Affiliate Marketeing; What It Takes

Each of us has its own interest or has a hobby. Some love all kinds of books, music, and movies while others are into sports and traveling. There are also people who love to grow flowers and loves pets. These things help us to relax and forget our everyday problems and troubles and these things are common to people. But not everyone has a hobby that makes money for him/her except if you love your job.

Money making hobby could let you treat your family and friends with the extra cash or you can even quit your current job that you almost certainly hate. That is why many of us today go online to start a business; their reasons are either to supplement their income or to gradually replace their offline income from their job. Affiliate marketing is a great way to start in making money online.

Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing partnership between a web merchant and one or more affiliates. The affiliate is paid a commission for referring clicks, leads or most often sales to the merchant. An affiliate’s advantage is that he can make money in a business where he doesn’t have the upfront costs of creating his own product, and he doesn’t have to worry about e-commerce, bookkeeping, or even customer support for it is the merchant’s responsibility.

Now, for sure you want to be an affiliate marketer with all that benefits an affiliate could get. But, do you have what it takes to be an affiliate marketer? Before you begin your venture into affiliate marketing, you need to decide first which area interest you. What products do you know the most and which products you could do the best job of selling? Once you discover your specialty, perseverance, patience, determination comes next. These are the qualities you should possessed to be a good affiliate marketer.

Too many online business prospectors lose out because they become impatient. You also have to know what your strengths are, the things in which you are good at and your capabilities and abilities related to your chosen streak. And the most important thing is you have to have a strong desire to succeed in affiliate marketing.

To be an affiliate marketer is not an easy task. You have to learn the techniques of marketing your product or service. You shouldn’t be looking at every chance because marketing is all about attracting you to look at this or that particular opportunity. To be a successful affiliate marketer, you should learn how to listen and to be taught because in life we need to learn skills to get by.

For an affiliate marketer, you should know how to market your site effectively, in will enable you to get thousands of visitors coming to your site which transforms into more sales. This only means that the faster you set up a website, the bigger your chances of making money online faster. You should avoid the same mistakes some affiliates make everyday, they are only building a short-term business where they just make a small sale. Make sure you do understand that you should be building a long-term affiliate business and not just something that makes you a few dollars on one sale.

It is also better to have knowledge on how to upsell your visitors for expensive services. This will in turn make you become recognized as an expert in your field and making money will be easier. There are some people thinks that just by having affiliate links on their website will bring them good profits. This can have some truth to it, but then most successful affiliates still believe that making use of strong marketing campaigns for their affiliate programs is still important. But affiliate marketers become much more successful when they treat their customers or online visitors as friends. Make a commitment to establish relationships with your customers and especially with visitors to your site. It is very important for an affiliate marketer to have a good business relationship with customers or visitors.

Three Fatal Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

Having an Internet business that allows you to earn money on auto-pilot is a very exciting thing. Although it’s thought to be easy to make a comfortable living with affiliate internet marketing, very few affiliates are truly successful in their businesses.

In this article you will discover how to avoid three fatal mistakes most affiliate marketers make. You will also find out how to target affiliate programs that earn you residual income, which is generally income that you receive month after month for work that you did only one time.

In affiliate marketing a Merchant agrees to pays the Affiliate a certain percentage of the sale price for products or services sold by the Affiliate. This is a win-win situation because the affiliate simply refers customers to a merchant-owned website and does not have to worry about fulfillment. The Merchant gets people to advertise for them and only has to pay them after they make a sale.

Here are three fatal mistakes most affiliate marketers make.:

1. They send their prospects directly to an affiliate website.

When you consider the time, energy and money invested in your business it doesn’t make much sense to send people directly to a merchant website where you only have one chance to get the sale. If your prospect decides not to make a purchase yet, you’ll likely lose that prospect forever. What you must do instead is send your prospects to a webpage where you can introduce them to the product or service your promoting as well as offer them something of value for free in exchange for their email address. This allows you to follow up them through an auto responder and have the opportunity to make multiple sales to the same customers.

2. Creating a website packed full of affiliate links, flashy banners and other distractions.

Overwhelming your website visitors with the above distractions will make them want to do one thing… leave. Instead, offer an honest review of a product or some other type of meaningful content. Pre-sell your readers on benefits and on how whatever your offering will help them.

3. Falling victim to commission theft.

Commission theft is a popular problem in affiliate internet marketing. While, you cannot eliminate it completely, there are some simple steps you can take to minimize it. Two methods you can use are cloaking and redirecting of affiliate links. Instead of having your affiliate link in the form: “www.merchantwebsite.com/?id=youraffiliateid”… You can easily set up redirects in your web hosting account that send your visitors to your affiliate link. Example: http://www.yourwebsite.com/affiliate_site

Fortunately, it takes the same amount of work to make a sale for a one-time purchase as it takes to make a sale for a residual payment type of product or service. This is why it makes good common sense to market affiliate programs with residual commission structures.

While shopping for residual payment affiliate programs you should consider the marketability of the services you are recommending.

For example, if you refer a sale for a membership website that only offers resale rights to products, and nothing else to keep the customer from canceling, people can join, download all of the products and then cancel their membership.

On the other hand, consider promoting and selling web hosting or auto responder services. These services are essential tools for your prospective customers business, and he or she is much less likely to cancel for quite some time.

In conclusion, you should always try to avoid common mistakes that affiliate marketers make by collecting your prospects email address, pre-selling them to the product&s benefits, and by taking simple steps to avoiding affiliate commission theft.

In addition, you should be promoting and marketing affiliate programs with residual commission structures. Be sure to evaluate the stickiness of the product you are recommending. The best way to do that is to first become a customer yourself, use the product or service and pass on advice that will help your potential buyers.

