Basic Affiliate Marketing Tips

Affiliate marketing? People look at you quizzically when you tell them that is what you do to make money. Most people have no idea of what affiliate marketing is. They just can’t wrap their minds around the idea even when you explain it to them.

Most will ask how they would start affiliate marketing and how they would choose a product to promote?  This is a common question that has an easy answer. Research your desired niche products and see what kind of demand is there. Use the Google keyword tool to choose a niche that has a lot of monthly searches – over 40,000 searches a month is good enough to get started. Make sure you have enough interest in providing your customers with as much helpful information as you can. If you have no interest, you can still promote the products, it just won’t be as fun.

Next, you will need to apply to become an affiliate through an affiliate marketing company. There are several major affiliate companies that are very highly recommended. One is Clickbank, which offers thousands of information products that people can download after purchase. Some of these products are software products that have a recurring charge and hence brings you a monthly payment without getting a new customer. Other products are solutions to various health problems. Some will teach you to learn a new skill. Some will actually tell you what the best selling products are.

A second company to check out is Google Affiliate Network. Google has combined their affiliate network payment schedule with their Adsense payments. So if you are already getting money from Adsense this is a good fit for you.

Google has thousands of merchants. When you log in to their site, they’ll give you statistics that are important to understand. There is a figure called EPC – and this means earnings per click. There is a 3 month EPC and a 7 day EPC. You’ll see that the higher the numbers, the better chances you have of selling their products. They list these statistics for each merchant. They also show you the merchant’s payout rank. So you’ll be able to see which merchants are paying the most to affiliates. Choose your merchants wisely with help from these statistics.

A third company to check out is Shareasale. They have hundreds of merchants with thousands of products. They will deposit your earnings directly to your checking account on the same day every month. Shareasale is run by Brian Littleton, who is experienced in every aspect of ecommerce. Shareasale has many merchants to choose from and they provide easy ways to make an web page that will display products on your site. They also have some video selling options available.

Affiliate marketing is challenging, but worth all the effort you put into it. You can be your own boss and set your own working hours. Be warned though, you’ll probably work twice as hard as you ever have worked. That’s what happens when you get to follow your passions. It hardly seems like work.

Launching a new website – Days 21-30

Launching a new website is not as easy as some would have you think. This is the last article in a series of articles that covered the promotional strategies of the first 30 days in the launching of a new website. Time will help any new website get more traffic and this site is so new that it will have to go through some growing pains for the next four months. Patience is needed to develop and get these new sites to a profitable stage.

The last week of the month showed some solid traffic increases. The total visitors for the month was 1018. As a whole, that wasn’t too bad. Next year at this time, it will be interesting to compare the differences.

Using SEO elite, I checked for the number of backlinks and there were 22 backlinks. These backlinks were acquired by writing articles and making comments on other people’s websites.

I checked the main search engines to see how many pages were indexed with each engine. Google has indexed 104 pages. Yahoo has 38 pages. MSN has only one page indexed and I’m not sure how to get more pages indexed by them. I just found a link to submit sites to MSN: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx so now I’ve submitted to that website. Alta Vista reported indexing 38 pages and All The Web has indexed 38 pages.

One strategy that I have added to this site is to add a blog. I think that WordPress blogs are very search engine friendly and I believe that adding content to it on a regular basis will be helpful.

I was able to get some help in making my website comply with the W3C, the web standards organization for all web pages. I have tried in the past to get compliant with that website, but my web skills were not good enough to understand how to change things to get into compliance. A friend of mine from the Philippines told me about a fellow named Taylor S. Ripley. He runs a web development and hosting site at http://www.turkreno.com/. I gave him a call and he was nice enough to walk me through correcting all the mistakes that were on my front page. He also helped me create a more useful sitemap and I have submitted that to the search engines.  He was so knowledgeable and helpful. I highly recommend him as a person to help you with your SEO efforts. It was so nice to meet someone that was so helpful.

So to wrap things up for this 30 Day Plan, I’d like to review the most valuable lessons that I learned during this time period.

1.  When developing a new site, submit a basic sitemap for at least part of your site to Google webmaster tools so you can start getting some traffic.

2.  When your site is completed, submit another sitemap to Google so that they will index all of your pages.

3.  Submit your new site to Yahoo, MSN, All The Web and Alta Vista.

4.  Begin the process of creating a sense of community by visiting other sites that relate to your topic and participate in their conversations on their blogs.

5. Write articles that relate to your product or website and make sure that they get distributed to a large number of directories.

