Not much today, just another example of how to promote rather costly affiliate products. Success stories of the health affiliates are no more new today; they have used (and sometimes abused) the Search Engine Index to earn really big money. Products like Treadmills are simply selling like hot-cake even today. An EPC (Earning Per Hundred Clicks) of over $100 is not very uncommon.

Health-cautious new generation just love to have their own home gym set. So why not you be the supplier? The step is simple, join an affiliate program that sells home gym sets. Select few products very carefully. cross-check the product quality with Amazon reviews or any other site providing free reviews, although it is always better to have at least some hands-on experience in this field. If you do not have any experience, you can ask for help of your health-cautious friends, family members or , anybody around you. Just conduct few simple surveys, like how far is it effective and so on and so forth.

Once your survey is complete, register a domain name, purchase some hosting plan, and design, develop and publish your affiliate site. Mind you, your visitors are coming to purchase products, which cost $500 USD or more, so, they expect some special reception. A spammy looking website is not going to gain their confidence. The site should be professionally designed without any attempt to show the “Buy Now” button in the home page. Once again, Do not just put up your affiliate link in the home page itself. Rather, try to provide as much information as you have for couple of pages allowing the visitors to navigate deep into your website; you are dealing with some sophisticated clients, so, try not to promote, but to provide information regarding your products. They are well aware of this field, so, do not try to cheat or challenge their knowledge. Rather, useful and relevant information against each listed product will develop your credibility. Never try to promote a product just because it offers you more commission! Think, how can you help visitors to take a decision in this regard.
Add a separate reviews and ratings section for each product you have selected. And finally, after reading the product features, your editorial reviews, customer feedbacks and some testimonial ( All in different pages, so that visitors may go deep into your website) - tell them to ‘buy it ‘.

You will be astonished to see high conversion rates, and with unique and relevant content, you might get the blessings of the search engines.

Goodluck.

Technorati Tags: Affiliate Marketing

• Don’t load pages with irrelevant words
• Provide unique and relevant content

This is what Google has to say about affiliate sites. The first one is a general issue, applicable for all websites, whereas, the second one relates to affiliate site more specifically. Can you recall Matt Cutts “Indexing Timeline“, lots of roars were sprouted as comments to that post in web’s probably the most popular webmasters’ blog? After an apparently harsh measure taken by Google to block ’spammy’ sites flooded with junks of affiliate links? So, affiliate sites call for SEO, which must be different from a non-affiliate website.

Now the biggest issue is what to do and how to do that?

Just read the Google guidelines there, first one does not let you add irrelevant words, which is applicable for all the websites. But the second, specifically for the affiliate sites, looks very interesting. You have to add value to your sites - ‘Unique and Relevant Content’ - is the necessary and sufficient criteria for ranking higher in the Google SERP.

So, affiliates must not fall short of ideas. If you are an expert in a subject, and you have the ability to write a lot of articles on that subject, then the problem is much simple for you. All you need is to register a domain name, preferably reflecting the focus of the site, purchase an affordable hosting plan, and either use a content management system or develop and design a simple HTML based website with the affiliate links piping in between the contents. Depending upon your level of expertise and the power of self-expression, both the visitors and that Bot will respond to your site. A good response will definitely going to give you rewarding returns in terms of hits, return visits and conversion.

But, and the biggest ‘but’ is the fact that most of us do not have a Ph.D. degree in a specific subject and still we need money. So, you have to work on for more option. A comparison shop is definitely a good option. Again it calls for some research work. My recent studies indicate that ‘Inkjet Printer Cartridges’ is one of the hottest selling stuff in the Internet. So, you may take part in ‘Inkjet Printer Cartridges’ affiliate programs, and open a comparison shop listing five to ten sellers against each item.

Yeh Man are you joking?

Yes, if you are well aware of the varieties of Inkjet Printer Cartridges available now, you will simply end up in frustration as it may take few months to develop your shop ( Unless you are able to develop sophisticated scripts to automate the task using Datafeeds ) and when your shop is online, prices might have changed meanwhile - making your site absolutely useless for the visitors.

So, what to do?

Simply narrow down your option, may be a brand specific site, i.e., focussed on a brand - like Canon or HP, will be better; like “Canon Inkjet Printer Cartridges”, or “HP Inkjet Printer Cartridges” and even if you think that you can’t manage the work load involved, you can make the scope still narrower. But whatever you would like to sell in a Comparison shop, setup your objective first depending upon available resources. For obvious reason, ‘Inkjet Printer Cartridges’ is just an example, you may go with many different selling products using ‘EBay Top 10′ list, or something like that.
It would be better for me not to disclose any other secrets for promotion of Affiliate websites, but I can’t help it. Today I’m in a fine mood to discuss these secret issues, so, read on.

