http://www.articletrader.com/ Articles at ArticleTrader en-us http://www.articletrader.com/internet/affiliate-programs/affiliate-marketing-the-beginning.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/affiliate-programs/affiliate-marketing-the-beginning.html Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0600
When looking at affiliate marketing from a business perspective, you should be focusing on a few, very important factors. You need to figure out your own strengths and weaknesses, find out how to compensate for those very weaknesses, or better yet – learn something new and overcome them yourself. All information you need to learn how to become a successful affiliate marketer is, that’s right, online – Free of charge. The only thing you need to do is find out what you need – and where to find it.

Whether or not you succeed depends just as much on your ability to research and evaluate, as your skills in web design, SEO and other, traditional affiliate marketing skills. Most of these services can be bought, but you are the only one capable of the research and the evaluation – You know yourself better than anyone; what suits you? How can you use your strengths? What do you need to buy, what can be found for free – There are many, many things to figure out, in order to make it right from the start.

The first thing you need is an idea of what the site should be about. At the very least a good hunch on the topics you expect to cover. When deciding on a topic, you need to take a look at the competition. If you choose the wrong keywords, you will have a very hard time to get a high listing on any of the major search engine. It’s better the be number one in an smaller niche, than a 7:th page placement for a popular keyword.
Figure out what keywords you will be targeting to find out your chances of making a profitable website.

You should then do some light research to find out two things;

• Is there a market and good affiliate programs for your search terms?

• How is the competition? Are you likely to reach a high enough SE placement?

Pinpointing these things is of highest importance before you start your work.
If you can’t seem to find any affiliate programs searching for your site’s keywords, you might face a problem when trying to generate a profit. You will probably be forced to choose between only a smaller number of programs, making the chances of finding a good one smaller.

If the competition is tough - That’s a whole other story. That usually means it is a profitable topic, since many others are trying to get into that area as well.
If you find it hard to reach a high placement on the search term you intended, it might be easier to focus on a different search term, making it more likely to be on top.
If you are new to affiliate programs and/or building a web site, starting out with a topic with a light or medium competition is better. Then, after learning from your mistakes, you will stand a much better chance to succeed when building your second or third site, perhaps in a more competitive, but lucrative niche.


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Read more of Theos articles at Affiliate Ranker's Resources
Or visit Theo's Affiliate Blog

Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]> http://www.articletrader.com/internet/affiliate-programs/affiliate-marketing-the-first-steps.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/affiliate-programs/affiliate-marketing-the-first-steps.html Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0600 An obvious factor here is your prior knowledge of HTML and/or HTML-editors - But there are ways to build a website with no prior experience.
For those of you with no prior experience, it might prove a good idea to use a template to make it easy the first time. There are a lot of sites offering free web site templates, some better than others. When you find a template that suits your needs, try to learn enough HTML to edit it a bit to make it stand out from the others using the same template. You need to look at the terms & conditions for the template you are using – some don’t allow you to edit their design at all, while others let you change as much as you want.
No matter if you are using templates or if you are building your site from scratch - If you are planning on using affiliate programs as your only source of income on this site, you should pick a design with a good advertising space, preferably on top and/or a vertical space on either side. Try to keep it simple the first time, don’t overdo it. Make another site if you want to try something different. The more sites you can produce, the easier it will be to have at least one top placement on Google. The sites not placing well in search engines can still be valuable by linking to your main site.
You will need to register a domain, find web hosting and eventually sign up for a few affiliate programs. Have a look around, try to find a good domain name, preferably one with your primary keyword in the name. A short, descriptive URL with a good top level domain, i.e. .com or any market specific country domain will always perform well in any competition. When deciding on a web host you could try a free host for your first site, but you will almost always be forced to show their ads, taking away the potential clicks and sales for your ads. With a site made for affiliate marketing, you obviously do not want competition on your own site; you will get enough of that from everyone else, no need to bring it on yourself. Hosting is very inexpensive these days, so the money saved by going with a free host is negligible. A web host with a good affiliate program can even add to your profit.
Build your site in your head - map it out mentally. Then try to put it down on paper. Figure out what sections you will have, the menu, the internal linking and other important factors. The more thought you put into it, the better the results. When on paper, look at it, think about it some more, make the adjustments you see fit.

Now, you are ready to start building your site, filling it with those profitable affiliate links.


