Sid - Blogging for Newbie Webmasters’

All visitors no customers! If this were the situation with your affiliate site, you need to consider revising your business model. What is a business model?

This is the basic guideline which will set the contents of your website, navigation structure and requirement of updates along with every other technical details - like keywords etc. These are the pages, which you need to go through regularly in order to avoid an potential damage to the goodwill of your website by including contents, either irrelevant or annoying for your visitors.

Ideally for affiliate websites, business model may be of four types:

1. Content based site.

These are the websites containing contents on a specific subject. It is always advisable to focus on a single subject as it is extremely difficult to learn, understand and write about a wide varieties of subjects each day. A blog focussed on a definite niche can do this as well. The simplicity of this model is that you need not have much room for commitment for your visitors. Add, update or modify pages as and when required, or based on available time. If you can write interesting content regularly on a specific product, or product lines - you are definitely going to get return visitors, who would then consider making a purchase from your website.

2. Deals, Coupons and discounts

This is the website/blog that should be focussed on deals, discounts, or coupon codes. Then again there is no need to enlist all the deals of the world to get a sell. Rather, it is always best to set focal points at some specific products, and update deals and coupons related to that. Also users often try to find coupon codes from different web stores. So Coupon codes by stores listing will definitely add value to your website.

But it calls for a regular maintenance of your website or blog. You need to update deals, as well as remove expired deals from time to time to give a fresh look to your website daily. Depending upon the product line you have chosen, if you can manage to spend few hours daily - this must be the best business model for you.

3. Comparison Shop:

Websites listing various vendors for the same item, like nextag, is a good example comparison shops. As it is virtually impossible for a single individual to maintain such a site, update each listing wherever there is a change in price, so it is not advisable to take up such a site unless you are a coding expert, or has wide experience, and you will be able to spend fair amount of time each day to update and maintain your website.

Once again, this model is only for expert users.

4. Hybrid model

This is just a combination of one or more of the above model. While visiting Camera reviews, I have seen lots of websites lists vendors with price details requesting their visitors to consider buying from such stores to help the project keeping alive.

This is also rather difficult but it has the flexibility in the way that you have the option open to write few lines to convince your prospective buyers, and then direct them to the advertisers’ websites.

Thus, I must say that if you can adhere to a strict discipline in terms of your business model which is to be extremely focussed - there is no reason for you to see visitors going away without making purchase from your website.

All of us need money. Don’t we? This is the market pressure that forces you to earn more to spend more and enjoy a decent living. A lot of people searches internet to find out online earning opportunities. I personally face a lot of questions regarding this from my friends and neighbors as well. They ask for advices or suggestions. They tend to look forward for instant result, and oh dear often ends up with frustration. But there are a lot of serious minded people as well who do believe in the old proverb: “Rome was not built in a day”.

It takes time dear, and you have to carry on atleast upto a certain mark.

I’m in a mood to tell you about two important channels of online earning - Affiliate Marketing and Adsense. Affiliate marketing means you have to place advertisers’ ‘banners’ or ‘text ads’ in your website and generally when a ‘Sale’ or ‘lead’ is generated you get commission. Adsense in that sense appears somehow easier as in case of Adsense you have to place Google Ads in your webpages and when someone clicks on that ‘Ad’, you get commission. You do not need to ‘Sale’ products to earn money from Adsense.
How to apply for Adsense?

Click this link to apply for Adsense Account https://www.google.com/adsense/

How to apply for Affiliate Programs?

Click the link to apply for ShareASale.com affiliate programme.

Otherwise click this link to apply for CJ affiliate programs.

You must have a content rich web site in both the cases to get approval from concerned company.
Both ShareASale and CJ are two global advertising channels of affiliate marketing and you can find a lot of advertisers listed in their database wherefrom you can find relevant advertisers that matches your website theme.

Which one yields more?

Adsense supported websites, with so much restrictions for promotion, is not that easy to generate great revenue unless the site is flooded with traffic. You really need quality content, interesting features and lots..lots of quality traffic to earn revenues from Adsense. There are many websites that actually survive for Adsense.
On the other hand, affiliate sponsored websites have flexibility to promote. So, if you can concentrate on a target group and promote to reach that group, it may not be that much difficult to earn money from affiliate programs. Though I must agree - promoting affiliate sites call for creativity, and site must not be promotional but informative to convince the user about the products you are promoting.
So, my conclusion is that for the sites crowded with traffic already, adsense is the best option but otherwise, consider joining affiliate programs.

Goodluck.