There are few things you must try to follow while building an affiliate site:

1. Your Page Title should contain Keywords, but, try to avoid the titles given in Datafeed or the same title as used by your merchants. My studies with certain brand of products have clearly indicated the dangers of using the same title tags. Against each merchant, there may be lots of affiliate sites just like yours, won’t it look spammy, if Google Search Result #1 to #100 get occupied with different URLs having the same title? What do you think? If you were ‘Google’ - what would you do?
2. Try to avoid the same description, both in META and CONTENT, as provided by your merchant.

3. Use ‘H1′ tag intelligently to cover keywords without repeating the page title.

4. Few free links in your web page may be a good protection against Google-Bite.

5. Add value to your affiliate site, after adding each page, ask yourself the question - ‘Does it add any value?’, or ‘Is There any other site providing the same information in a better way?’ Satisfy your-self first with the quality of your web pages, then think of the visitors; “G”-Bot is intelligent enough to pick up and promote the best in the web, so you need not be too much worried about the Bot at the very beginning.
And in fine, no, I won’t tell a single more word. Now it is up to you to decide whether you will enjoy the Google Juice or Not.

Technorati Tags! Affiliate Marketing

No, MySpace does not let you place your Affiliate links or other commercial advertisements in your profile.
But Internet Marketers are simply digging new avenues to use MySpace for promoting their brands for FREE.

Then what is mySpace?

It is a social networking site where users can make friendship, to a varying degree ( just friend, activity partner, serious relationship or networking) , or at the most, spend time to build a network. And MySpace does not charge you a single cent to do that so far and so long you create a personal profile.

What can I do in mySpace?

mySpace is a multi-featured sites providing you myriads of opportunity to interact with your friends at mySpace. First of all, you can create your profile - write some stuff about yourself, your interest, hobby, music, movie, persons you would like to meet as well as your heros! MySpace also allow you to blog, upload photos or videos, send bulletins to all of your friends or send message to anybody. It also let you post comments about your friends in their profile page. You can send a friends request to anyone ( Almost! ) in that  social networking site.

Ok! Got it! Then how can I promote my product or services?

As I have told earlier that you do not have permission to use mySpace for commercial purposes. So you can’t be vocal their about your products or services. But there are nice ways to do the task. Fact is that I followed the guidelines given in the links below to give it a success with few modifications - as you know - few tricks. So I would first of all share with you my opinion and then would like to request you to follow those links. I believe you can get decent a traffic and m…… using mySpace.

OK! Tell me what to do?

First of all, always keep in your mind mySpace is a Social Networking Site and it is the place for your friends and not any free advertising forum where you are free to promote your products or services. So, it calls for a modest approach  with  personal touch to win the race.  Here goes my tips:

1. Create a decent profiles - try to reflect the person you are not any product or service - your taste, your favorites and some hints to what you do - your profession, or occupation etc.

2. Add friends.

Do it following a definite schedule - check if the person has similar interest or share common thoughts - this helps a lot in future communications  - before sending a friendship request. You will see some of them has actually wanted to become your friends. Greet them at the first meeting by sending messages or posting comments  to their profile.
3. Post blogs to give updates about yourself and sometimes about your products or services.

4. Add photos - if you are selling some fancy items - like handbag for woman - show some items in your photos.

5. Create a semi-amature video presenting you as a person and tell something about your interest. For example, if you are selling handbags for women, share your source of inspiration or how do you stimulate your creative thoughts. If you  can manage relevant videos from  sites like YouTube - use it to see some big hits.
6.  Send Bulletins - you can send bulletin to communicate with your mySpace friends. Provide important announcements and updates about anything interesting or try to go for a more focussed campaign - driving traffic to a particular websites.

7. Take part in relevant communities - it will provide you the right exposure

8. Use mySpace classified for promoting your products or services and that is allowed. mySpace classified ( I could not product any result though!) is also a great way to drive traffic to your profile.

9. mySpace does not allow you to create multiple profile, so, I’ll not recommend that anyway. Also do not send spam messages - I’ve seen Spammers get deleted from mySpace overnight.

10. Be co-operative and a good listener - mySpace has really lot of juice still left for you.

Good luck.

