Computers and the Internet have finally come full circle for the average American looking to make money through promoting products and services online. Blogging and site building has enabled many more people to earn money through affiliate marketing. I don’t know about save the economy, but affiliate marketing can definitely provide a means for more Americans to earn income online. Currently, there are several states that want to impose taxes on merchants with producing affiliates in those states, as is the case in New York. This can only be a bad thing and counter-productive to the growth of affiliate marketing as a vehicle for more people to earn money online. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of this happening, but people in their local states can protest and petition against this happening and get angry about it. It definitely has a negative effect on affiliates as merchants may choose to not working with affiliates in those certain states, which I don’t think is the answer at all. The merchants will just have to restructure their own margins to accommodate this change and make it work. The various affiliate networks seem to be stepping up and fighting this impending legislation more vigorously, so thats good. Everyone in the affiliate marketing world needs to mobile to fight this. The states are just looking for revenue anywhere they can get it.

Affiliate marketing truly is a vehicle towards earning income online by promoting various online retailers and websites. There are many supposed affiliate marketing gurus that novices come across, but they only want to sell you something themselves in the end by telling you how to make money through affiliate marketing. Stay away from anyone considered a guru! Affiliate marketing is very much about content, writing, and putting a heck of a lot of time in on your keyboard getting work done. I would venture to say that typing speed is one of the most important factors in how much content you can produce online. So I always recommend to work on becoming a faster typer. Doing a lot of reading online is also a good way to improve your own writing skills, which will help you craft better, more intresting content for your site visitors.

Blogging and blogs have really opened up the doors to many affiliates that struggle with creating their own sites in HTML. Now anyone can create a blog, put up the affiliate banners, and start writing. This is why I created the free affiliate site builder for the affiliate programs we manage. It allows you to get up and running with a .com or free subdomain site is under a minute. Everything is hosted for free and you can build as many site as you would like. There are other site building tools as well you can use like Synthasite. Once you are up and running with a niche site or blog, you can go to work adding articles and other useful/interesting information without worrying about building the pages in HTML and FTPing them to your server.

Content is one biggest part of affiliate marketing because sites with good content rank well in the search engines. Leveraging pay-per-click or PPC keyword marketing is also a great way to generate traffic to your site or in some cases directly to the merchants site, but more and more merchants are moving away from allowing that. So affiliates need to have their own niche sites or send the traffic to a dedicated page on their site which pre-sells for the merchant. A good pre-sell page can really help convince the consumer that they should buy from the merchant and maybe even promote a coupon code to increase conversion likely hood. Making PPC work is not easy at all but affiliates do make it work so it can be done successfully. I always recommend a very slow, controled experiment with about $100 to see how many sales occur and if any ROI is present. Testing out 100s of keyword niches in this manner may leave you with 20 or 30 that are profitable and can be run effectively to create a profit channel. Using PPC and organic SEO together is the best approach towards creating sustained long-term traffic and affiliate commissions. Make sure to make your site “stickier” by adding newsletter sign-up, Twitter follow, email this page, bookmark this page, etc.

Affiliate marketing is still a growing industry that is really seeing more interest due to the current economic crisis. As people look for way to generate additional revenue, they will be turning online. Affiliate marketing is the best way for the “average American” (I only mean that in the most general sense) to generate income by marketing products and services online. This industry needs to be supported and embraced in order for it to really flourish for more people. So yes I do think affiliate marketing can save the economy! This was more of a ramble than a well-constructed piece, so take it for what it’s worth. I’d love to know your feedback and thoughts! Happy Easter!

There are so many possible ways of driving traffic to your website, it’s hard to know where to focus first. This article will attempt to explain some of the best ways to drive traffic to your company’s website, including: organic search (SEO), pay-per-click search advertising, affiliate marketing, and database re-marketing. All of these methods are effective and must be done properly and with gusto. These concepts are in no particular order, but equally important to your overall Internet marketing mix.

Organic traffic or SEO is as old as the the Internet itself. I remember formatting the meta-tags on my web pages 10 years ago! Guess what…good, complete meta-tags still matter to your organic rankings, so make sure they are completely filled out on EVERY page of your site. There are basically 2 main aspects of organic optimization you need to focus on initially: meta-tags and on-page content. Like I said, every page of your site should have complete, unique meta-titles, meta-descriptions, and meta-keywords filled in. On-page content also has a huge amount of importance for gaining search rankings. I have sites that ranking organically just off the content on each page alone. If you are able to expand you content on certain pages like your category pages and product descriptions, you can potentially gain more search traffic off those pages, maximizing what you are currently doing with your site.

