juncture many people start to encounter some problems because in order to get traffic, you cannot just sit back once you have a website up.

On top of that, merely having a constant flow of people visiting your website is not necessarily going to do you a lot of good. For best effect, the traffic that you need to harness must be as targeted as possible.

Summing it up: What you want, and what you need to succeed in any internet marketing venture are sources of targeted traffic.

What is Targeted Traffic?

 One of the best ways to explain targeted traffic is through this example:

Assuming you had a website that is centered on the dog grooming niche. It’d undoubtedly be a place where your visitors could check out various techniques of dog grooming, learn about some of the common problems when grooming dogs, and so on. 

Now, if you somehow ended up getting a ton of traffic, but it all came from people looking for alien conspiracy theories, well… you’d undoubtedly notice that most of your visitors just leave your website immediately since it is not what they were looking for.

Admittedly, that is a slightly wild example, but it serves to illustrate the point fairly well. Even if your visitors were looking for something more closely related to your niche, such as dog training tips, or dog healthcare tips; the end result would be the same once they discover that you are not offering what they want.

Due to this, you want the traffic that does get to your website to consist of people who actually want to learn about dog grooming and are genuinely interested in it. If you can get a steady stream of such people flowing in, then without a doubt your conversion rate would be higher.

Actually, you could conceivably obtain traffic that is even more targeted.

Assuming you have monetized your blog to sell eBooks about dog grooming, then if the traffic that goes to your website consists of mostly people who already intend to buy resources about dog grooming – well, that would be very ideal.

At the end of the day, the more tightly focused and targeted your traffic is, the greater your results.

How to Start Generating Traffic?

All too often, a website does not get traffic simply because there are no real and reliable efforts carried out to do so. Sometimes, this is because of a lack of knowledge as to how to go about it, but most times, it is more due to the habit of overanalyzing the issue and not taking action.

What is constantly not realized is that even if the action taken is not perfect, some action is far better than no action at all.

Best advice as far as generating traffic is concerned is therefore to pick something, and stick with it. Then, once you’re done, pick something else and stick with that too. This way, at very least you’ll end up with a couple of well developed streams of traffic, which may not be perfect, but will still end up bringing in visitors.

Let’s look at some of the best sources of traffic that you should be tapping into: 

1. 1.     Search Engine

When anyone is looking for something online, where is the first place that you think they’d head? That’s right – search engines.

For a long time now, search engines have been at the very heart of the internet experience, by being the navigation method of choice. All that has changed is the popularity of various search engines over the years, with Google currently dominating the pack by a king-sized margin

With this in mind, it is reasonable to want to be getting your slice of the pie as far as search engine traffic is concerned, and how that can be done is simply by ensuring your pages start to show up within the first page (or at least, first few pages) of search engine results for terms of your choice.

Stay tuned to next week for the 2nd part to this multi tip!

Week of 2/24/11 (pt 2)

Thanks for tuning in for the 2nd part of search engines for traffic…

These ‘terms’ are known as keywords, and they’re what form the brunt of how you can get targeted search engine traffic.

 Basic Keyword Research

     In order to find out what keywords to aim for, there is some research that needs to be done. Fortunately, it isn’t too complicated a process, but there are just a few concepts behind selecting ‘good’ keywords that should be discussed.

 1.      Search Volume

Basically, it is the amount of searches of the keyword you’re looking at, and is either measured as ‘searches per month’ or ‘searches per day’. It should go without saying that more searches is definitely better.

 2.      Competing Websites

For each keyword, there are bound to be at least some competing websites also targeting the same term (although, maybe not by purpose). Just searching for the keyword you’re looking at in Google will give you an idea of how many competing websites there are. If there aren’t many, then that’s great for the keyword.

 So essentially, what you’re looking for is a high number of searches for a keyword with very little competition. One of the easiest keyword tools to get started with is Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

 On top of that, to further narrow down keywords, there are the questions of how targeted it is, and also, how profitable. A targeted keyword is really just one that relates to the niche that you’re in fairly well, but profitability of a keyword is a completely different kettle of fish.

 One of the most common ways that marketers measure profitability is to see if, when the keyword is searched for on Google, any advertisements appear. If they do, then chances are that it is a fairly profitable keyword.

The other way to do so is simply trial and error.

 Based on these considerations, it should not be too difficult to come up with a reasonably sized list of ‘good’ keywords that can be used to target search engine traffic.