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

The life of Affiliate Marketers have never been easy. You can hardly expect any positive result at all by putting some links or banner ads in your website. Unless and until you can inspire the visitors to spend some dollars for buying affiliate products -you can’t expect any good result. So, should we avoid promoting such products?And my simple answer is a big “NO”.

Why?

There are people who are actually eaning thousands of dollars by taking part in affiliate programs. So why can’t you? All you need is to follow few simple steps to claim your own profit share. For that, above anything else, you need to be creative. OK, enough is enough, let us come on to the topic. What you need to do to be a successful affiliate marketer?

1. You need to have basic knowledge of Website designing

2. You must have expertise in Search Engine Optimisation.

3. You need to do a Keyword research for finding your niche or neo-market.
4. You need to build a website for promoting products

5. You need to promote the website the best way you can do.

If you do not get result, review each of these five steps to see what went wrong. The common mistake with Affiliate marketing, as I’ve seen, is the over optimistic approach for returns. First of all you have to learn, understand and apprehend your limitations.

If you do not have the capacity to build a good looking website, you should consult a professional web designer and that is the basic need. Anyway, it is not that difficult to build a quality website as many FREE scripts are availabe by virtue of which you can make professional websites by just few mouse clicks.

You need to have a good expertise in SEO, i.e., search engine optimisation. Despite of different alternative means of generating traffic to your website, nothing pays you more than the generic Search Engine Visitors. If you can’t optimise your site, you should consult professional SEO firm.

Finding your niche is the toughest part of becoming a successful affiliate. You have to dig a lot for a good keyphrase - you need to spend lots of hours in search of a popular keyphrase and I’m afraid to say that you can hardly expect any professional help in this regard. You must have enough knowledge about the niche keyword you have chosen, that is another point to keep in mind. Successful affiliates have suggested that they have earned a PhD degree in their niche and they can freely write bunch of pages about their niche. So, their may be good keyphrases but it may not be just suitable for you.

Once you have found your niche, your job is now much more simple. Now you need to build a quality website, must be content rich, focussing on your selected niche and promote it in every possible way. You must have the patience to get some visitors coming to your site, having a trust on your site and finally making the purchase.

That’s it and it is not yet over.

Things you should keep in mind.

Instead of focussing on a large population, try to focus on small tagetted visitors. Build a small and very much targetted website.

You need to be creative.

Do not be promotional, nobody loves a blind promotion, try to be informative instead. And at the same time you have to inspire your visitors to make a purchase.

Apart from depending on Search Engine traffic, dig alternative sources like Social Networking Sites - Digg.com; reddit.com.

Take part in Forums, Use Press Release Services or consider taking part in PPC ( Pay Per  Click - Google Adwords ) programs.

And a final word of caution - a desparate attempt ends up in frustration; so, plan your project well ahead, ensure disciplined hard work to achieve your goal.

Good luck!

Affiliate Marketing is one of the best source of earning money in the internet. I’m not going to discuss much about what it is all about, and if you do not have much idea, you can read it here: Affiliate Program A-Z

Like any other site in the internet, an affiliate site also requires visitors, the more the better . However, the organic search engine visitors are the best source of getting visitors in the internet, so, your site should be optimised to get some visitors from the search engines and mind you, it is more difficult than optimising a site which does not contain affiliate link.

This type of site is going to get a good position in the SERPs only if it adds some value. That is the factor of paramount interest, and while building such a site, if you rely on the search engine visitors, you must consider the value-addition factor at the first instance.

Now how to add value to such a site?

Obviously, here are few ideas that, i think, will help.

1) A site that provides price comparison, i.e., if the site lists the same product from different suppliers/manufacturers with a comparative statement regarding selling price, taxes, shipping rates, delivery time and editorial reviews on each seller, it is definitely going to add a value to the end user.

2) The value-addition may be ensured in another way and an example may illustrate that. For selling a product like care bear party supplies, a detailed instruction on “how to decorate the venue on that theme”, is definitely going to add certain value, and which in turn, may generate good search engine traffic. If you place a text /banner containing affiliate link in such a page, it is definitely going to yield better result, both in terms of search engine traffic and also in terms of the conversion rate.

The focus of such a site should not be promotional, but rather, should be informative.

For markeing and promoting such a site, you need to be creative, and need to have an extenssive knowledge on that subject so that you can write a number of informative articles based on that product. Also you need to discuss with the merchants regarding issues like site promotion, conversion rate and latest product/price updates.

Promoting an affiliate site has never been easy, however, if it is developed with due focus, care and attention, it is definitely going to give you a great reward.