Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

According to the University of Delaware’s ecommerce and internet marketing dictionary, an affiliate marketing program is one where advertisers – or affiliates – are paid to drive traffic to or to get transactions for a certain programs or products.
Making money with affiliate marketing doesn’t happen overnight, but it can be done. Stephanie Phillips from http://www.creditdonkey.com/ share a few steps you need to take to make money as an affiliate marketer:
1. Start your own blog or website
You’ll need a blog or website to promote the products and services for which you are an affiliate marketer. Since you’ll need to create real, readable, informative content in order to gain readers for your blog or website, it’s a good idea to choose a niche topic you’re interested in or passionate about. Many of today’s affiliate marketers opt for a blog instead of a more static website, but websites can work for affiliate marketing, as well.
2. Build reliable content and credibility
Just like you wouldn’t listen to an unreliable friend’s opinion on what car or house to buy, your web visitors won’t listen to your opinion on affiliate products and services until you build some credibility. The way that you do this is by creating high-quality content on your blog or website. Think of your web presence as your brand, and do everything you can to protect that brand. The more well-known and credible your blog or site becomes, the more likely people are to take your suggestions to buying certain goods and services.
You’ll also want your blog or website to look reliable – which means not filling up every extra white space with ads, ads, and more ads. Visitors see right through that! It’s worth hiring a pro to give you a basic, good-looking website or blog design. If you need the cash to get started, business credit cards for new business or a small business bank loan are an option. However, hiring a freelancer or college student to design your site is generally not too pricey.
3. Use SEO to build traffic
Even once you have reliable, credible content built up, you aren’t ready to make real money with affiliate marketing yet. First, you need to get more traffic to your website or blog. This is all a numbers game. If you make money from about 5% of your visitors, you’ll obviously make significantly more if you have 1,000 visitors a day than if you have 10 a day. Search Engine Optimization will help you build traffic organically by getting your website or blog at the top of the search engine lists for certain keywords.
The simplest way to use SEO is to optimize every page on your blog or website for a popular keyword. For instance, if you’re trying to sell lawn care products with a gardening-related blog, you might write a page about fall gardening tips. By using that keyword organically in your content, you’re telling the search engines that you have what people want to read when they search for “fall gardening tips.”
SEO is much more complex than simply using the right keywords, but this is where you start. There are tons of resources online where you can learn about search engine optimization for yourself, or you can hire a company or individual to help you search engine optimize your site or blog.
4. Find the products you want to promote
The key here is to promote only high-quality products and services. Remember, your blog or website is your brand. You might make a little money promoting cheap, lower quality products for a while, but eventually your visitors will stop trusting your opinion. If you can, test out the products and services you promote before you start promoting them so that you can give your visitors your real, honest opinion. If you wouldn’t spend money on a product or service you’re promoting, you probably shouldn’t be promoting it!
5. Use an email list
Once you start getting visitors to your website or blog, you can keep them coming back for more by creating an emailing list. Services like MailChimp will help you create and mail out emails to your visitors with new content and new advertising for affiliate products. This can be a great way to keep old customers coming back for more, especially if they know you only promote high-quality, worthwhile products and services.
6. Watch your income grow
As long as you continue to provide excellent content, promote great products, stay in touch with your visitors, and practice the best search engine optimization techniques, you’ll keep growing your income through affiliate marketing. You may need to experiment with different ways of marketing products – outright promotion through blog posts, in-text links, or photo-links beside your pages and posts – and you’ll probably end up using a combination of techniques. But so long as you continue working at your affiliate marketing program, you’ll continue to make money.
These six steps don’t guarantee that you’ll eventually be a millionaire, but they do nearly guarantee that you’ll make money from affiliate marketing. Yes, you can eventually create a passive income from affiliate marketing, but you’ll need to work hard at first to find great products to promote and to promote them in ways that make your visitors want to buy them.
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I would like to personally thank Stephanie for her “guest blog” post today. Thanks for sharing all of this information with the readers of my blog. ~ Shelly
 

10 Real Ways to Make Money with Your Blog by Terri Seymour

These days we can all use a bigger income but it is definitely easier said than done. But the internet has given us all opportunities that were never possible before to create our own success. There are many people who make a good living online and many who claim to have gotten rich but there are also many people who are trying and trying but nothing is happening. I tried for several years before I started making a good living online so I would like to share some of the things that helped me increase my income. Although I have not tried every method listed below, I have tried several of them and they have worked for me.

