Archive for December, 2008
15 Reasons to Become an Affiliate Marketer
Posted by: | CommentsWelcome back
There are HUGE benefits to promoting affiliate programs with your own home-based Internet business, and I’ve come up with a list of 15 great reasons to become an affiliate marketer.
Let’s look at each reason separately:
1. No Production Costs – The cost to develop and produce a new product is prohibitive for almost anyone who wants to start a home-based business. With affiliate programs, production costs aren’t an issue. The product has been developed and proven – all on the merchant’s nickel.
Click here to Get your copy of the Super Affiliate Handbook
2. Low Cost Set-up – Compared with building a brick and mortar store, starting a home-based Internet business is relatively cheap. You probably already have a desk, Internet-connected computer and word-processing software, which is all the equipment you may need.
3. No Fees for Joining or Licenses to Buy – I often compare doing business as an affiliate, with distributing a line of products in the real world. The biggest difference is that the distributor must often pay for a license to distribute products within a limited geographic region. Affiliate programs, on the other hand, are usually free to join, and geographic market reach is limited only by the affiliate’s ability to promote his web site.
4. Choose From Thousands of Products and Services – What isn’t sold online? That list must be shorter than the one describing all that IS sold online. There are thousands and thousands of affiliate programs selling every product under the sun. That makes it easy to find products related to
your current or planned web site.
5. No Sales Experience Needed – When I started my affiliate business, I had absolutely no sales experience. That wasn’t a problem, however. The companies I affiliated with provided excellent marketing material. Using their sales copy, I was able to get my first affiliate site up in less than a day.
Click here to Get your copy of the Super Affiliate Handbook
6. No Employees – The largest expense of most businesses is employee salaries. Although there might be times when you need or want someone to work for you as an affiliate, it’s doubtful you’ll ever have to worry about hiring full or part-time employees. When you have a project you want to
hire out, it is easy to find specialists in every computer-related field who can work for you from the comfort of THEIR own homes. You pay only for the project, and never have to worry about ongoing employee-related benefits and deductions.
7. No Expensive Merchant Accounts Needed – Setting up a merchant account for any business is a time-consuming and costly business. It’s even more tedious for Internet businesses. However, merchant accounts aren’t a concern when you’re an affiliate. The merchant bears that cost and handles all processing of payments. You never have to lose sleep over potential chargebacks, fraud or losing your merchant account when you’re an affiliate.
8. No Inventory to Carry – Even if you live in a small one-bedroom apartment, as an affiliate you can sell large items without storage concerns.
9. No Order-Processing - Forget the problems associated with collecting and storing names, addresses, credit card numbers, etc. The merchant does all that!
10. No Product Shipping - The cost and hassle to prepare and ship products to customers worldwide could be staggering. Affiliates never have to worry about packaging supplies or postal rates.
11. No Customer Service Concerns – Do you hate the prospect of dealing with nasty people or customer complaints? Don’t worry about it! The merchant handles the snivelers.
12. Make Money While You Sleep - What other business allows you as a sole proprietor to keep your doors open and keep making money even when you take breaks or after you go home for the night?
13. The World at Your Doorstep – The Internet is the world’s largest marketplace. You can drive more visitors to your online store in a day, than many small-town merchants sees in his or her brick and mortar business in a year.
14. Minimal Risk – The product you chose isn’t making money? Dump it. Take down your links and promote another! It’s that easy. There are no long-term contracts binding you to products that don’t sell.
15. High Income Potential – If you have a job, your salary or hourly wage is probably pre-determined. Maybe there’s not much, other than working overtime, that you can do to increase your income. With your own affiliate business on the Internet your income potential is limited only by your desire, effort and imagination.
Click here to Get your copy of the Super Affiliate Handbook
There you have them – all the good reasons to start your own online affiliate marketing business. Start today and benefit from this incredibly simple, cost-effective business opportunity known as affiliate marketing. The time
is right, and the time is now.