The 5 Mistakes That Can Lose You Money On Ebay

I am often asked by subscribers to UK Auctionline web site to have a look at their eBay listings. This is usually because they are not doing as well selling their items as they had hoped. When I go and look at the listing I will often find that they have made one or more of the common mistakes that deter bidders.

1. Too many negatives. Some people, especially newcomers to eBay have a very real fear of being cheated or ripped off. Because of this they apply negatives in their listing. This can be in the form of a long list of types of payments they wont accept or conditions that they apply. Something else I have seen is the warning that thee seller will not be responsible for any item lost in the post. Even worse are threats such as negative feedback if payment is not made within a certain time after the auction ended. These sorts of restrictions and threats are a great big turnover to any potential bidder.

2. High shipping charges. Most reasonable people are happy to pay something over the cost of postage to cover packing materials. But as I saw the other day someone who charging $10 to ship a $4.99CD, that is pushing it a bit. If you doubt how the average bikdder views hyped up shipping costs just go and read the commentgs on any eBay forum and see what buyers feel about it.

3. Not using a Gallery Photograph. I assume that no one who is serious about selling on eBay would consider putting up any listing without a picture. I cannot think of any item that would not benefit from a photograph. But there are still a great number of sellers who do not use the gallery feature to have a photograph next to their listing in the search results. Ebay’s own figures show that the use of a gallery photograph can increase the final bid figure by as much as 12%.

4. Setting you opening bid price too high. If you want to attract the most bids and therefore a higher final price for your item you should not set too high an opening bid price. A low opening price attracts casual browsers who place a bid just on the off chance of getting a bargain. Once a few bids have been entered other people start noticing and come to your listing to see what it is all about. Then before you know it, the price is shooting up. However, if you start with too high a price you could end up as one of the many listings that attract no bids at all.

5. Not communicating. I know some eBay sellers who really resent having to answer e-mails. In fact I know some who just do not answer any questions from sellers. How stupid is this? A question from a seller is a great opportunity for you to build up rapport with a potential buyer. A quick and pleasant response will almost certainly encourage bids whilst a curt or a non-reply will not.

The bottom line is that eBay is a numbers game, the more people you can get to bid on your items the higher the price they will achieve. Therefore it is important to do everything you can to encourage bidding not trying to deter it.

Do You Have What It Takes To Be An Online Affiliate Marketer?

Each of us has its own interest or has a hobby. Some love all kinds of books, music, and movies while others are into sports and traveling. There are also people who love to grow flowers and loves pets. These things help us to relax and forget our everyday problems and troubles and these things are common to people. But not everyone has a hobby that makes money for him/her except if you love your job.

Money making hobby could let you treat your family and friends with the extra cash or you can even quit your current job that you almost certainly hate. That is why many of us today go online to start a business; their reasons are either to supplement their income or to gradually replace their offline income from their job. Affiliate marketing is a great way to start in making money online.

Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing partnership between a web merchant and one or more affiliates. The affiliate is paid a commission for referring clicks, leads or most often sales to the merchant. An affiliate’s advantage is that he can make money in a business where he doesn’t have the upfront costs of creating his own product, and he doesn’t have to worry about e-commerce, bookkeeping, or even customer support for it is the merchant’s responsibility.

Now, for sure you want to be an affiliate marketer with all that benefits an affiliate could get. But, do you have what it takes to be an affiliate marketer? Before you begin your venture into affiliate marketing, you need to decide first which area interest you. What products do you know the most and which products you could do the best job of selling? Once you discover your specialty, perseverance, patience, determination comes next. These are the qualities you should possessed to be a good affiliate marketer.

Too many online business prospectors lose out because they become impatient. You also have to know what your strengths are, the things in which you are good at and your capabilities and abilities related to your chosen streak. And the most important thing is you have to have a strong desire to succeed in affiliate marketing.

To be an affiliate marketer is not an easy task. You have to learn the techniques of marketing your product or service. You shouldn’t be looking at every chance because marketing is all about attracting you to look at this or that particular opportunity. To be a successful affiliate marketer, you should learn how to listen and to be taught because in life we need to learn skills to get by.

For an affiliate marketer, you should know how to market your site effectively, in will enable you to get thousands of visitors coming to your site which transforms into more sales. This only means that the faster you set up a website, the bigger your chances of making money online faster. You should avoid the same mistakes some affiliates make everyday, they are only building a short-term business where they just make a small sale. Make sure you do understand that you should be building a long-term affiliate business and not just something that makes you a few dollars on one sale.

It is also better to have knowledge on how to upsell your visitors for expensive services. This will in turn make you become recognized as an expert in your field and making money will be easier. There are some people thinks that just by having affiliate links on their website will bring them good profits. This can have some truth to it, but then most successful affiliates still believe that making use of strong marketing campaigns for their affiliate programs is still important. But affiliate marketers become much more successful when they treat their customers or online visitors as friends. Make a commitment to establish relationships with your customers and especially with visitors to your site. It is very important for an affiliate marketer to have a good business relationship with customers or visitors.

You should also be creative. The real key to being successful with affiliate marketing is to develop a good content based website and weave your affiliate links into all your content. You have to provide your prospects with good, quality content to keep them coming back to your site. So, do you have what it takes to be an affiliate marketer?

Free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips – step by step

There are so many websites all over the internet so it’s essential to promote and optimize your website. A new website needs to be visible to search engines. Before submitting your site to search engines it is very important to optimize your website. If you can not afford a search engine optimization service, make sure to follow our few search engine optimization tips to have your web site well optimized for the top placement in search engines.