1. Sell Resell eBooks and Software – You can easily add a digital product store script to your existing blog and sell ebooks and software with resell rights. Ebooks are very popular and the demand for them is increasing. You can also sell videos, music and other downloadable files from your digital store.

2. Write and Sell Your Own eBook – Write an ebook about your area of expertise and put it for sale on your site. You can sell it outright, offer resell rights or recruit affiliates to sell it for you as well. I did this with my first ebook and it worked out very well.

3. Affiliate Products – Find quality products and services that offer a commission and sell them on your site. Be sure they are relative to your site and if possible try the product out first so you can give a personal recommendation. Personal recommendations can help increase your sales. You can find affiliate products at AffiliateSeek, Clickbank, and AffiliateTips.

4. Sell Advertising – Offer advertising space on your blog. You can offer text ads, banner ads and even video and audio ads. You can charge monthly and annual fees to give your customers a better value.

5. Dropship Sales – Dropship means you can sell products without having to ship them or stock them. You find a company that offers dropshipping, sign up with them and start selling their products on your blog. Anytime you get an order, you send it to the main company and they ship the product out to your customer. The customer will think the product came from your store and you get a portion of the profits. You make money simply by taking orders and the dropship company does the rest. Dropship companies will usually require a membership fee, either monthly or annually.

6. Google Adsense – This is not my favorite but it does work well for some people. What this entails is placing numerous ads on your site, chosen by Google. Anytime these ads are clicked on, you will get paid a portion of what the advertiser has paid Google. Google will choose ads that are relevant to your site’s contents. So, what this means is that if you sell jewelry Google will place ads on your site to other people who sell jewelry and related products. So, in essence you are sending people to your competitor’s sites. Although I do not agree with this, many people claim to make a good chunk of change each month using Google Adsense!

7. Donation Button – You see this more and more often these days. People offer a lot of free resources and content on their sire and ask for donations from the people who utilize this information. You can get the buttons directly from Paypal and place them on your site. To do this, you must provide quality content and value to your visitors so they feel a donation would be appropriate.

8. Classes and Workshops – Organize some informative classes and workshops to teach your visitors how to “whatever”. Sell space to attend these events. Offer a variety of classes such as a week-long class, month long, etc. You could also produce some effective webinars. You can also recruit affiliates for these services as well.

9. Exclusive Access – Offer private content, forums, classes, etc. to members only. Charge a monthly or annual fee for this membership. People will pay for valuable information they can’t seem to find anywhere else.

10. Sponsored Reviews – Companies like Blogvertiser will connect you with advertisers who will pay you to write reviews about their products and services and place them on your site. You will have the option of accepting or declining any deals the advertisers offer. Other sites that offer this service are PayPerPost, SponsoredReviews and ReviewMe.

The methods above might not make you rich but they can earn you a good income or add to your existing income. Selling ebooks and software has been very profitable for me and affiliate products, selling advertising space and dropshipping has also worked for me in the past. Some of these methods might not be for you but it could be worth your while to check them out. I wish you much success in whatever path you choose.

About the Author:
Don’t be one of the 95% of people who fail at their online business. Terri Seymour can help you make money online. Find out how to increase your traffic and sales with her popular “How to Build Your Online Business” ebook for FREE at: ==> http://www.SeymourProducts.com

Article Source: WAHM Articles

A few weeks ago a very nice person emailed me to let me know that a competitor with a blog similar to my own had stolen and published 3 posts that they swiped from my blog and this competitor was not naming me or crediting me as the author of those posts. I was really “floored” that this blog owner was out swiping posts from other blogs instead of writing their own material or using free reprint articles.

Needless to say…my process began on getting the stolen content removed from their blog and here is how I did it.