–
Article excerpted from Rosalind Gardner’s “Super Affiliate
Handbook: How I Made $436,797 Last Year Selling Other
People’s Products Online”. Rosalind is the ‘Net’s most
recognized expert on successful online selling as an
affiliate marketer.
Get First Page on Google Searches – SEO Basics and Tips
Posted by: | CommentsGet First Page on Google Searches – SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Basics and Tips
By Jim Estill
Do you want to get first page on Google? If you have a web page or blog, you likely already are first page for some searches. With a bit of SEO, you can gain first page on more searches. And its simple.
The first and most obvious step is think about what words or phrases you want to be first page on.
Once you have that list, determine how many people are searching for those terms. To check how popular a search is you will need a tool. I use Wordtracker (there is a free online version). The higher the number, the more popular the search. No point in trying to optimize for a word or phrase that is rarely searched.
There is also no point in trying to optimize for a word that is too popular because getting a high ranking there will be almost impossible.
Think about “long tail”
Think about how people will search. People often search with a question. EG where do I find X? Or where do I find Y in Canada. The longer the string, the less competition you will have for it so the easier you will get ranked.
So make the list of phrases you want to “own” and ones that are realistic to “own”.
Now it is simple. Just put these words and phrases in your titles, picture descriptions, videos and in your text. The titles are the most important. That is why a blog called “Shrimp Fish Soup Recipes” will get good Google juice on all 4 words. So searching “Shrimp soup” will get first page. Or “fish soup recipes” or “Shrimp recipes” etc.
Yes you want to repeat your words and phrases often in the text. This said – write naturally. Never let SEO be a substitute for good content.
So you do this and you still are not first page. That is because you do not have enough credibility with Google. You need another free tool to check this. I use a free Firefox plugin called searchstatus. It gives me both the PageRank and the Alexa rating of any web page. Higher PageRank numbers are better. High credibility is your ultimate goal as that is what gets you ranked first and Alexa tells you traffic (a lower number is better)
How do you increase your PageRank?
It is all about quality inbound links. You want people with a high credibility (PageRank 4+) to link to you – eg Wall St Journal would be great. More is better and link rank is almost logarithmic so a PageRank of 6 is worth 10 times one of 5 etc.
This said, for you to get a link from an 8 rated site like pornstars.com would not increase your rank in the business genre. Sites are ranked for relevance.
The best inbound links are contextual. So someone blogging and saying I heard time management guru John Doe speak and hot linking from “Time management guru” is great for John Doe. Second best, hot link from “John Doe”. Third is just having a link on a blogroll without any context.
You get a higher rank if you update your content regularly. That is why having a blog on your site is a good way to increase your ranking.
Moderate cross linking within your own material will also increase your rank and clarify for google what it is that you do.
3 ways to get links to your site:
1 – Ask politely. You might not always get a link but it never hurts to ask.
2 – Comment on other relevant blogs (and have your PageRank on so you ignore low PageRank and high alexa). Note that most comments in themselves do not constitute a link. But being out there gets people to look at you. You need people to look at your stuff for them to be inspired to link to it.
3 – Have good material. People link to quality. But of course they have to see it so promote your content:
Have your URL on all your print material, cards, letterhead, email sig file etc
Write guest articles and blogs in the right (high traffic) places (check the Alexa).
PR – get written about
Contribute to other sites. EG write reviews on Amazon, join the conversations.
And a word of warning. Never play games (like buying links).
In the end it is about having good quality material. And being out there so people look at your material. People link to quality without you asking as long as they know about it.
Jim Estill is the CEO of SYNNEX Canada, a $2 Billion distributor of computers.To learn more about his successful business strategies, visit his blog at http://www.jimestill.com
New to Blogging? Download this Free Report
Posted by: | CommentsYaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick from BecomeABlogger.com have finally released their highly anticipated new report. It’s called…
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Here it is again:
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This new report “Roadmap to Become a Blogger” has some great information. A lot of it talks about the X-factor – techniques that will help you stand out from the crowd.
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