Step 1. – Analyze your competition
The best way to start optimizing your web site is analyze your competition. Take a look at the web pages that currently have top rankings (Top 10) on Google for targeted keywords and try to find out what these pages have done to get these rankings.
- analyze the first top ten web sites related to your branch
- analyze keywords they are using
- look at their source code, meta tags
- look at their keyword density
- look at their comment tag, alt tags, title tag
- internal and external links on their websites
- look how many sites linking to them
- check out the quality and link popularity of sites that are linking to your competitors
- look how many pages they have
After all you can tell is it easy to beat your competition or it is not.

Step 2. – Start to improve your website with quality content
When optimizing your website always use keyword in the meta tags which are reflected in your page. It is not going to help your search engine ranking if the page has nothing to do with the topic.

Step 3. Choose the right keywords.
As mentioned before, analyze your competition but never use the same keyword and description tag. There are two great resources for finding out the most effective keywords. – Overture – WordTracker

Step 4.Creating meta tags – TITLE Tag
The most important tag is the Title tag, because it is in the head section of your website and many search engines use it. Title tag should be short (about 14 words), descriptive and to the point. The title is appeared on first line in the search engines.

Step 5. Creating meta tags – DESCRIPTION Tag The next important meta tag is description tag. It describes content of your web page
- shouldn’t be longer than 120 characters
- description is for the search engines not for the viewers to see

Step 6. Creating meta tags – KEYWORD Tag
- use the most important keywords that your website represents
- we recommend to use 5 keywords separated by a commas
- one keyword should have 1 – 3 words

Step 7.Creating meta tags – ROBOT Tags

Step 8. – Check your website URL before submit to search engines.
Your website should be finished without errors:
- no broken links
- no spelling mistakes
- have a good design
- no html tag mistakes
- have a site map

Step 9. – Submit your website to search engines
Submit your website into the most important search engines, it brings you the most of traffic. Make sure to submit your URL for free to www.google.com, www.yahoo.com, www.altavista.com, www.alltheweb.com, www.excite.com, www.lycos.com, www.webcrawler.com, www.Alexa.com, www.Jayde.com, www.whatuseek.com, Open Directory (The ODP powers core directory services for some the most popular portals and search engines on the Web, including AOL Search, Netscape Search, Google directory, Yahoo directory, Lycos, DirectHit, and HotBot, MSN and hundreds of others). DMOZ and Yahoo Directory listings are tremendously valuable. There are a lot more free and paid search engines and directories to submit, but if you do not have time to search for and submit, you can also use our search engine submission service.

Step 10. – Build your link popularity (offpage optimization)
Next significant step you should do with your website is build your link popularity. Link Popularity is the number and quality of other websites that link to your site. Top rankings depend on your link popularity. It can be done with creating a quality non-reciprocal and reciprocal links from related web sites and Internet directories, blogs, forum sites …

Robert Toth provides search engine optimization, submission and link building service since 2002 and now run Alexia Search Engine Optimization firm (http://SearchEngineOptimization-Submission.com).

How I Made A Fortune On Ebay Using Dropshippers… And Then Lost It All

My name is Kevin and I’m 24 years old. This is the true story of how during the summer of 2001, I made $40,000 selling dropshipped goods on ebay only to lose it all and end up with $4,000 of debt. Read my cautionary tale to prevent yourself from making the same mistakes that I made.

I first found out about dropshipping back in June of 2001 a little after I started a not-so-profitable business on eBay selling cell phone accessories and such. I saw dropshipping as an all profit method of business. You don’t pay for shipping. You don’t pay for inventory. You basically just advertise the product on auction websites such as eBay, take orders, collect the money, and pay the set amount for each item to the dropshipper keeping the remaining amounts for yourself as profits. I now realize that it is only that easy when you’re dealing with the right person.

I first started dropshipping with a guy named Chris. I was selling Nike Air Jordans on eBay. I saw that Jordans are real popular on eBay and people pay huge amounts for them. I’ve seen some pairs go for $1,000+. Chris only charged me $67 a pair. So, I basically just doubled the price and sold them on eBay for $134 a pair. I sold about 20 pairs of shoes within a week giving me a profit of $1,340. I suddenly became happy with the success I had because obtaining over $1,000 in a week at the age of 19 is pretty rare. So, I wanted to start putting up way more auctions so that I could make way more money. Unfortunately, this is when Chris became unreliable. He never returned any of my e-mails and never got back online. Plus, he only had shipped half of the 20 orders I had. So, I decided that I needed a replacement quick before I started to have some unhappy customers on my hands.

This now brought me to dropshipper #2. I talked to the guy about the situation and he said that he would be able to handle it. I paid him for the remaining 10 orders I had left and he shipped the shoes off to my customers. I respected the fact that he picked up right where my previous dropshipper had left off at and took care of business. So, I assumed that this guy was all about business and was a very reliable and legitimate dropshipper. So, I started to put up more buy it now auctions and these shoes were selling faster than I could put them up for auction. This is the unbelievable part. I had sold 250 pairs of shoes in a matter of 4 days. I collected over $40,000 in 4 days. That’s $10,000 a day! This came as an amazement to me especially since I was only 19 at the time. I’ve made some people’s yearly salaries in a matter of only 4 days. Little did I know though that I was in over my head. I got a little too greedy and started to splurge on money that wasn&t even mine yet; buying clothes, shoes, and even put a $1,000 down payment on a new car. My dropshipper shipped my first 30 orders only to find out that he had shipped off nothing but all wrong sizes and wrong colors. So, I had a lot of complaining customers. Some even went straight to PayPal to complain causing PayPal to limit access to my account. So, now I had over $40,000 sitting in my PayPal account that I had absolutely no access to and over 200 orders that need to be shipped off. So, my only option was to refund everyone their money back to get my PayPal account back to regular standing, which brought me to my next dilemma…

I spent almost $4,000 of the $40,000 I thought would be mine to keep. So now, my Paypal balance was negative $4,000 and I needed to come up with that $4,000 quick before PayPal took legal action to get that money. I thought the only way to get me out of this mess was by the same way that got me into this mess. This is what brought me to dropshipper #3.