 Creating Keyword Rich and SEO-d Content

 Once you have a list of keywords, all that remains is to insert them into your content creation. Now, this does not mean you should ‘stuff’ them in as much as possible, because at the end of the day the traffic that you’re getting will be in the form of actual people, who probably won’t respond too well to illegible ‘stuffed’ keyword content.

 Widely accepted by both search engines and people is the common 1% to 3% keyword density rule. All that means is that you should, for each keyword, have between 1 to 3 appearances per 100 words. If it is a particularly ‘long’ keyword, then limiting it to 1 or 2 is more than enough really.

 Fairly effective as far as formulas go is the idea of having the presence of 1 ‘short’ keyword and 2 ‘long’ keywords per article or piece of content.

 As soon as search engines latch on to these keywords, you’ll at very least have your website appearing in the right ‘target’ bracket. So, all that would remain is to actually start scaling the pages until you appear as close to the top of the search results as possible.

 For SEO purposes, while meta-tags are largely unused nowadays, it still is a good idea to have them in there, just in case. Title tags and description tags in particular are important, with keyword tags of lesser value, but still occasionally relevant.

 Realistically, it never hurts to cover as many bases as possible as far as SEO is concerned.

Importance of Backlinks

 How you end up near the top of any search results actually ties in closely with the algorithm that search engines use to ‘rank’ websites. Different search engines would do this differently of course, but it is only logical to focus first on the largest and most widely-used search engine of them all: Google.

 Far as Google goes, there is one thing that has been proven to affect search engine rankings, and that is actual links by other third-party websites to your own, which are called ‘backlinks’.

 For all purposes and effects, these ‘backlinks’ are counted as ‘votes’ regarding the quality of your website, and is based on the logic that the more websites that are actually linking too you, the better your website must be.

 Due to this, one of the ways to start scaling search engine results is to start building up a reliable base of backlinks. Admittedly, the ‘quality’ of those backlinks does count too, and link-exchanges do not tend to work anywhere near as well as a backlink from a high authority (and high Page Ranked) website.

 Note: Page Rank is basically a quantity, between 0 and 10, which Google assigns to websites based on how ‘good’ its algorithm thinks they are.

 Later on, we’ll talk about social bookmarking, but at this juncture it should be enough to note that social bookmarking is one way to get backlinks. Similarly directories are too, as are forums and blog commenting.

 We’ll be discussing the latter two a bit later on too. But for now, that should suffice.

 Warning: Do not build backlinks ‘too fast’ or Google could latch onto your website and penalize you. Backlink building is fine, but ‘spam’ is not, and if you’re getting 1000 new backlinks in a short span of time, it could end up being flagged

Importance of Backlinks

How you end up near the top of any search results actually ties in closely with the algorithm that search engines use to ‘rank’ websites. Different search engines would do this differently of course, but it is only logical to focus first on the largest and most widely-used search engine of them all: Google.

Far as Google goes, there is one thing that has been proven to affect search engine rankings, and that is actual links by other third-party websites to your own, which are called ‘backlinks’.

For all purposes and effects, these ‘backlinks’ are counted as ‘votes’ regarding the quality of your website, and is based on the logic that the more websites that are actually linking too you, the better your website must be.

Due to this, one of the ways to start scaling search engine results is to start building up a reliable base of backlinks. Admittedly, the ‘quality’ of those backlinks does count too, and link-exchanges do not tend to work anywhere near as well as a backlink from a high authority (and high Page Ranked) website.

Note: Page Rank is basically a quantity, between 0 and 10, which Google assigns to websites based on how ‘good’ its algorithm thinks they are.

Later on, we’ll talk about social bookmarking, but at this juncture it should be enough to note that social bookmarking is one way to get backlinks. Similarly directories are too, as are forums and blog commenting.

We’ll be discussing the latter two a bit later on too. But for now, that should suffice.

Warning: Do not build backlinks ‘too fast’ or Google could latch onto your website and penalize you. Backlink building is fine, but ‘spam’ is not, and if you’re getting 1000 new backlinks in a short span of time, it could end up being flagged

 Week of 3/3/11

On to the Next one…     

       Social Bookmarking and Social Networks

 Commonly known as ‘Web 2.0’ promotion, social bookmarking and social networks form a new type of promotion that has rapidly gained ground. Previously, it was mentioned that these represented a valuable source of backlinks, and that much is certainly true.    ( examples of web 2.0 – facebook, myspace, twitter)

 However, apart from the backlinks that come as part and parcel of marketing efforts involving these websites, there is also the additional possibility of receiving traffic through those backlinks. After all, if there is an interesting bookmark that draws the attention of the crowds of people who flock to social websites, then there will probably be a correspondingly high amount of visitors who want to know more.

