Should You Hire An SEO Professional From The Beginning?

Beginner website owners are usually excited when they first start a brand new website. They "know" their site is about to make the big bucks and they are waiting on the first wave of traffic to come flowing in. But after the first few months of no traffic, that excitement turns to frustration, then desperation. They start searching for ways to boost their rankings and come across a bunch of junk on the net usually tips down the wrong path to boosting SEO rankings.

But there are a few things you should know before starting a website. Just because you by a domain name and put content on the site doesn't mean that you will have visitors flocking to your page. You may not even get a listing in the search engines. Then you have to also realize just because you know someone with a successful website who makes money selling laptops and cameras, doesn't mean you can do the same. There is a lot more involved with owning a website than you think and there are some things you need to take into consideration.

You may have heard how about SEO (search engine optimization) and how important it is. It is improving your websites visibility in the search engine's natural search results. The higher your SEO ranking, the better chances people will find your website on Google and on other search engines. So how do you do it? Do you higher an SEO professional?

According to Submit Edge you should. Here's why....


It is easier to start on the right foot than it is to fix things later. Many new webmasters start with the idea that they can handle the early lifespan of their site’s SEO needs on their own, they pile on the content, dump some links around the web here and there and hope for the best. Unfortunately, that rarely works, Their content is often not optimized for the keywords that will actually get them traffic and the links they place on their own often lack real value and relevance. With a start like that, it is difficult to get other sites to want to link into you which means you lose free organic links and traffic.


Content is king. Anyone can write a blog post, and most webmasters know to include keywords in their post, but not how to use them effectively. There is a big difference between writing a post and writing an optimized post that provides solid anchor text, the proper keyword density and is also engaging to readers. Creating a post that Google bots will happily devour is not always easy but is essential if you want to get strong rankings in the SERPS. Again, it is easier to start on the right foot with a professional SEO copywriter than it is to repair less valuable un-optimized posts.


Link building isn’t easy. Link building is not just a matter of dumping links all over the web. There is an actual strategy to it. You have to know not only where to link, but how to link. This refers to knowing that you don’t create nothing but links to your homepage, You need deep interior linking mixed as well. There is a need to know where your links will have the most value and how to create interior links so that you get the most value out of every page on your site as you can. View original source

If you want to start a website, start off correctly. You don't want to waste time and money on building a website and receive no visitors. What would be the purpose of building the site if it's not seen? Hiring SEO help is important if you want to build your brand but you have to make sure the company is reputable and know what they are doing. You may even want to go with a company that offers a free trial before making a purchase.

But make sure you are not over optimizing your site, as too much SEO can get you penalized by Google. SEO is important but you don't want to over do it using too many keywords and not enough helpful content on your website. So do your research, start out on the right foot in the first stages of setting up your sites and blogs, and do it correctly. Remember time is much more valuable than money because you can never replace lost time, but you can replace lost money.

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Use Semantic Keyword Research For Higher Affiliate Sales

Powerful Often Overlooked Traffic Tips

Use Semantic Keyword Research For Higher Affiliate Sales

In order to promote affiliate products you need to do keyword research. And you have to be sure to choose the right keywords to use in order to get traffic to your site. But is that enough? When choosing keywords, we have to focus on picking the "money" keywords to use in our blogs, ads, websites, and campaigns.

Let's say you are selling shoes. You can't just leave it at shoes because you have a low chance of getting visitors off of just that one word. Then you also have to consider what type of traffic you're trying to target. Some people may be looking for a particular shoe brand such as Vans or Polo. You have to be precise. Plus are they looking for running shoes, dress shoes, or a place to buy them? You have to take all of this into consideration when your looking to make affiliate sales. 

There is a method that you need to be using if you want to better your chances of getting affiliate income. That method is called semantic keyword research. 

Read what Neil Patel has to say about semantic keyword research.....

What is semantic search?

Basically, semantic search is technology that tries to determine what users mean when they type in a certain keyword.

They explore the semantics of those words…or the meaning behind them.

For example, if someone typed in “laptop” do they mean:

• That they want to buy a laptop?
• Have one repaired?
• Upgraded?
• Are they even talking about a computer, but something entirely different?

In the real world most people don’t search with one keyword…additional keywords give additional clues.

Even then search engines aren’t always right. Google guesses because all it has to go on are the keywords you enter into their engine.

Semantic search will look at how those words relate to each other and look for clues on how you entered them…location being crucial.

Say you used Google search on your smart phone to find “laptop repair.” Semantic search will recognize your location via your GPS on your phone and deliver you “laptop repair” results based on location.

In other words, results related to “laptop repair + [your city].”

How does this impact SEO?

In your SEO campaigns semantic search means you will have to identify the right keywords based upon user intent in the real world…and then create content around those terms.

This is where the semantic keyword research comes in.

In the world of keyword research you simply sought out the keywords with the highest search volume. The meaning between your list of keywords and the content you created was equal. There was a one to one relationship.

“SEO strategy tools” meant “SEO strategy tools.”

In the semantic keyword world, you build a database of keywords that are full of meaning...”SEO strategy tools” could be used in four different contexts.

Your job is to figure out how.                                                   

What are the advantages of semantic keyword research?

Having a database of semantic keywords to create high-converting blog posts is one advantage…but there are other benefits, like improved CTR and PPC optimization as Wordstream explained: 

• Higher click-through rate – Whether it’s in your emails, landing pages, text ads or blog posts, highly-targeted semantic keywords will improve your CTR. When all these elements of the conversion funnel are aligned semantically…your results will go through the roof.
• Lower minimum bids – Higher relevance and targeted action with your content due to semantic keyword enhancements will lead to lower minimum bids on your PPC campaigns.
• Higher quality score – When you achieve high relevance around your semantic keywords…the search engines will reward your content with a high quality score that leads to better rankings.