I stumbled upon a guy named Jarell. I found him through a legitimate business website so I decided to sell enough pairs of Jordans to make up the $4,000 and then I’d call it quits because this was too much for someone so young. Everything went smooth and I was able to make the $4,000 using my girlfriend&s PayPal account. Unfortunately, PayPal then limited access to her account also finding out that she was linked to me. This then aggravated me because now I had 15 orders that I in no way could pay my supplier. If I had shipped to my customers it would bring more complaints and negative feedback which was very bad for business. That was then, this is now.

After reviewing my whole experience with dropshipping in hindsight, I realized all of the mistakes that I had made. For anyone who is looking into working with dropshippers, please pay close attention.

1. Before going into business with someone who is going to be dropshipping merchandise for you, be sure to get to know the person really well. Don’t go by instinct. Have a few converstations with the person before you start anything. Collect all methods of contact of the dropshipper for emergency contact.

2. I suggest that you do not start off having the dropshipper ship the merchandise to your customers. Order some of the merchandise for yourself and examine it thoroughly before you go into business. I started to recieve e-mails from angry customers stating that the Jordans were of terrible quality when I was told by my dropshipper that they were of authentic quality.

3. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. As stated previously, I sold 250 pairs of shoes in 4 days. Within those 4 days, I had to deal with about 600-700 e-mails which is almost impossible for only one person to deal with that also has school to worry about. Patience is the key to success.

These were a few of the mistakes that I made dealing with dropshipping. I had a price to pay for my mistakes. I owed $4,000 to PayPal and I had a $2,000 eBay bill that I ended up working during the summer to pay off. My purpose in writing this is for everyone considering going into business with a dropshipper to take precautions and use the tips I provided. I would also like to say that even though I had a bad experience dealing with dropshipping, that is not always the case. I know there are some people who have become successful and wealthy off of dropshipping.

Five years have passed since I began my journey in this industry. I finally did pay off all of my debts that summer and have made it my mission to educate and inform people of the scammers out there waiting to ambush the inexperienced and naive. I wrote this article because I don’t want anyone else to go through the experience that I did. There were times where I felt hopeless and bitter for falling into a trap that left me feeling depressed. Needless to say, I have learned from my soul-crushing mistakes and now make a decent living selling on ebay.

SEO Elite Review: Check out SEO software ranking examples!

SEO Elite does what exactly?

SEO Elite starts from the following assumption:

- look at the page that ranks number 1 in Google,
- do exactly the same + a bit better,
- and you will be number 1

SEO Elite will examine “all” the SEO parameters that it finds out about the number 1 site in Google. Then this SE software will automate the process in mimicking this for your site.

SEO is more than a software-approach!

SEO is the art of ranking number 1 in any search engine for any keyword.

Spiders rank a website number one because they “think” that this site deserves to be number one. Of course the spider cannot think, and there needs to be a programmer who programs the spider to find out which site is best.

Now if you are smart enough to feed the spider exactly what the programmer thinks is important, you will have the knowledge to rank number 1.

This is exactly what SEO Elite does: it claims to know how to find out “all” the parameters that make a website ranking number 1.

Pitfalls of a software-approach to SEO

Suppose you find all the parameters needed to rank a website number 1. You manage to get all this parameters onto your site and you even manage to be rank number 1.

Now if your site is really deserving to be ranked number 1, all is fine. But if surfers start complaining that you are not, they will complain like: gosh, this Google these days just gives undeserving sites ranked at number 1.

It won’t take long since Google find out that “somebody broke the code” of the spiders, and they will update the spiders, hey, they want the search engine to give quality back to the visitors!

So that means that you need to get an upgrade of your SEO software approach… in other words: you are running after the facts in stead of above the facts.

How to be ranked number 1?

You rank number 1 because you deserve it. In general spider logic this still means:
- your page talks about the keyword you are optimizing for
- you page has lots of incoming links about the keyword you are optimizing for.

This is what SEO is about, and whatever you do different could make you not be number 1.

But my SEO software is really up to date, or is it not?

Your software can only be up to date AFTER the spiders’ software is updated. Unless you write the spiders yourself, you will always be a bit later.

You cannot know all the parameters the spider takes into account, unless again you are writing the spider software yourself.

And some of the parameters you cannot influence: age of the website is one of them. Suppose the spider needs to choose between 2 websites: the oldest one and the SEO mimic: which one to choose? The oldest one would be the easiest bet, and you cannot change the age of your website can you?

SEO Elite: a close look at this SEO software

SEO Elite advertisement says you can get a top 5 Google Ranking in under 30 Days… But the examples on the SEO Elite website tell a different story!

There are 16 websites listed at the bottom of the website with their rankings.

Examining those 16 websites :

- 6 are about Yahoo rankings (and the advertisement stated clearly Google ranking!)
- from the 10 Google rankings left, only 1 is stated to rank number 1 in Google BUT
- typing this so called number 1 website keywords in Google, the website ranks down only number 9!
- and the so called number 1 website keyword-phrase is far from a popular keyword-phrase, in other words:
not a lot of people search for that keyword AND
the website doesn’t rank number 1 for this keyword…

Why do you do SEO in the first place?