6. Make sure your site is W3 Compliant.

7. Be patient and keep contributing to your site by making it better and offering people more resources and help.

8. Start trying something, anything. Some of what you do will work, and some things won’t. Doing something is better than just dreaming about it.

9. Realize that it takes time for your new project to become profitable and know that it is possible to get your sites profitable enough to support yourself.

10. Network with other people through http://www.meetup.com to find others in your community that are pursuing the same types of business.

I hope that part of this experience has helped you learn what you can do to get your sites started an on to profitability. Good luck with your projects!

Blog World Expo 2009 – John Chow Challenge

John Chow has challenged me to give him reasons why I should be chosen to receive a pass to attend Blog World Expo 2009. He probably doesn’t remember meeting me at the last Blog World Expo in 2008, so I have included my extremely unflattering photograph with him. Learn about this challenge at JohnChow.com

Last year at the Blog World Expo 2008, I was totally inspired by all the talks given by the Fab Five – four of whom are shown in the photograph below (Zac Johnson, Jim Kukral, Darren Rouse and John Chow). Notice that ShoeMoney is not in the photograph shown. He must have been off networking.

Anyway, I learned so many things at the conference that helped me with my business plans and I will always be grateful for that.  I don’t really like to reveal numbers about my income levels, but since last year in September, my affiliate income has increased by 660%. My blog traffic is now getting 14,444 unique hits a month and I can live on my affiliate earnings. I owe a lot of this success to the great information that I received from the Fab Five at the Blog World Expo 08.

I was also recently invited to attend the Shareasale ThinkTank that is going to be held in Newport Beach, California.  Without the training that I received at the conference, I never would have been successful enough to be invited to attend. So I thank you Fab Five again. Should you consider me to receive a pass to the conference I would be so grateful. I look forward to learning much more about being successful on the Internet.

Launching a new website – days 14-21

This article is a continuation of a 30 day plan to launch a new website offering personal checks. The goal of the plan was to do something every day to promote the site and see what kind of traffic we’d get. Unfortunately on August 8, the site went into the Google sandbox and none of the pages that were being listed with top positions in Google were being listed anymore. The site is still in the sandbox unfortunately. It’s not hard to tell when your site is in the sandbox because your pages won’t pull up for the search terms they were originally pulling up for.

As you can see from the graph  the site is going through ups and downs in traffic. Most visible is the drastic decrease in traffic on August 8. There is a steady increase, but this is not due to getting out of the sandbox, it is due to some promotion efforts through a company I hired to help.

Originally, I planned not to spend any money during this first thirty day period, but I caved in after the drop in traffic. I hired a company that helped me with this website and asked them to do the same thing for my new site. If you are interested in knowing who they are and what they do, be sure to email me.

The goal is to get between 500 and 700 visitors per day. At that point, the site will be pulling in some decent income.

Sites can be in the sandbox for three to six months so the plan now is to build high authority back links which means getting the site listed in different directories.

The plan now is to:
1. Add quality content to the site through a blog.

2. Work on increasing the number of inbound links (quality links not just any old link).

3. Tweak and improve the SEO quality of your site.

4. Write articles.
So you should be seeing some changes coming soon to the site which will include a WordPress Blog.

Again, the biggest mistake made with this site was to wait until the entire site was done before submitting the site to Google. So if you are working on a new site, be sure and get at least a few pages presentable with a sitemap and submit it. Hopefully that will shorten your stay in the sandbox.

Launching a new web site – days 11, 12, 13

Well, unfortunately I believe that my new site is officially in the “sandbox” which is Google’s way of controlling sites.

At Webconf.com the Google sandbox is explained in detail.

It’s never easy for newcomers to enter a market and there are barriers of different kinds. For newcomers to the world of search engines, the barrier is called a sandbox – your site stays there until it gets mature enough to be allowed to the Top Positions club. Although there is no direct confirmation of the existence of a sandbox, Google employees have implied it and SEO experts have seen in practice that new sites, no matter how well optimized, don’t rank high on Google, while on MSN and Yahoo they catch quickly. For Google, the jailing in the sandbox for new sites with new domains is on average 6 months, although it can vary from less than a month to over 8 months.

There are hurdles to overcome, just because the site is new. It might have been helpful to have submitted a few pages to Google when I first got the site going so that it would have time to get out of the sandbox.

Cpanel Stats are:

01 Aug 2009 29
02 Aug 2009 26
03 Aug 2009 36
04 Aug 2009 43
05 Aug 2009 67
06 Aug 2009 35
07 Aug 2009 50
08 Aug 2009 11
09 Aug 2009 11
10 Aug 2009 24
11 Aug 2009 9
12 Aug 2009 12

You’ll notice the drastic drop in visitors due to the sandbox effect. It’s very frustrating to go through these growing pains. My goal is to get back into the “top position’s club.”