Pay-per-click search marketing is probably one of the most necessary, yet misunderstood types of campaigns you can run. All companies, in my opinion, should be running a good amount of PPC search in order to drive targetted traffic to their sites. Whether you handle this internally or outsource it, you should keep a very close eye on the performance and management of your PPC accounts with Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Your PPC accounts should be ever growing, as you test different groups of keywords to see what converts and what doesn’t. What converts you run with and what doesn’t you eliminate. The goal should be to attain the best ROI possible. Of course, your landng page should be as good as it can be to best convert the traffic into sales or leads.

Affiliate marketing is my favorite topic and where you should be focusing a great amount of resources and money. A well-managed affiliate program should always be growing in the number of participants and active producers. Many companies launch affiliate programs and just expect them to grow on their own. This will occur to a certain degree, but plataeu quickly without good affiliate management and a good affiliate growth strategy. Companies should be trying their best to make it as lucrative as possible for affiliates in order to get the most production possible. Again, having a good converting website is key to ensuring your affiliate traffic will convert and produce commissions for your affiliates. Affiliates should be treated with the utmost respect and given as many tools to become success as possible. At all times, affiliates should be worked with and motivated to produce more revenue, as well as new affiliates should be recruited into the program to grow the number of participants. If either of these 2 things aren’t going on, you are not maximizing the growth of your affiliate channel.

Re-marketing to your database is one of the most powerful ways to generate revenue for your company. You can send promotions, deals, and coupons to motivate your database to purchase for the first time or re-purchase more products. Re-marketing to your database at the right interval and with the right message is essential to getting a good response. Subject line is everything! Getting people to open your email promotions is key to getting them to act, so make sure to make your subject lines compelling. Email content is also improtant to getting your database members to move into action.

Once you have a good strategy in place for all of these traffic driving methods you are ready to make it happen! Make sure to have the right people or companies handling these tasks for you, as they are extremely important. Don’t assign a new employee to manage your PPC or affiliates, you will suffer the consequences or just not grow like you should. I hope this mini-article was an enjoyable read. I couldn’t mention everything, but you get the jist. If you would like to have a conversation about these concepts make sure to email us or leave your comment below! Now get out there and drive some traffic!

The reports are out and Google has increased it’s domination over Yahoo, MSN and the rest of the search engines…again. Not really too suprising, as it doesn’t seem that Yahoo or MSN can get their act together to promote their search engines effectively to web-surfers. According to the Hitwise report, Google posted an 8% year or year gain over the competitors.

What does this mean for companies trying to gain as much traffic from the search engines as possible? Focus on Google first and foremost with your organic SEO and PPC campaigns. Make sure your Google PPC Adwords campaigns are as built out as possible and your ad copy is effective and working. Doing things to maximize your website’s organic and paid search is always time well spent. You should re-evaluate your SEO and PPC strategy at least every quarter to make sure you are doing search as well as possible.

In order to improve the amount of free, organic traffic your site is receiving, you can put a strategy in place to add freshly written articles to your site to increase your overall page count. Google loves frequently updates sites and posting new, unique articles to your site is a great strategy for increasing your organic traffic to those pages. Make sure you have an effective layout to capitalize on the traffic those pages are receiving, otherwise what’s the point? You can monitor how well your articles are converting into actions to maximize and expound on the topics that are working well. I’d love to hear your coments.

Back in the day you could buy your way to the top of Google by purchasing text links on various high-ranking websites. Then came paying bloggers to write about your company or product with a few in-content text links to boost your rankings. About 1 1/2 ago Google came with the smack-down and punished bloggers and companies that were using these methods or artificially increase their SEO rankings. Page Rank took a hit every where and people started panicing that the text link industry was dead. But is that really true? According to another recent report, sponsored blog posts are still taboo and the bloggers that do them could face penalites from the mighty Google.

So, it is just a bunch of scare tactics to take more wind out of the text link and paid-post industry? There is a dilema here…Bloggers need to earn a living with their blogs and selling advertising is a major way to increase blog revenue. Of course Google would just love everyone to put up Adsense on their blogs and call it a day. But guess what, Adsense doesn’t really have that high a yield for a lot of topics, so bloggers and webmasters have to use other ways to generate their revenue.

Personally I think if the merchant review is a genuine one based on the an actual review of the company or product I don’t see an issue with the blogger charging for a post. Does this really sway the search results in favor of the advertiser? Anyone that follows SEO or is involved in it knows that building your inbound links is still an effective way of raising your search rankings. Google has claimed it’s all about content quality, but can they really determine which content is better than others and which should be ranked higher? Because the answer is likely still no at this point, we can only assume that Google is still using other site factors like: site longevity, frequence of site updates, amounts of fresh content, how many inbound links you have, etc. This is why Google is stil hating on paid blogging, because they have to rely on these aspects of ther algorythm to determine rankings. The sponsored blogs can artificially sway the algorythm, so Google has to come out and warn against them. Personally, I would avoid doing many paid blog posts or paid text links. I think in the right circumstances they can work, but have to be done very carefully, through very legit sources. As fars as the “no follow” attribute, this is probaby a good idea for bloggers to do because the paid post can still benefit the advertiser as long as the post pulls some organic search rankings for the advertiser. At the end of the day, gaining a new organic listing for a competitive search phrases can still benefit the advertiser by providing a likely buyer that just read a review of their product or service.