SEO is 1 of the ways to get more traffic to your website. But there is more in getting a lot of traffic to your site, than “blindly ranking 1 in Google”:

— Always make sure you rank number 1 for a word a lot of people are looking for! —

If you buy any SEO software or outsource your SEO to the SEO specialists: always check their SEO examples:
- are they ranking number 1
- are the keywords they rank for popular search keywords (bigger than 10.000 searches a month in the Keyword Selector Tool from Yahoo’s searchmarketing is considered not too low)
- how long did it take them to be number 1
- how big is the competition for the keyword-phrase (smaller or bigger than 5 million? As a general rule : above 5 million keyword-phrase results in Google, things become though)
- how big is the competition for the quoted “keyword-phrase” (smaller or bigger than 33.000? As a general rule : above 33.000 quoted “keyword-phrase” results in Google, things become though)

If for all these items the SEO software or SEO specialist can answer YES, then you can start taking them very seriously!

Let us use SEO Elite as an example of how serious you should take this SEO software.

1. SEO Elite: Are they ranking number 1?

Yes they are for the keyword-phrase SEO Elite.

2. SEO Elite: Are the keywords they rank for popular search keywords?

According to the Keyword Selector Tool from Yahoo’s searchmarketing, SEO elite has less than 2000 searches, so it’s not that bad, but again, it is under the 10.000.

The top keywords are :
46762 searches for seo
10815 searches for seo services
9849 searches for seo company,

and for none of these the SEO Elite website ranks number 1.

So “No” for popular search keywords.

3. How long did it take them to be number 1?

I cannot answer that question now.

4. How big is the competition for the keyword-phrase

SEO elite has about 1.5 million search results in Google, less than % million, so shouldn’t be to though to rank number 1 for. So that’s a “NO”.

5. How big is the competition for the quoted “keyword-phrase”

The quoted keyphrase “Seo Elite” has about 250.000 search results, so the competition is stiff here and the SEO Elite website ranks number 1 here,
so that’s a “YES”.

6. SEO Elite results

2 YES and 2 NO… so for my analysis, it SEO Elite is a 50-50 program. It means it can do some good but is not proving it can do all. And the question is: do I really need to spend the money to reach not the highest goal: ranking number 1 for a popular key-wordphrase?

6. SEO Elite: the website

Whenever you are interested in something to buy on the Internet, check out the overall website of the product you want to buy! For SEO software

SEO Elite website is a 1 page website… Now what was the first idea to set up the Internet? To give people information, lots of information.

And we are talking about a “net” in Inter”net”: net means links here, there, everywhere… (that’s why links is so imprtant in SEO)

I didn’t see any of these and from the point of the “information-internet” I don’t like that: a SEO software program being on a website without loads of interesting content and without loads of links.

SEO software: read and check the examples before you buy!

Again this goes for all SEO software you want to buy on the Internet: if they say “I ranked this website for that
keyword number 1 in Google”, spend a few seconds to check it out!

1. SEO Elite: check out Google

SEO Elite’s first sentence talks about “your page in Google”

This sounds promising: is SEO Elite “the” SEO software to get me number 1 in “the” number 1 search engine
Google?

Well, at the bottom of the screen of the SEO Elite web page you then read:
Using SEO Elite I rank number 1 in Yahoo for this, that, and more site…

Oops, Yahoo! …

So do you want to be ranked number 1 in Yahoo, or do you want to be ranked number 1 in Google?
Everywhere I can hear you say… You want to be ranked number 1 in Google as that is at this moment the most
used search engine of all. If you get number 1 in Google, you surely will have a high ranking in Yahoo and MSN,
not the other way round!
So why starting the SEO Elite website with Google rankings and then switch to Yahoo?

But you mostly want to be ranked number 1 in Google because you have to pay for SEO Elite!

2. SEO Elite’s website examples

The SEO Elite website lists 16 example pages: high example-rankings using SEO Elite.

From those 16 , there are 6 Yahoo rankings, so that leaves us with 10 Google rankings.

Remember my SEO keywords rule above : SEO is well possible if your keyword phrase has less than 5 million results in Google.

How many of the example site in SEO Elites website are below this 5 million?
Only 2 out of 10.

And how many of those 10 rank 1 in Google?
Only 1 (or at least that is what they want you to believe!)

Hmmm. if I am going to pay big bucks for SEO Elite, then I want to be number 1. Don’t you?
Don’t you just hate it to be number 2?
I do, especially when I need to pay for it!

3. SEO Elite’s website examples : The numbers are wrong!

Numbers, numbers and numbers… Always check the numbers on any website!
So SEO Elite claims to have a number 1 ranking website :

* keyword phrase : learn to type faster
* website typingmaster.com.au

It takes only a few seconds to verify what SEO Elite says :
Type in Google – learn to type faster – and see what comes out:

55 million results! and not 5 million like mentioned on the SEO Elite website.
Great you say: SEO Elite is modest, he is able to rank number 1 with a higher competition than mentioned!

Does he???

Eh, you take a few seconds and a scroll down to find the example website ranking number 9!

Number 9!

Eh, yes you say: maybe the competition took over after the time the SEO Elite website was written…

Yes, but wasn’t the idea of SEO to rank number 1…. not for 1 day but “forever”.
Or was it just a typo like the 55 million that became 5 million, people do make mistakes you know…

Whatever the reason for the mistake: you need to check out all numbers quoted on the internet yourself!

All is a lot you say? I agree, but if the first example I chose already doesn’t fit the reality, then you don’t need to check all.

Anybody can make mistakes, but luckily we can easily check everything what is said about SEO, so always check
anything said about SEO before spending money on it!

Rank 9 is not that bad after all you say….

I agree, the first time your website gets on the first page of Google is one you keep remembering.