Launching a new website – Days 6-10

This reports covers a span of days, mostly because there isn’t much new to report. There was a problem with having Google index the site as http://checksmall.com and not http://www.checksmall.com. That problem was solved with a 301 redirect file put in the .htaccess file. Now Google is showing all pages indexed for http://www.checksmall.com.

When studying the Cpanel stats, there were 32 external links pointing back to www.checksmall.com and that is very good. There were 45 different keyword phrases that are bringing in traffic.

74 different page urls were bringing in traffic and there were 224 unique visitors for the month.

The daily statistics

1-Aug 29
2-Aug 26
3-Aug 36
4-Aug 43
5-Aug 67
6-Aug 35
7-Aug 50
8-Aug 11
9-Aug 11

Advertising activities included writing an article at Squidoo on ordering checks.

After watching the movie, Julie and Julia, I realized that I’m not as diligent at writing everyday and my topic here is possibly boring to many people, so my apologies. I am hoping that it will get more exciting as time goes on.

Launching a new web site – Days 4 & 5

Day 4

Video Marketing Efforts: I created a video using www.stupeflix.com. I have to say it was really fun to make and I guess it won’t hurt to show you the video here.

It was really fun to make and very easy too. The best part about it is that it ranks number 3 for the keyword phrase “order checks” when you do a Google video search. I think that video marketing is one way to advertise your business. I have yet to learn a few skills in being able to control the text as it displays throughout the video, but it wasn’t bad for a first try.

I also used SocialMarker.com to get the word out for my page that displays discount coupon codes for checks. That took about 30 minutes and it’s getting easier to get through the bookmarking procedure.

Cpanel stats: 43 visitors

Day 5

Today was a great day because I discovered that Google had indexed my site and I could see that 32 pages showed up in the Google search results. If you don’t know how to see if your site is showing up in the search results, just type in site:http://www.nameofyoursite.com into the Google search box to see if your site appears.

After discovering that, I took the keywords in my title tags and popped them into Google search and was quite happy with the results. There were 30 keyword phrases that had page one search results. Out of those, seven were number one listings. There were 39 keyword phrases that were in the first three pages of search results. It is too soon to tell which keyword phrase will be the most profitable, but at this point, I start to speculate and it becomes fun to watch the statistics complete the story.

I used SeoElite to see how many sites had links pointing to my site and it reported this:

1 – from a page rank 8
6 – from a page rank 6
5 – from a page rank 1

Cpanel shows 25 pages showing links to www.checksmall.com.

Cpanel – 47 visitors.

I was informed that Amit completed his social bookmarking. He does a great job and offers his services to others as well. You can contact him through his site at WickedFire.com

Best tips for launching a new site: Based upon some of the Social Bookmarking experiences I’ve had, it seems best to submit good articles that have content relevant to the place you submit them to or they are considered spam by the site owners. Google search engine results should start bringing in more traffic within a few days.

Launching a new web site – Day 3

This is a series of articles relating to advertising activities behind launching a new web site. This article represents day 3 of  a 30 Day Plan to build traffic to a new web site and report the number of daily visitors as reported in AWStats in the CPanel.

The following is a list of marketing activities performed for the day.

1. Spent time reading Webproworld.com for marketing tips.  Advice from the web site, Webproworld.com was that “some of the best ways to build links are forum posting, blog commenting, directory submission, article submission, and social bookmarking and you can use all of these strategies at the same time.”

2. Published an ezine article on coolchecks.net/blog with a link to checksmall.com.

3. Checked Google to see if the site had been included in their index. There were  7 page results from social bookmarking, but the main site has not been indexed yet.

4. Asked for help from a Facebook friend, Amit Nyamtabad to do more Social Bookmarks.

5. Posted links  on Twitter and Facebook about  Christian Bank Checks.

6. Made forum comments on three forums.

7.  Spent time at Alexa.com finding out my who was linking to my competitors.

8. Submitted to two directories, prolinkdirectory.com and directoryvault.com.

9. Published an article at www.coolchecks.net about business checks which linked back to Checksmall.com

10. Checked Cpanel Statistics on visitors.

Aug. 1 = 29

Aug. 2 = 26

Aug. 3 = 21 (This may change by tomorrow.)

Conclusions: It takes a while for Google to index sites so while you are waiting for that to happen, it’s good to spend time doing other promoting activities.

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