Some good natural ways to increase your inbound links are posting on “do follow” forums and blogs. On forums you can set-up your signature links and really gain some nice inbound links by posting your butt off. Also doing really good blog commenting can gain you traffic and an organic boost. Blog commenting and forum posting has to be done very well and in volume to work effectively. Back in the day, black-hat SEOers would comment spam thousands of blogs and gain inbound links that way. Thankfully those days are over! I’d love to hear your opinion on Google’s rankings and paid blog posts.

Presented by Guest Blogger Aaron Korff

Everyone wants to learn those “special” tricks, those little known gems, that will give them that little push over the competition. This article focuses on leveraging your content to increase your SEO. I’m going to discuss methods for two types of sites: e-commerce and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service).

My first assumption is going to be that your e-commerce site has a database. My second assumption is that your site has a brand/category drill-down feature, as well as product detail pages. The problem is that search engines don’t do a good job of gobbling up these pages, and unfortunately, the majority of your site is comprised of them. Usually they are coded with a query string, or there is a session variable controlling which product page is currently displayed. Instead of leveraging valuable keywords from your URL, you are instead showing the search engine spiders the same page over and over again.

A skilled web developer can turn those “ugly” URLs into “friendly” URLs. There are different methods and unless you are a developer, the jargon can get very technical. Suffice to say that there are widgets available that work with your Internet server to spit out friendly URLs based on a set of logic that you determine. My custom software development company, Vazkor Technologies, uses URLRewritingNet. Another popular method is Apache Mod Rewrite. As an example of how nicely this works, compare www.shoebuy.com and www.allfootwear.com. ShoeBuy.com rewrites their URLs. As you click through products and categories, you will see friendly URL names. On AllFootWear.com, you only see database codes in the URL. Obviously, database codes do not make for good keywords.

The next method for content-based SEO is a little more difficult to implement but if you have access to a decent software developer, it will be a snap. Basically the trick is to take all of those responses that you or your support staff are sending to customers who email your company with questions, and push them to your website, either to an FAQ page, a blog, or some other informational page. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but the easiest way to get started would be to create a special folder in your email software client (e.g. Outlook) and instruct your support staff to move every Sent Item that was a response to a customer into this folder. Then your software developer needs to write a script that will “crawl” this email folder and parse out the original question and the response your staff made. Voilà, you have a lot of juicy FAQ content for your website.

With this sort of automation you can make the mistake of pushing too hard for perfection, which will end up costing you in the end. Yes, you could develop the script to crawl the email folder, parse the content out and upload it automatically to a location on your website or to a blog. However, the smarter solution would be to inject a checkpoint into the process. I would recommend having the content dumped to a text file that can be scanned and edited before uploading. If there are any emails that weren’t of a Q&A nature, you can manually cut them out.

For SaaS product owners, there are other methods for content enrichment. With these types of products, the users need training and support, and that usually means creating documentation. Put your documentation online! I’ve spoken with SaaS owners who worry about revealing their product information to the public. They fear that their competition will reverse engineer their functionality. While anything is possible, keep in mind that your competition can always subscribe to your service and get the information anyway. In the vast majority of cases, the SEO gain from having your documentation online far outweighs the risk. As an example, at my SaaS product’s website www.enteryourhours.com, I have my documentation with all the screenshots fully exposed.

Another simple content method for SaaS owners is to create a user forum and have it open to the public. Forums work especially well if you have a decent amount of market traction. It’s a great avenue for potential new customers to ask questions, and will allow your user community to build your content for you. If you don’t have a large customer base, you might want to forego the forums, and instead offer freebies to some of your best customers in exchange for contributing to a product-review blog.

Hopefully this article has gotten your wheels turning on content enrichment. Whether you have an e-commerce site, SaaS site, or some other web presence, you should consider this one fact: Your content is all around you, but not always on your website. Be clever, and you’ll come up with your own tricks. Get a scanner with OCR (optical character read) and scan your printed content. Rummage through all of your word documents and see what you find. If a customer gives you a testimonial over the phone, ask them to send it in an email so you can post it online. Be vigilant, and get into good habits, and you’ll have a content-rich site in no time!

Author: Aaron Korff