But:
I had to scroll down to find the SEO example page and only found it because I was looking for the particular URL
stated in SEO Elite’s example.
In other words, if you are ranked number 9, it takes some efforts of the visitor to actually scroll down and chose to click on number 9.

What is even more strange: The quoted keyword-phrase : “Learn to type faster” has no ranking on the first page!

Now this is what really bothers me: if I search in Google for the exact phrase “learn how to type faster” I would
assume that the SEO Example site would be number 1 there!

Back to Basics: what is the purpose of SEO?

Your purpose is getting as much people to your site as possible, isn’t it?

SEO software has the purpose of ranking 1 in Google.

Now it is very easy to rank 1 in Google for the keyword-phrase “jhdkghgkbdcds”,
but who is looking for jhdkghgkbdcds??? Nobody!

So if nobody looks for jhdkghgkbdcds, then why bother to rank number 1 with it?

Same with the above example-site with keyword phrase “learn to type faster”:

The Overture keyword-tool says that 448 people are typing in this keyword sentence in Yahoo.

448 people… is this a lot?
As mentioned above in this article: Nope,
and those 448 need to find the result example website at rank 9… not ideal SEO!

What is a nice number? Anything above 10.000 but: also know that above 10.000 “the big boys’ are competing
with you, below 1000 you kind of have the field for yourself. Ranking second for this example website could be expected after 2 months, but it should be number 1 in no time, even without using SEO software.

SEO Elite Conclusion

As I said before: always check the numbers and the facts about any SEO software! Also check the numbers in this SEO article written 13th May 2006.

Then make a decision yourself. If you see that the SEO software
- is ranking well for it’s own product
- is ranking websites for popular keyword well,

only then you can consider buying it.

How to Really Annoy your Web Site Visitors

It is quite easy to build a web site. It is even easier to really annoy your web site visitors.

Build A Winner

Anyone can build a web site. Building a good web site is another story. Web designers can easily avoid some of the most common mistakes by watching out for the following pitfalls:

1. Pop-Ups – Pop-ups can really annoy a visitor as these advertisements that open automatically in a new window can be quite distracting. The visitor might be interested in looking at the content of your site but a pop-up can force the visitor to focus on other things. A better way to annoy visitors is by having pop-ups that spawn more pop-ups when the visitor tries to close the first one.

2. Never Ending Web Pages – Another way to annoy your web site visitors is by putting mass amounts of information on one long continuous page. The visitor will keep scrolling endlessly down the web page only to get lost in web site content unrelated to what he or she was looking for in the first place. Long pages are one of the easiest ways to make a web page look hokey. It is much better to keep web site pages short and sweet so that it is easy for the visitor to get right to the information that is being looked for.

3. Excessive use of Graphics – Some web developers think that by using flashy graphics they can attract visitors to their site. Instead, the visitors are likely to get irritated. Too many graphics will make your web site download very slowly. Due to slow download speeds people might leave your web site before even knowing what your site has to offer. In this fast moving world, nobody has spare time to sit and wait until your web site pages load. This is particularly true for the 42 percent of people still on dial-up.

4. Under Construction Pages – Another way to irritate your web site visitors is by diverting them to a page which reads “under construction”. Most people try to find content oriented web sites and if they come across your web page that reads “under construction,” the visitor is likely to be annoyed, having spent time getting there with no positive result.

5. Plug-Ins – Some web sites use plug-ins that visitors have to install before they can view the web site. This is one of the easiest way to really annoy your web site visitors. Some people feel that if they like a particular program then others should like it as well. A web developer might like a good-looking icon program which needs to be installed before his or her web site can be viewed. If the program is obscure and not used by most people, this will only be a source of discontent when things do not work properly on the site. Don’t make people download software to see your site. Never ever make them take extra steps to do something.

6. Lack of Content – Most people like content oriented web sites that give information on specific topics. Even search engines love content-based web sites and will rank content heavy sites higher in search results. Usually people visit a web site to see what benefit the site can offer them. Lack of proper content results in annoyed visitors leaving the web site.

7. Music – A few years back music was quite common on the web and many web sites had music that automatically played. Gradually people have realized that music creates a lot of distraction and is a nuisance to a lot of people. If you really want music then a choice should be given to the visitor to switch it on or off. Remember, may people surf the web with music playing already or while sitting in their office. When a web site automatically plays music, it will aggravate them to no end.

8. Inconsistent Page Design – Some sites are designed in such a way that after moving from one page to another the visitor feels as if he or she has come to a totally different web site. There should be some uniformity in page design or else visitors will feel lost and disoriented.

By paying close attention to factors that can annoy web site visitors, web site owners and designers can keep their visitors happy. Following, or rather not following, these eight web site annoyances, webmasters can make the most of each web visitor.

11 Rules of a Copywriter

The art of the copywriting is one of the most intricate arts in the world. As in every profession there are some indispensable rules that every copywriter should stick to in order to impress his reader and produce appealing content What are these well-known yet so often forgotten rules that every copywriter should follow?! One should be as much precise and straightforward as possible in the writing of your text. Your text should have coherent and logical style. There should be some definite order in which all your message is written. Moreover, you should always visualise your audience in front of you and stress the most important points of your message.
In writing of the advertisement try to answer several important questions before you start devise and design the structure of your web site.

Make it easy to read. You message must have just one important point. It is not advisable to include several points in your message. Despite the fact that this is an advertisement and some exaggerations are possible and some specialists even encourage them, your message must not contain outward lies. If the reader suspects that you are lying he will not be inclined to take your words and might even doubt the credibility of the whole company you are working for. The message must be written in simple, easy to read and understandable style. Do not patronise and try to have honest and equal dialogue with your customer. Do not be very technical in the writing of your message. However, it might be advisable to include some technical terms in your advertisement, otherwise write it in more general terms, as your message might be read by the person who is not familiar with technical details.