 Despite this, there are two things that one should be aware of regarding social bookmarking, and social networks:

1. Not every piece of content is going to do well in social bookmarking websites. For the most part, the content that does do well when social bookmarked is those that are deemed to be ‘fresh’, ‘hip’, expertly informative, or even controversial.
2. Research has shown that traffic from social bookmarking websites tends to have a very high ‘bounce rate’. What this means is that very few visitors that come in through social bookmarks will actually end up staying around long enough to browse your website.
3. Some social bookmarking websites are very niche specific, so finding those in your niche could presumably not only increase the value of the backlinks obtained, but also allow you to do much better due to the relevancy and automatic targeting of traffic.

Being a relatively easy and painless way to gain backlinks, and also build up yet another traffic stream, social bookmarking is certainly worthwhile.

  Week of 4-3-11

3. 

Article Marketing

Another easy way of gaining both backlinks and traffic, article marketing is more powerful than many first realize. In fact, some people use it solely for the backlink value, and by doing so, are ignoring a potentially incredible source of extremely targeted traffic.

On the whole, the entire process of article marketing could be summed up by describing it as writing an article, and submitting it to article directories. By including a link of your choice in the ‘resource box’, you will be gaining back links.

However, if it is to be a true source of traffic, then there is much more to the process than simply that. Firstly, the article must be keyword targeted, just like your content, in order to enable people to find it.

Apart from that, the article itself must be a ‘presell’ of your website, albeit in a non-promotional way. Good articles for submission are those that relate to the content of your website, and guide the reader to the resource box which would contain a call to action.

It is here that the article culminates its usefulness, and the call to action should be convincing, and supply the reader with a good reason to want to visit your website.

If you can accomplish this, then your suggestions are bound to be taken more seriously, as will your links.

Before you get to this level though, you can always start off by including a link in your signature, as is the generally accepted practice with most forums. Be sure to read and abide by the forum’s rules though, the last thing you want to happen is that you end up getting banned for some offence that you did not realize was an offence.

Who knows, once you are very reputable, you could end up tapping into a huge stream of traffic from a forum.

6.

Stay Tuned Next Week For another Great Way To Get Traffic To Your Website

Note: To further get readers to visit your article, some basic promotion of it through social bookmarking, could help it rank higher and thus increase the traffic flow.

There are hundreds of article directories to write in and that can lead to tons of traffic.  The most popular one maybe EZine Articles and hubpages.  Squidoo is also a popular website to submit an article to.  Just remember rewrite your article if you are submitting to multiple directoies..  Search engines dont like duplicate material and you will do lots of work and recieve little results.  The whole article doesnt have to be rewritten, but substitute a few paragraphs or sentences and you will be happy with the outcome!

One argument regarding article marketing is that it is a ‘short term’ solution, which basically requires you to submit content to a third party website as opposed to building up your own. While this is very true, at the same time, it is a way that you can tap into the already-high page rank and reputation of article directories.

What you end up with is a high-up search result that basically advertises your website, which is not too shabby at all.

4.

Speaking of advertising, yet another great way to gain traffic is to advertise. Through PPC advertising, whereby you only actually pay when your advertisement is clicked, you end up essentially paying per visitor.

As far as value for money goes, this would seem to be a no brainer.

Running a PPC campaign however, is slightly more involved than it sounds. Where there is high competition for a certain keyword, you’re going to need to pay more per click for your advertisement to appear often. Thus, it boils down to a question of keyword research again, and finding targeted, but low-competition keywords which you can then exploit.

Properly carried out, this is one of the easiest ways to gain traffic quickly, though admittedly, you do have to pay for it.

WEEK OF 4-7-11

5.

For almost every niche, there are forums around online where people would flock to discuss the issues that surround it. Naturally, this represents a base of potential traffic that you could tap into, but the question that should be asked is, “How?”

Obtaining traffic from a forum can sometimes be a long process. Most good forums tend to have been established, and you will have to establish yourself within the forum so that the others there view you as an important and trusted contributor.