Further reading:
1. ) 10 Ways To Make Money With MySpace!

2. ) Self Promotion on MySpace!

Those two articles are complementary to one another and provide enough information on MySpace Marketing, still, I’m digging for few more and let you know whenever I get something new.

MySpace Promotion

Creating profile in mySpace is really a challenging task as they do allow you to use HTML and CSS tags. So, you can tweak with CSS and HTML to get the desired looks and feels.

Although, you can not do much with the basic layout as you do not have controls over the basic page layout -i.e., the DIV and the table structures, but by changing background property, font size and color, and hiding certain sections - you can really give it a very different look.

Here is a simple step by step method to jump start your mySpace profile:

BASIC LEVEL ( Copy-Paste Method )
1) Set the background image/ layout:

Free Background Image / Layout: Copy the code and paste it in the About Me section

2) Hide Top/ Bottom Navigation Bar, they look ugly.

Copy and Paste the code given here!

3) Hide Details Section; if you want it to hide at all.

Simply copy and paste the code given here.

4) Remove Blog(?) and Extended Network Section:

Simply copy and paste the code given here

There are better alternative to hide the ‘Extended Network Section’ only, but that needs editing CSS style for ‘blacktext12′ class; set it to display: none to hide the text.
Obviously there are much more settings you can change or hide:

Get a full list here!

ADVANCED CSS EDITING

You should have some knowledge of basic CSS to do this.

Here you have to find the respective class and edit it.

This will give it a new look.

How to do that?
Open your mySpace url.

Click: view -> page source

This will show you the HTML page source.

Find the text, whose looks and feels, you want to change.

(Example: I tried to change CSS style for my Name: ‘SID’, I searched for the word ‘SID’ in the page source window and got that.)

Next Locate the CSS:

(Example: It is something like => class=”nametext”)
Here we get it, the class governing behavior of ‘SID’ is nametext.

Now change the CSS property of the class nametext, you can use DreamWeaver to do it more easily.

Copy and paste the changed class property in the About Me section in place of the existing class property. It must be placed in between ’style’ ‘/style’ block.

Done.

Experiment with different classes to change the overall looks and feels of your mySpace profile:

This is my profile:

http://www.myspace.com/myphp

Is Google Adsense Ads Allowed?

MySpace does not let you use Javascript, anything - including Google Adsense Ads - that contains Javascript, is not allowed.
What more I can do with mySpace?

You can create blog, add and share photos, vidoes - and there are some more fun stuff.
In fine, MySpace is really a perfect site for social networking, it may give you a great expose as well. The task of tweaking with CSS/HTML is really challenging for any programmer. Enjoy it, as I have done so while editing it.
Cheers!

Technorati Tags

MySpace Profile

At times, you may just get confused about how to promote your website? So many free resources are there, if you do not want to consider the paid options! Have we used them to their maximum potential in order to drive traffic to our websites?

I guess, so far as my focus goes, I’ve always been wandering; without making any promotional plan and sticking to that; just tried to follow advices that come from different sources; mostly like do this or do that.

Though, I must appreciate that those have worked to some extent to drive traffic to my websites and this blog, still I need a continuous stream of visitors to keep my sites running - don’t you?

If you are really serious about promoting your website,first of all make a plan - where to promote, how to promote, how much and how long to promote! It has been said so many times that once you have finished your website, put it for reviews and if you are satisfied with its quality - just go on promoting; quite common phrase - “Let the world know about your website!”

The free resources are well known to all of us:

1. Free Web Directory

2. Article Writing

3. FFA and Classified Ads Sites

4. Newsletters

5. Social Networking Sites

6. Press release etc.
Instead of just wandering around, it is better to make a plan - something like - how many directory submissions should suffice, or how many articles should I write each week? Now prepare a daily/weekly schedule of activity to reach your target and stick to that.

It should look something like:

Name of Website: abc.com
Target Visitors: XXXX per week

Campaign Starts On: xx/xx/xxxx

Campaign Target Completion Date: xx/xx/xxxx

Target Activity:

Dir Submissions: XX per week

Articles: X per week

Classified Ads Submissions: X per week

Newsletter: X per week

Social Networking Sites: X hours per week

Press Release: X per week etc.

*If you are not an expert in writing press release, then just learn it from the available resources; it must be narrative, like a reporter writes.