Check your text on grammar and spelling mistakes before you are placing your message on the web site or submit it to the advertisement. Do not use too many words; try to be as succinct as possible. Your message should be memorable. Talk directly to the reader of your advertisement. Try to use such words as “you”, “your” as much as possible, as the advertisement that communicates directly with your customer is more appealing.

Four Questions to Ask Before you Look for Affiliate Programs

I’ve been receiving emails from people asking for my advice on which affiliate programs are the best, who pays the most and most often, and many other basic questions. I’d like to answer those questions on this forum, but I can only type so fast.

I went out this weekend looking for content that I could publish here temporarily while I got down to writing. I had a hard time finding unbiased content. Most of the so-called reviews out there are infomercials, and that’s not what I was looking for with this blog. So you’re going to have to bear with me. I’ve been looking and learning and reading and talking, and I’ve got a lot to say. I just need the time to write it down, and I will, starting tomorrow. No, really I will.

In the meantime, you need to ask yourself this — are you ready for an affiliate program, or Internet Advertising in general? I put together four questions you should ask before you embark on your affiliate program or any Internet advertising.

Before I get to the four questions you should ask before you enbark on your affiliate program, I am going to review two concepts that I use often here on Affiliateblog. The first is what I call the macro view of your Internet presence:

Incoming visitors -> Internet Presence < - Sales or Actions

You are really running two campaigns with your Internet presence -- the first campaign is concerned with getting visitors to the site, and the campaign is ongoing. The second campaign is to get those visitors to do something. That something may be just to spend more time at your site, or it may be to sign up for something or buy something.

The other represents the process of Internet advertising:

Impression -> Click -> Action

Most affiliate programs pay publishers in the last part of the process, the Action. I’ll be using both of these concepts in my questions. So here we go…

1. Do you know enough about your visitors?

There are literally thousands of affiliate programs out there. While some affiliate marketing hubs are experimenting with context-sensitive serving of affiliate banners and banner rotation on affiliate sites, YOU will be the one to decide what kind of products and services you want to offer your visitors. This seems like a minor detail, but it is a major factor in your success.

If you haven’t already, take a look at the stats for your web site over the past month or so. Where do your visitors come from? Have you paid for Google, Yahoo or other search engine traffic? What are the keywords that people used to get to you? More complex and specific search terms tend to result in more immediate conversions, while broader search terms may result in sales later. If people get to your site using what you believe to be broad search terms, you need to be sure that the cookie life (the amount of time that passes between someone from your site visiting the affiliate merchant’s site and the sale) is long.

Do you have textlinks or other advertising on other sites? Do you know the demographics of the visitors from those sites? Have you spoken to the webmaster, owner or manager of the sites on which you advertise and asked him or her about their visitors? Do you know the websites? Have you visited the sites that advertise on the same sites as you? When you investigate all of these things a profile of the visitors to your site should begin to emerge.

Which search engine brings you the most traffic? If it’s Google, the user is slightly more apt to be male, and in the middle (of MSN, Yahoo and Google) as far as propensity toward buying something (42% more likely than the average user). There’s a terrific article on marketingvox.com if you want to see more details. You can also find some interesting demographic info on the major search engines from AQABA.

You should pay particular attention to the domains of your visitors. If you have a lot of AOL traffic for example, you should consider that the profile of the average AOL user is 35 or older (77%) and married (62%).

If you have trouble with textual representation vs. graphical representation (as I do), there is a terrific product called VisitorVille that takes your web logs and animates them. The text is represented as pictures (buildings, people, buses for the search engines, etc). You can see it here. Disclaimer: I am a VisitorVille affiliate.

After all this you should be able to sit down and come up with the profile of a typical visitor. This profile should hopefully include estimates of age, country of origin, education and income.

Try to think like your visitors. Try to anticipate their interests and the products and services they might want to purchase. Affiliate programs raise the bar from PPC — your payment comes at the end of the Internet marketing process (the Action) rather than at the beginning (Impression or Click) like Google Adsense or Doubleclick. You need to apply more brainpower to the process, and you’ll make more money if you do it right.

2. Is your site perfect?

You’re asking someone to buy something from your site. If the pages have sloppy html code, broken links or instability from a bad Cascading Stylesheet, it makes you look cheesy. We’ve all been uncomfortable buying something off a cheesy website. You don’t want to be that website.

Let’s start with the html code. Are you sure there are no errors in it? Have you used an html checker like the one at W3C? I find mistakes in my code all the time. Unless you check your code on several browsers in several resolutions you might not catch an error. The validator will. If you use Cascading Stylesheets you should also visit the CSS Checker.

Speaking of validators, you should check your links often. W3.org also has a link validator.

The site should also be optimized for search engines, be easy to understand and navigate, and should have a sitemap for people (and spiders) to find their way around. You should have had ten of your closest friends take a look at the site and give you their feedback, and you should always listen to unsolicited comments from users with an open mind and place value on them. If someone takes the time from their busy day to send you an email about your site, they feel strongly about it and you should take a close look at what they’re talking about.

Understand that if your Incoming Visitors campaign is not working right, you’re wasting your time with your Sales or Action program.

3. Do you know what kind of ads you’re going to use, and where the ads are going to go?

People have been ignoring banners for ten years. That’s why they shake and make sounds (someday I’ll tell you about the screaming match I had with a creative director the day we put out the first talking banner ad) to try to get your attention. Where you put it on the page is going to make a huge difference. Briefly — banners need to go somewhere the eye naturally rests (next to the masthead, near the navigation, at the bottom of the page).