The first thing that I did was email them an official email requesting that they had 48 hours to either remove the 3 stolen posts or edit them and list me as the author with a link back to my original post & blog. I then filed that request.

I waited 48 hours and fired off a second email to the blog owner stating that I was serious and that it was illegal for them to swipe content from other people’s web sites and/or blogs and they now had only 12 more hours to correct the situation or I would contact some of the advertisers on their blog to let their advertisers know that they practice stealing web content from other sites.

Wow…that finally got this persons attention! Within 3 hours of me firing off that email to them…the 3 posts were removed from the site and they replied back with a simple apology. I replied to that telling them that if they ever did this again to me…I would legally file a complaint and brief with my business attorney and come after them again.

If you find people swiping your original blog posts or web content you do have the LEGAL RIGHT to have that stolen material taken down and you should take the time to follow up and go after anyone who swipes content from you. If need be…report them to their advertisers and if that doesn’t work…get legal services involved!

Has anyone ever stolen your original content? If so, what did you do about it?

10 Vital Elements of Your Web Stats by Terri Seymour

Your web stats are an important collection of information regarding your site’s visitors, referrals, and other essential information. This information is important to you because it can help you measure the success of your marketing campaign, determine where to improve your site and how to tweak your site for success!

Below are ten vital elements of your web stats and why you should study them.

1. Unique Visitors – This component will tell you exactly how many people have come to your website. No matter how many pages this visitor clicks to, he is counted as one visitor. You need to utilize this statistic to see if your traffic is improving over time or getting worse. This will help you determine if you need to enhance your search engine rankings and other methods of getting traffic.

2. Location of Visitors – Knowing where your visitors are coming from is important because you can research how to reach a wider worldwide target market. You can see where the largest percentage of people are coming from and work on expanding your global visitor base.

3. Search Phrases – Your web stats will let you know exactly what search phrases/keywords people are using to get to your site. Studying this critical component can help you fine tune and improve your keywords and site content for better placement in the search engines.

4. Referrals – Referrals are websites or pages from which your visitors have found you. Study them to find out where your traffic originated and exactly how they found you. You can find out who is linking to you and which of your articles are bringing you more traffic. You can then submit these popular articles to more sites.

5. Pages – This item will help you determine which of your site’s pages are the most popular and which ones are not visited much. Analyze this info to see why some pages are so well travelled and some are not being used much at all.

6. Entry and Exit Pages – Analyze this information to find out where people are entering your site and from which page they leave the most. This can help you stress your sales pitch more on certain pages and learn how to keep visitors from leaving other pages. Put special offers on popular landing pages. Spice up or add more interest to pages from which people are leaving. Study those pages to see what could be making them leave as opposed to exploring additional pages.

7. Time of Day – Your web stats will tell you the time of day when each visitor came to your site and visited individual pages. This can help you schedule chats and/or webinars and can help you determine when to publish new content and/or special offers and sales.

8. Days of the Week – This information will help you in much the same way time of day stats help you. Study the stats to find out when to offer specials, teleclasses, chats, contests etc.

9. Length of Visits – This critical information can help you find out if people are lingering on your site and taking the time to read the content or if they are clicking a page and leaving almost immediately. Studying this information can help you find where to improve your pages and find ways to get your visitors to stay longer.

10. Error Reports – Find out if people are having trouble accessing any of your pages and getting error codes. With this info, you can correct these errors promptly so people will not leave your site.

Web stats can look overwhelming and seem a daunting task but it is vital that you learn what all the statistics mean and how to interpret the information they give you. Look at the statistics as a whole to find out the trends but also study the individual stats to see how you can refine your site and your marketing campaigns to bring you more traffic and longer visits to your site, thus increasing the chance for more sales conversions.

About the Author:
Terri Seymour has over twelve years of online experience and has helped many people start their own business. Visit her site for free articles, resources, information, resell ebooks and more. Sign up for the RSS Feed for a free business ebook with MRR. http://www.SeymourProducts.com

Article Source: WAHM Articles

When you sit down to write a post for your Direct Sales blog it is important to remember that your blog posts should be more “informational” type of posts instead of “spammy” type of posts. When people visit Direct Sales blogs they are looking more for the important information that you post and less for your sales spam ads.