Once you have framed your target activity, now just keep a log of each activity:
Date Website Dir Articles FFA/Classifieds Newsletter Press Release

- either in the above format, in the form of a spreadsheet, or the way you feel better. This raw activity log will help you to monitor, review and modify your activities based on the available data.

• Many webmasters do submit their websites to different existing directories just after publishing their website, it is a good practice; still they are advised to look for new PR directories, this will definitely compensate for the expired directories.
• Website promotion is not instantaneous, but it spreads like ripples in a pond, the older your domain name is, and the sustained effort you have made to promote your website - the better it will yield in the long run.

The next time, before getting frustrated for want of traffic in your website or blog, at least you can check, what efforts you have made to draw visitors to your website.

Related Topics!

Website Promotions || Free Web Directory || Free Classified Ads Site || Press Release || Free Article Submission || Free Advertising Resources

SEO, the popular abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization, is a quite common word in the webmaster’s world. Whether you have a website, or a blog, or even a forum - without basic knowledge of SEO, it is difficult for you to get your site indexed in major search engines, like - Google, Yahoo or MSN (Live). You need to tweak with the META Tags, keywords, HTML tags - like

h1

or

h2

etc.tags, link text, link url or alt tag - at the basic level to increase your site’s visibility in search engine. And apart from that, you have to build up a good volume of inbound links, pointing to your website with keyword rich link-text; which is the most difficult part of SEO.Probably, webmasters - even newbies are almost aware of these basic SEO tricks and employ them to increase their search engine rank. And these are not unfair and may be called white hat seo -trick, if done within limit.

There is a word called limit to everything and when you give stress in optimizing your website, both on-page and off-page optimization within your limit - there is no harm. But either to get the desired result too early, or, in a special drive to rank #1 in Google, Yahoo or MSN - if you implement, what is called bad SEO practices, you are bound to get into more trouble that your instant gain.

What you can do and must not do to adhere to the white hat SEO tricks?

1. Adding keyword rich hidden text or using text color as the same as the background color,so that the visitors may not see the keywords but the search engine bots can see it and may rank your site higher for high keyword density.

And it is absolutely wrong. Search Engine crawlers are smart enough to pick up these over used tricks and will simply keep your site out of their index. A moderate keyword density of 1% to 3% at the most is desired at this time.

2. Do not employ clocking, i.e., showing one version of web pages to the visitors and the another version of web pages to the search engine bots, or create doorway pages. These are too bad trick.

3. Do not go on for loading your web page with unnecessary words just to keep the word count to 300+ as advised by many SEO experts.

4. And finally link trading and link exchanging - this is the most important factor that usually measures how high your site will rank in the search engine result pages.Few irresponsible SEO firms and even few webmasters themselves, in an effort to push websites up in the ranking, simply go on trading links. Even exchanging links with irrelevant websites, or exchanging bulk amount of links within a very short duration is what is just opposite to White Hat SEO.

In short, White Hat SEO practice is the one focussed mainly on on-page optimization and regarding off-page optimisation, like - link-building, such practice usually rely mostly on editorially given links or a limit their efforts within directory submissions in high PR web directories, or some limited link exchange with relevant websites. These are the good SEO practices that pay well in the long run.

Reading of this article is strongly advised:

Black Hat vs. White Hat

Related Topics:

SEO Tricks

Rank High In Google Search

Not many of us, the webmasters, care a lot about whether to use a bold or a strong tag. But a recent video, released by the Google Guy Matt Cutts, might just compel you to think over the issue once more.

I was just browsing the net for some resources to write a post for this blog and got stuck to that Video, where Matt has gracefully declared the qualities of a good website. It has been done in a question-answer form with carefully chosen questions and very unambiguous answers.

The discussions started with a debatable sitemap issue, whether Page-Load has anything to do with the sitemap update; and the answer was ‘no’, as expected. Regarding the issue, quality of good website, he has pointed out the much-discussed content issue again. “Good content, and content that is interesting”- is the key. One may consider something interesting like, having a newsletter or some tutorial, for which visitors will come to that website.
Adding a sitemap is a good way to ensure better crawling and it has been mentioned there as per expection. However, no reference to HTML/CSS Validation was there which might be just an oversight or may be Google is yet to give it due importance, but, it is an essential quality of a good website nowadays.

And finally came the question: what Google prefers more, bold or strong HTML tag? And Matt’s answer is:

“In general, we probably prefer bold just a little bit more, but its so slight that I wouldn’t going to worry about it.”