Placement of any ads is a huge part of getting them noticed or clicked.

A lot of people (including me) believe that text ads should be placed at natural breaks and be close to the same in text size and color as the text. You need to surf around and look at where people place their ads, and you need to figure out where you think they would work on your site.

If you plan to create pages for some of the products you endorse (a great idea), you need to figure out how prominently you want to place the advertising. Most people won’t buy something if they believe you’re shilling for a particular company. They will buy from someone they believe honestly endorses the product or service. You need to figure out how to keep the distinction.

4. What’s your hunch on the right kind of offers for your site?

I ask this question a lot. Now that you have a better idea of the demographics of your visitors, try to decide on which action you think they would be more apt to take — pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale or even pay-per-click (hard to come by) on your site.

If you have a general interest website that gives away free stuff it’s probably going to be difficult to sell people products from that website. It might be smarter to try to get them to sign up for a free products newsletter from one of the affiliate programs, or you may want to look for offers that target the age group of your site rather than offers that target a specific interest. You might be looking for smaller-ticket sales or only leads. Leads get the user to the end of the advertising process chain, but require less of a commitment.

Try to come up with the four, five, six or fifty ways to slice this all up, by type of action, by type of sale or lead, or any other way you can come up with. Then you can go out and find the different offers that might appeal to your visitors. When it comes time to place the ads, try to put different ads in similar spaces on the same pages, and see how they do.

Get your questions answered and you’re ready to take the plunge into affiliate marketing.

The Big Fat Mistakes Affiliate Marketers Make

It’s always one of those “I can’t believe its true” moments for new affiliates once they discover the world of affiliate marketing. When they realise you don’t have to worry about product development or shipping. They jump in not doing some due diligence on the company. They expect to start making some money within few weeks, unitl reality strikes. They are yet to be millionaires. Here are some mistakes and tips on how to avoid them.

Patience is a Virtue like they say. It took years for Macdonalds to be a successful, it took years for Microsoft and other big companies to take off to success. Infact most business take up to 5years to start seeing profit. Treating your affiliate business as a real business is important. Super affiliates that earn $20,000 a month took years to get to that point. Research a program before signing up. Commit to stick it out. If they offer guides and training take advantage of it. Update and maintain your site with fresh contents. Don’t jump ship when the going gets tough.

Avoid the temptation to subscribe to too many programs. When the going gets tough, its easy to think the grass is greener the other side. The problem about subscribing to too many programs at the same time is that you’ll fail to give them the attention and focus they deserve to make you money. I recommend two or three programs at the same time to enable you turn your hard work into cash.

The main problem with most affiliates is that they want to make fast money. By taking time to learn and apply what they’ve learnt, slow and steady they will get there. I’ve put together a review on top affiliate programs. I recommend these programs because they just don’t want to make a sales person out of you, they are interested in making you a top marketer with the right mindset.

These programs come with A-Z guides and tools to help you avoid mistakes affiliates do. To find out more about these programs visit www.affiliatemarketersplace.com/review.html

5 Affiliate Mistakes to Avoid that will Increase Your Sales

Affiliate Marketing is one of the best ways to make money from home and affiliate programs provide anyone with internet access a chance to make a living on the internet. Affiliate programs are usually free or very cheap to join, easy to get started and typically pay commissions on a regular basis, so more and more people are turning to them as a means to start a home based business. However, there are a few mistakes affiliate marketers tend to make that hurts their business tremendously.

Avoiding some of these common mistakes made by affiliate marketers should quickly and easily improve your chances of making sales and increase your affiliate commissions. Here are five of the top mistakes made by affiliate marketers:

1) Not researching the affiliate program before your start promoting it

It really is amazing just how many affiliates grab the first affiliate program that comes there way or signup simply because it has a high commission rate or promote it just because every other marketer is promoting it. If the program does not compliment the overall theme of your site, you will find it difficult to convince your visitors and subscribers to purchase the product. Why would they want it if it does not have anything to do with the area you are targeting?

2) Not using your signature file correctly

Many affiliates add a signature file to all of their out-going email messages and forum posts but they do not do it correctly. Twenty lines of text full of affiliate links to a bunch of different products is not considered a good signature file! In fact, it can very easily be considered spam. Try keeping your signature file under five lines with an attention grabbing or intriguing first line and overdo it on the links.

3) Not writing your own ad copy

There’s nothing worse than seeing the exact same advertisement all over the internet or in email messages from ten different marketers. How much perceived value will your message have when it arrives and the reader is seeing it for the tenth time? Take the time to tweak the ad to suit your target audience and subscribers before sending it out. Personalize it to make the ad your own so it doesn&t even seem like an advertisement anymore.

4) Not paying for your own domain name and hosting account

Even novice internet users can tell a free hosted site when they see one. It&s very unprofessional and suggests to your visitors that you haven&t made any money online and probably don’t know what you&re doing. If you haven&t even taken the small step towards setting up your business properly then how can your visitors trust you? Less than $10 a year for a domain name at GoDaddy.com and maybe $5 per month for a small hosting account won&t break your bank account. In fact, it will probably help to add to your account in the long run.

5) Not capturing your leads before you send them on to the affiliate product site

If you spend your time and money marketing to get someone to click on one of your affiliate links then they leave the product site without purchasing, what have you gained? Nothing! You have just lost the time and money it took to get that one click-through in the first place. Set up a squeeze page so you can capture your lead&s email address before you send them on to the product site. That way if they don’t buy you can follow up with them later and try again (and again and again and again). This can be priceless!

Now that you know these five affiliate mistakes to avoid you should be able to make more sales and increase your affiliate commissions by a significant amount. So get out there and become the super affiliate marketer you always knew you could be!