Affiliate Marketing Guide

Hello everyone, and welcome back. In this post of the affiliate marketing guide I will discuss a marketing method which I am currently trying out myself, called article marketing. The great thing about this method in comparison to most other ones is the fact that you don’t need a website in order to go through with it; all you need is a product to advertise.

First Article Marketing Step – The Content

Once you’ve gotten an affiliate link to whatever product you wish to promote, the first thing you need to do is make sure you have a way of getting content written. Most of the articles you will write will be somewhere between 300 and 500 words, so you don’t really need a Pulitzer winner on this one.

If you cannot or don’t want to do the writing yourself and have no one to do it for you, there are other ways to go. For example, there are various forums on the internet where ghost writers can be found. Alternatively, there are website such as iWriter example where you can simply post the articles you need written and wait for writers to do them. Of course, you can make special requests if you know who you want to write for you.

Second Article Marketing Step – Uploading your Articles

In any case, the next step in article marketing is to find websites where you will be able to upload your articles. The first places you should check out are article databases such as Ezine Articles, but these places usually have very strict policies in regards to posting links in posts, so you will have to look around and make a list of directories.

Apart from the regular article directories, there are also some websites which allow you to upload pdf articles. Most people find pdf documents more pleasant to read than other formats, which is probably one of the main reasons pdf marketing websites are gaining in popularity.

Also, you should keep in mind that while these websites tend to be more lenient when it comes to posting links, some of them do enforce some very strict rules, going as far as instantly banning your account if you break them… just make sure to read the terms of agreement before you do anything.

To reiterate, all you need to do is simply find products, write short articles describing what they are about, and simply insert the affiliate links into them. This is a totally free method that will pay off in the long run when you will have uploaded many documents. I highly recommend that you try to upload at least two articles per day on a consistent basis; the results will come.

Hello, and welcome to my affiliate marketing guide after a long hiatus. Instead of talking about what I usually do, I would like to dedicate this post to sharing my take on what the SOPA Act means for the future of the internet, whether it gets passed or not.

If you are reading this then the chances of you being an internet user go up by 110%, which means that you have at least heard of the SOPA Act. To make a long story short, as I’m sure a majority of you know already what this is about, SOPA is an act authored by Lamar Smith in order to allegedly put a stop to internet piracy. However, pretty much everything that was suggested in the act has been deemed to be simply ridiculous by pretty much everyone.

What Does Passing the SOPA Act Entail?

If the act was to pass, then a website could be immediately shut down if it has any type of copyright infraction, or if it has “harmful” links that can lead you to pirate website.

So in other words, all you would have to do in order to shut down your competition is to simply look for anything that may infringe copyrights on their website, which is actually easier to do than it sounds, especially seeing as how Lamar Smith’s website was actually caught posting up a picture without crediting the author, which is a copyright infringement.

Also, you may simply post a comment and leave a link to a Torrent website, after which all you would have to do is report the website and watch it go down within a few hours. In other words, the internet would die.

Does the SOPA Act have a Chance?

Do I think this act will pass? Not a chance in hell, unless we are watching the biggest conspiracy ever unfold between our eyes. The public support for this issue is unbelievably low, with the majority of its supporters being tied to large corporations in the art industry (not to mention the supporters being insanely rich)… or as some like to refer to them, the 1%.

The White House has the right to simply veto the SOPA Act, and so far everything indicates that if it will be necessary, they will do so; the Obama administration simply cannot afford to anger and alienate such a large part of the population considering most of them want him out of the office already… not during an election year at least.
And even if there were no elections or even public support at stake, there is still a good reason to believe that the President can see just how harmful SOPA will be to the internet in general, not the mention the American Ecommerce industry, which is growing exponentially.

What does the SOPA Act Imply for the Internet’s Future?

So if there is really nothing to worry about with this act, what’s all the fuss about? Well, this pretty much marks the first time that the government tried to impose an authoritarian control of the internet. Until people started talking about SOPA and PIPA, most of us simply didn’t realize that anyone would ever try to control the internet with an iron fist.

We never thought that censorship would be practiced on the internet, especially not in “the land of the free”. While the act certainly won’t pass, it will be something from which those who want control over everything will start to build.
If we simply let them, if we simply ignore the issue and stay inactive, in time they will reach their goal and silence us with the law. This should serve as a wake-up call to us all and remind us not to take our freedom for granted.

Hello, and welcome back to my affiliate marketing guide. In my previous posts I have extensively discussed how you should go about finding your niche market, and in this one I aim to explore a method which involves going to bookstores in order to find the hot markets.

While reading is less and less of a common activity nowadays, there are still hundreds of thousands, if not millions of books out there that have for objective to help people fix some type of problem and make life better. If you can successfully identify the hot market books (in other terms, the ones that have the biggest demand) then you will see that identifying a hot marketing topic becomes child’s play.

Market Research – Local Bookstores

To start your market research you should first do a little investigating at the bookstores in your area. Simply take a look at which non-fiction books are selling better (the salesperson know what gets restocked how often, so asking them is a good start), and you will be ready to go for a local marketing campaign. Amongst all the books, chances are that you will have the most success with how-to and self-help books, as they are usually aimed at helping people work on or fix some type of common problem. Naturally, you can do the exact same thing by going to online libraries and looking at the trends.