So, in your next project it is up to you to decide whether to worry about the Bold or Strong issue or not, but, that’s what Google has to say in this regard.

Just like to share with you this video!

Google Hell

I would like to request dear readers to read the topic first.

It is all about Google Supplemental Results. The entire SEO industry and the Website Publishers across the globe have largely opined that nothing worse can happen than to see web pages in the supplemental results, if you set aside Google Ban.

But, Matt Cutts has something different to say regarding this issue. And I just want to quote what he has to say:

“Google’s supplemental results are some sort of search engine dungeon where bad pages go and sit in limbo forever, and that’s just not true.” – This is what he has to say about the supplemental result.

Regarding this issue, a reference to a previous post has been cited which suggests,

“the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank.”

So, PageRank plays the key role to determine whether your site will be in the Main Index or in the Supplemental index. Google updates its algorithm from time to time. It implements new measure to judge the importance of inbound links to your site. So, there is every possibility that the big “G” may not judge the IBLs to be equally important round the year for many reasons, including, an attempt to implement bad SEO practice like link trading, or link purchase, or even worse a Spam report against a particular website - may result in dropping the site out of main web index. The site is then placed in the supplemental index.

And that’s exactly what Matt has to say in that discussion – “a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past.”

The second point relates to reciprocal link exchange:

It appears from the discussion of the Google Guy that reciprocal link exchange with relevant sites may not invite a Google Ban or a penalty in any form so far and so long it is done keeping a certain limit. But linking to irrelevant sites, for mere excuse to earn inbound links may result in a penalty.

“Reciprocal links by themselves aren’t automatically bad, but we’ve communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking.”

Obviously, the man dealing with Web Spam for so long days has once more reminded us what Google considers a solid white-hat SEO is, “to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit)”.

SEO | Link Exchange | Google Optimization

If you are really serious about setting up your own website design and development business, here are an abstract of the discussions recently took place in WPW forum; I liked the great ideas shared exclusive by the men who know their business and are successful in this industry. So, I like to share it with you all.

To start a website design and development business, apart from having good technical knowledge and infrastructures, you need customer – who will entrust you with the job. To penetrate the world market as a web developer is not that easy with any prior work experience or without bearing a great portfolio; so, the option may be to poke into the local market. A market that you know like your own palm, the customers can trust you for they can meet you direct and can explain their projects. Getting people interested in publishing their own website is not that difficult in these days when a website is an essential means of communication, whether the person is a professional – like a Doctor, or an Architect, or an Artisan – or it is a commercial establishment like a local beauty parlor or a message center or even a store; Website is a must of all of us today. So there is ample number of clients and that fact should not require any more illustration. But, how to dig the soil is the matter of great concern for all of us, and in that discussion of WPW, it has been revealed without keeping anything secret. Since it is a, rather, long citation, so, I would present here the brief abstract.

• Rent an office place in an easily accessible location, location is the key where your potential customers can get to meet with you. It is rather difficult to monitor such business from home unless you have a separate suitable space.
• Create a profile in MySpace and let the world know what services you can offer!

Create a content rich, resourceful website optimized for local search, offer some local discounts. Design banners and make them available on a link to us page on your website as well. As potential clients like to chat a bit before making a decision, so, put up your IM in the Contact Us page, or, in MySpace profile.

• Talk to the business owners
• Cold Calling (in Person) will work the best.
• Approach local cities, towns, scout troops, churches, sports teams and offer your FREE service to building and maintaining a website for them.
• Take part in local Chamber of Commerce
• Print and Distribute nice Brochure
• Utilize Social Networking Sites like Ryze, linkedin, BNI (Business Networking International), meetup.com
• Post ads on Craigslist.org
• Contact local ISPs in your area for exchanging clients.
• Contact local people who are in the related industry, like, Web Hosting Company, SEO Workers, and People Working in Website Marketing; negotiate with them.
• Let the word of mouth spread in your locality.
• Build up a newsletter mailing list.
• For Website Design and Development business non-internet ways of marketing works best.
• Skip the yellow pages, and might be Post Cards - its worthless for web design
• There are no bad customers. If you take the time to learn the customers’ needs, his business and his potential customers you will succeed. Answer the phone when people call with questions. Always be nice no matter how rude and arrogant people are
• Be prepared to hire in help once things get rolling and be prepared for taxes.
• The key is to deliver quality - delivering something that’s fit for purpose.

you can read the full discussion at WPW!

Related Links

Website Promotion | Off-line Marketing | Website Design Services