When writing a post for your blog, here are a few important tips to remember.

* Title your blog post with related keywords on the content that is contained within your blog post. This will help search engines find your post and will help give readers a ‘sense’ of the information that is contained within the post itself.

* The opening paragraph in your blog post should be a great paragraph that entices the reader to continue reading your post. Furthermore, it should be a “preview” of what your blog post is all about.

* The body of your post should have approximately 3 keywords within it. You do not want to overload your post with keywords as search engines frown on that and consider it to be keyword spam. The body of your post should be written cleanly and concisely to get your message across to the reader.

* The summary paragraph in your blog post should be just that…a summary of what the reader just read. Keep the summary concise and to the point.

Your blog posts should be 200-300 words when they are informational posts and you should always use spell-checker before publishing them. Writing a great blog post does take some time and practice, but the more you write for your blog the easier it will get.

7  Quick and Easy Tips For Building Backlinks to Your Website Or Blog by Loretta Oliver

It has been said that links are the currency of the internet. While many marketing and traffic building methods come and go, this seems to hold true. Links make the internet go around. So, naturally you want to have as many incoming links to your site or blog as you possibly can. The more relevant they are the better.

There are many kinds of links and link programs out there on the web today. You’ll hear terms like one way links, three way links, do follow links, no follow links, SEO backlinks, .edu links, link wheel, and so on and so forth. It can be overwhelming and confusing to say the least.

Let’s simplify this and just look at 7 ways to build links to your website without ripping your hair out. Don’t worry about the technical details of things, just think of a link as a link and block the rest from your mind for a moment.

* Blog Commenting. This is a fast easy way to get relevant incoming links. Visit blogs that are about the same topic as your site and leave a relevant comment on a recent post. That’s it. You’ll get a link back from the comments section and hopefully you’ve found a great new blog to read regularly.

* Build a Squidoo Lens. This seems to scare some folks, but it’s really easy to do. Building a Squidoo lens is mostly point and click plus drag and drop. There are no special technical skills needed and you can have a lens up in 20 minutes or less linking back to your website or blog.

* Comment on a Squidoo Lens. Maybe you’re not feeling up to taking the time to build a Squidoo lens right now, or you’re in a bit of a hurry. No problem, you can still harness the link power of Squidoo by commenting on an already existing lens about your topic and including a link to your website as the resource. Easy peasy.

* Submit an Article to Directories. That sounds simple right? Write an informative article about your topic and submit it to article directories. Not only will you get an incoming link from the article directory, but also whenever someone republishes your article on their site. Again, super easy and non technical.

* Be a Guest Author. If articles and comments are a great way to get links, then being a guest author at another site or blog is just pure brilliance. Being a guest expert not only gets you a nice in content link to the page of your choice, it establishes you as the go to person on the topic and gets you in front of an entirely new audience.

* Bookmark It. While not my personal favorite method for link building, it is still a backlink. Bookmarking on social media sites like Digg, Delicious, Facebook etc…. I don’t really recommend bookmarking your own stuff, but instead putting a few select social media icons on your site to allow your visitors to choose which content to submit to those places. Don’t worry, they will.

* Help Someone on a Forum. Message board communities are powerful and amazing places online. If you find a forum that is based around your niche or topic, sign up and get active. Helping someone on a forum is like handing out free cookies. People will love you for it. Be honest, be yourself, and don’t forget to link back to your website in your signature and profile while you’re there.

Now go out there and get some links! If you’re looking for a step by step daily action plan for backlink building the easy way check out 5,000 Backlinks from Lynn Terry and Paul Short. The powerful daily action plans in 5,000 Backlinks make it easy for you to get at least 15 or more links back to your sites in an hour or less per day. It’s so easy you can even outsource the work to your kids!

Check it out and grab a copy of the amazing package at http://www.squidoo.com/5000backlinks
Article Source: WAHM Articles

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