Market Research – Online

If you are going to be doing the research through online bookstores, then your method of research needs to be slightly different. You won’t have anyone to help you out, but you will be able to easily identify which books are the most popular by their amount of ratings and the quality of their reviews. In some ways, doing market research this way is advantageous in the sense that you will have instant access to the opinions of hundreds, if not thousands of users who have read the book… you will be working with numbers, and they seldom lie.

What to do After?

Once you are done with the market research, the obvious thing to do is simply promote those books. However, you can go deeper and use these books you identified as a source of information as to what people are looking for in general. With this knowledge, you will be able to not only know what types of products it is best to promote, but you will also have a good idea of what people want if you are ever going to create your own product.

I know that this type of research method seems a bit outdated for the 21st century, but those who have gone through with it know just how effectively proper market research can lead you to a hot niche market.

Hello and welcome back to the affiliate marketing guide. In this post I will basically continue discussing how you can further research your topic in order to narrow down your market niche, and thus make all of your marketing, promoting and advertising efforts much more rewarding.

Research Products and your Niche Market

The first factor which you are going to be looking at when you research products or services that you plan on promoting in your niche market is just how high the demand is for it. Before you go out making your website and start the whole process of advertising and optimizing it you must make sure that you are going to be offering something that people will actually need; otherwise, all your efforts will have been in vain as there will be no one interested in what you have to offer. You should focus your search around products that actually help people solve a problem, let it be losing weight or teaching your children basic language skills easily.

Once you have conducted your analysis and chosen a product or a service to promote, it is now time to narrow down your market niche in order to determine the audience to whom you will be advertising mostly. You should take into account the amount of time they spend online, their activities during their spare time, what their motivations and goals are, how they like to spend their money and what are their general demographic characteristics (gender, age…). Naturally, it goes without saying that there is a myriad of other factors that you could incorporate into making your decision, but these are the main ones that are mandatory.

Getting Some Extra Help and Ideas

If you are not feeling too keen about doing this work manually using a bunch of free tools then you could always look for one of many niche market software programs that have been designed to help you learn all the information you will need to fully analyze your niche of choice and make an educated decision based on that.

If you want to get some inspiration or ideas as to how the advertising campaign is properly done, then perhaps the best place to get some cues would be from your competitors. Simply look at how products or services similar to yours are advertised by successful companies and without copying them take some pointers. This will also give you a pretty good understand as to the price most of your potential customers would be willing to pay.

To sum things up, if you can manage to find a product for which the demand is high and isolate the specific group of people within the niche market that you are going to be reaching out to then without a doubt your promotional efforts will have a much better chance of being successful.

Hello, and welcome back to my affiliate marketing guide. This post will be the second one in a series of many pertaining to niche marketing. In my last post about niche marketing a brief overview was given of niche marketing, and so this post will address some common misconceptions people have about it that often leads them down on a road of failure.

The Two Biggest Niche Marketing Misconceptions

First of all, you should always keep in mind that the goal of niche marketing is not to simply advertise and sell your product to the whole world. The point is still the same: to identify and go for targeted audiences that are sure to be interested in your offers. A lot of people make the mistake of spending huge amounts of money on various advertisement campaigns, which in the end brings them very little as they did not reach out to those who actually mattered.

Second of all, you should remember that niche marketing is not a competition, especially when compared to the advertising to everyone. In this instance you will not be dealing with hundreds, and possibly thousands of other people who are selling either the same product as you are, or something in the same category that is proving to be just as much, if not more effective. When using niche marketing you should end up building yourself a mailing list of clients who are ready and willing to listen to your offers, because it is you who is offering them.

The True Reward of Putting Effort into Niche Marketing

Contrarily to regular marketing, niche marketing has for goal not to sell your products to different customers on every day. Instead, it aims to create more of a long-term relationship between you and your clients so that you can sell different products to them time after time again, without having to wait or look for customers. Taking your time and effort into building your list and presenting yourself as a trustworthy person in front of your subscribers can really be beneficent in the long run, as some may simply end up trusting you to make decisions for them.

All in all, simply keep in mind that niche marketing is basically all about focusing on the smaller, more detailed and precise picture rather than the larger one. You need to narrow down to a target audience in your niche which will allow you to gain more profits, even though they will be coming from a small part of the population… there are seven billion people in the world now, and all you need to make a comfortable living is for a tiny fraction of them to purchase your product.

Hello, and welcome back to the affiliate marketing guide. In this post I will basically discuss the importance of basing your business model on niche marketing.

What is Niche Marketing?

Well, to sum it up in a nutshell, niche marketing is the concept of narrowing down your target market in order to make it more specific. Contrarily to some merchants who advertise anything they come across on their website, marketing a niche gives you the opportunity to really make your content much more specific, meaning that you will be bringing in targeted traffic.