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Theo Swan - Writing about affiliate marketing and how to generate revenue online.

Read more of Theos articles at Affiliate Ranker's Resources
Or visit Theo's Affiliate Blog


Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]> http://www.articletrader.com/internet/affiliate-programs/affiliate-marketing-finding-proper-content.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/affiliate-programs/affiliate-marketing-finding-proper-content.html Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0600
The more content you can fill your site with, the better it will be. As long as you make it easy to navigate and incorporate a logical structure - you will attract more visitors and make a better profit on your site. Besides the obvious search engine exposure gained from each added page, you will also be benefiting from a larger site in less obvious ways – mainly due to the internal linking. Easily put; The more links explaining to Google what a particular internal page is about, the easier they can decide what its about. With internal linking, you have the possibility to tell Google what YOU think the pages are about – most likely by an important keyword. There are numerous advantages with large sites, but they often take quite some time to build and maintain, so as far as ONE site designed for affiliate programs goes, I’d stick with somewhere between ten and fifty pages. Not too small to get by unnoticed and at the same time not too large to be unmanageable.

Choosing to build a good site solely on free material is very hard - and gaining a top placement on the search engines might prove impossible due to the lack of original content. However, you can make it profitable if you direct traffic to it or if you target clever keywords. You will be best off with a nice mix of free and self produced material. Most free content – and the sites providing it – is well organized, keyword rich and easy accessible, making it perfect for filling up that empty space on your site. Many people use adwords – or other contextual ads, but if you are imaginative, I bet you can find a few affiliate programs matching your content. Many people try to make multiple sites covering the same topics, writing only slightly different texts and targeting different keywords. This might seem like a perfect idea, but for the major part search engines often notice this, and if you are unlucky you may get penalized. For a site built for affiliate programs, getting penalized and losing traffic is often devastating. You will always be better off writing completely different and original material, even if you are covering the same aspect of the same story, and make up for lost time by adding some articles or other relevant content - and then moving on to the next project – making your site known to the world.


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Read more of Theos articles at Affiliate Ranker's Resources
Or visit Theo's Affiliate Blog

Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]> http://www.articletrader.com/internet/affiliate-programs/affiliate-marketing-making-your-site-known-to-the-world.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/affiliate-programs/affiliate-marketing-making-your-site-known-to-the-world.html Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0600
There are a lot of ways of improving your pages SE position, but the most important factor is inbound links. The reason why it’s important is because a page with many links pointing to it should be a page of interest. Why else would people link to it?

While this is very true in theory - most webmasters know this and are actively looking for more inbound links – the consequence is the inflation of the value of links in the long term. The number of inbound links needed for a top placement today, will most certainly not be enough in a week, a month or a year. The only way to compensate for this is to continually attract more inbound links.

There are many ways of getting inbound links, but the best links almost always are spontaneous. They get placed on relevant pages, surrounded by relevant keywords and are often not in competition with fifty other outbound links on the same page.

Although the very nature of spontaneous links makes them impossible to create, or even predict. You can try to imitate those spontaneous links when using services, such as buying or exchanging links, designed to improve your links’ popularity.

Vary your anchor text – If 90% of your links all have the same anchor text, it’s not too hard to figure out the nature of those links. If the anchor text is stuffed with keywords, odds are you won’t find your page on a good SE position anytime soon, it’s way too obvious. When you are buying or exchanging links, try to vary yourself as much as possible. Try to establish link exchanges with sites with similar topic. These exchanges can often result in increased traffic as well as improved link popularity.

Another way of boosting the number of inbound links is submitting your site to various directories. The number of directories is virtually unlimited, but manually submitting your URL to all of them is extremely time-consuming. The links you get from these directories are often of very high quality, so see to it that you are represented in as many as you can.

The more inbound links you have the better, but try to stay clear of shady link farms and the like. Links from such places will most likely not do you any good anyway, and if you exchange links with such sites on a regular basis you will probably get in trouble sooner or later.

If you can offer relevant, high quality links - you will stand a good chance of getting good links in return. Links NOT placed on a link page, but within a site’s content are generally the best ones, both for page rank and for attracting visitors.


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Theo Swan - Writing about affiliate marketing and how to generate revenue online.

Read more of Theos articles at Affiliate Ranker's Resources
Or visit Theo's Affiliate Blog


Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]>