Why is targeted traffic so important? Well because it consists of people who know what they are looking for and most of whom are actually ready and willing to make a purchase. If not, then they are certainly looking for some information which they are sure to find on a website dedicated to their topic of interest.

The Importance of Knowing your Customer

A mistake which a lot of business owners make is to neglect doing any research on who exactly their target audience is. However, by getting to know your customer you will also get familiar with their mentality and recognize what it is they are actually looking for. In turn, this means that when writing your content for them you will know exactly what information to include and how you should be communicating it.

There are various ways in which you can narrow down your potential customers, including: age, gender, employment, marital status, income, physical location, religious beliefs, ethnic background as well as interests and hobbies.

The Main Reason Niche Marketing is Important?

The main reason most business models should adhere to niche marketing is because not everyone is looking to purchase their product. Too many people simply make the mistake of believing that everyone will want their product, but what they forget is that not everyone has the need or the problem which the product fulfills or solves.

As was said before, putting in extra research and perhaps even looking at some niche marketing examples related to your niche will help you define the group of people who will actually want to purchase your product. From this point on, it mainly becomes a question of the quality of your content.

Hello and welcome back to the affiliate marketing guide. Among all the various tips and tricks I’ve shared over the past few months, I have seldom touched upon the subject of how to choose a domain name properly.

In a lot of cases, people simply settle either on something which sounds nice and is generally connected to the theme of their website, either on something which is based on some keyword research they have done.

However, the domain name bears more influence than most people believe, and as such I believe it is important for those of you out there who are going to be buying a domain name in the future to keep in mind the following tips on how to choose a domain name.

How to Choose a Domain Name that will Stick

One of the primary things which a domain needs to be is memorable. People need to be able to remember it after only seeing it one time, so try to keep it short and snappy.

Along with this consideration you should also make sure that the name you take clearly indicates what type of service your website is offering (try and put your main keyword in there); getting traffic through a misleading domain name will certainly not up your conversion rate.

When it comes to establishing yourself on the market, one of the first things you will want to do is to trademark your business so that your content and ideas will not be stolen.
The easiest way to establish your trademark is through your domain name. Most people find the safest way to do this is to include their name in the domain title, although you could also invent a new company name (make sure it is not taken and trademarked by some obscure company no one heard of).

Getting Help in Choosing a Domain Name

Coming up with a domain name on your own can be quite a difficult thing to do, especially if you are in a competitive niche where most of the obvious good names have already been taken. In these situations, you need to be more resourceful and perhaps imaginative, but even with these assets it may take you quite a while before you can come up with something suitable on all fronts.

For this reason, there are many people out there who have advanced their own domain name generators. While there are some out there who have the nerve to charge (and in some cases, quite a lot) for such a simple piece of software, the majority of programs that focus solely on generating domain names come free of charge.

Most of these programs work by having you put in the keywords you want to, after which it will give you all the possible domain names you can generate from these terms. In all of the software programs I have tried so far, the results displayed only pertain to available domain names, which quite frankly saves you a lot of tedious work.

Hello and welcome back to my affiliate marketing guide.
Today, I am going to discuss a certain email I have received from Google which proved to be quite an interesting read, especially the part about the official statements from Google, about Google SEO. Matt Cutts has agreed to answer some very pertinent questions from various webmasters for the benefit of the community, and here they are.

The Google SEO Q&A

• First of all, there has been a big question mark for the community as to how exactly the +1 clicks affect your organic rankings. I know you are hoping for a fulfilling answer, but the truth is that Google themselves are still testing this feature and still haven’t compiled enough statistics for a proper conclusion. However, it looks as if only real +1 clicks help; purchased ones are worth nothing.
• The second question to be answered is to whether or not you can exclude your website from ranking for certain keywords. Well, the straight up answer is no seeing as how it is pretty much impossible to guarantee that you will not be able to appear for certain keywords seeing as how it could be used as a way of silencing criticism and negative reviews.
• Is the age of a website an important factor when ranking websites? While it is not the only factor, you can bet the house it’s an important one. However, you need to keep in mind that you will need to keep bringing updates and new information in order to earn your stay at the top.
• There is another point which confuses many people: Google rewrites your meta description tag. Why? Well, Google will only take into account the meta description if it is considered to be appropriate for the keyword. As a part of the process, Google will also write their own description in order to demonstrate why the query was ranked the way it was.
• Finally, there is the everlasting question which no doubt will be asked many more times in the future: what do I do if some jerk steals my content? Well, short of tracking the person down and dishing out some personal justice, the best course of action you can take is to file a DMCA complaint as well as report that person as a spammer, especially if they are actively scraping content completely. Click on the following link if you want protect your WordPress blog with the DMCA Protection Free WordPress Plugin

In conclusion, what you need to remember is that ranking for search engines is quite a complex task with many different facets and details to it, all of which add up to give you a ranking. When it comes to Google SEO requirements and demands, things can get even tougher for a lot of people, especially considering the fact that there are several updates to the Panda algorithm every year. There are however certain Google SEO factors which are known to make a real difference when it comes to a website’s ranking on the search engine: a low bounce rate and quality content that is unique and relevant.