Tools you can use to find semantic keywords

Employing a semantic keyword plan is crucial. But how do you come up with those keywords? Here are five approaches to use…including recommended tools.

Using Google advanced search

Google’s advanced search results provide a quick way to generate some semantic keywords. Just type in a query like “laptop discount codes” and click “Show search tools”: Continue Reading

It takes a bit of work to make money in affiliate marketing and when selling your own products. What would be the purpose of starting a blog, paying for ads, writing articles, or using any type of marketing if we can't get the right people to visit our sites and make a purchase through us? In order to make affiliate sales, it takes work. And performing a semantic research of the right keywords is the way to attract buyers.  

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Create A Money Making Landing Page For Affiliate Products

When affiliate promote products for Clickbank and others vendors, they are given a special link with their unique code. Many beginner affiliates will send their traffic to their affiliate url instead of their own website or landing page. This can be a bad idea because in may cases if an affiliate is placing an ad, they won't have a chance to pre sell and traffic most likely won't convert to sales.

This is why you should consider having a landing page when promoting an affiliate product. If you don't have your own website or blog, you need to have a way to send traffic to the product. Most article directories will not even let you use affiliate links or urls in your articles because they have to produce a good quality site for visitors and prohibiting affiliate links is one way of doing this.

Read this article; they provide perfect examples of landing pages that will convert visitors to buyers.....


A professionally designed landing page can improve your conversion rates.


This post is all about showcasing awesome landing pages, to give you some inspiration for your next design. It’s worth stating that no page is ever perfect – or conversely, every page can be better. With this in mind, we’ll be offering perspective on what makes each page special or interesting, while providing some insight into what we would try out in an A/B test experiment to optimize for higher conversions.


But what is it that makes a landing page design effective?


There are many factors, but the principle reasons are an adherence to the fundamental rules of conversion centered design:

• Use a clear and concise value statement so visitors understand the purpose of the page immediately
• Focus the whole page on a single message, with a single primary call to action (CTA)
• Use conversion design rules to make your CTA stand out (whitespace, color, contrast, directional cues)
• When using a form to collect data, balance the amount of information requested with the perceived value of the item being given in return (report, eBook etc.)
• Use modal dialogs for supplementary information (terms & conditions, privacy policy, product details) as opposed to sending them to your website (which removes them from your intended conversion path)
• And many more that I’ll get into in the examples below… Read more and see very beautiful examples here

Want to create a money making landing page, read this article on  How to Create a Landing Page for ClickBank Promotion by Nicole Thomas on eHow. This article provides step by step instructions on how to create a landing page. 

If you want to increase your chances of making an affiliate income, building an effective jaw dropping, money making landing page is the way to go, especially if you don't have a website. 

Bing is Cleaning The Junk From Their Search Engine

With all the talk about how Google is moving forward with their changes, we seem to forget about the other major search engines. One of them, Bing, is making some of their own changes. They're taking out the trash. Parked domains, broken links, new domains with a bunch of crappy ads and no helpful content, and other junk, is being removed from the Bing search engine. Read what Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land said about these changes....

Dr. Richard Qian from Bing’s core search team wrote a blog post on the Bing Search blog named Bing Search Quality Insights: Reducing Junk. This is part of Bing’s ongoing effort to provide search quality insights on how Bing works.


Bing here explains how they handle removing bad links from the Bing search results, and also have they handle junky or empty snippets.


Junk links include:
Dead Links
Soft 404
Parked Domains
Junk or Empty Snippets include:


Junky Snippets
Empty Snippets


Dead link examples are pages that return a 4xx or 5xx error code is returned from an HTTP request for a page. There are times where there is a dead link in Bing and Bing isn’t aware of it because they have not crawled the web page since it returned a proper result. But Bing’s crawler does crawl often and is able to detect dead links fairly quickly. When Bing does detect a dead link, depending on their algorithms they may “boost its re-crawl priority and frequency” to see if the dead link was a temporary error and should return to the search results or not. Continue reading original post here

As you can see, these search engines aren't playing. Bing, along with Google, have to make it their business to make sure people find what they are looking for. This is their top priority. No body likes to type in something and get a dead page or a site full of ads and no hint of helpful content. This can be annoying and folks will hit backspace as soon as they see a site cluttered with junk. What is junk; banners, ads, links to cheesy make money programs, and links that link to nowhere or to bad neighborhoods. Bing and Google wants to provide the best results for their users and they can care less what webmasters and bloggers think, which is the way it should be.

So the focus should be on how to provide the best experiences for our readers and visitors first and less about trying to make a buck all the time. Sure making money is important, but the customer comes first. If you want your online business to thrive, try building it on a solid foundation by providing readers and visitors with solid content.

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Is Link Building Still Effective

Many people are questioning whether link building is still effective or not. With Google constantly changing it's algorithm and making updates, it's no wonder people doubt link building still works.  Folks also think that Google + is a possible way for link building to be less important or a way for Google to know too much information about you. So to answer your question, is link building still effective? Read what SEOmoz have to say about the importance of link building and Google +.....

Are links less important than they were?


Back in the early days Google treated all links as being equal. A link in the footer was as good as a link in the main content, a link in bad content was as good as a link in good content, and so on. However, then the new generation of SEOs arrived and started 'optimizing' for links. The black hats created all sorts of problems, but the white hats were also manipulating the link graph. What this meant was now Google had to begin scrutinizing links to decide how trust-worthy they were.


Every link would be examined for various accompanying signals, and it would be weighted according to these signals. It was no longer a case of all links being equal. Reciprocal links began to have a diminished effect, links in footers were also not as powerful, and so it went for a variety of other signals. Over the last decade Google have begun using a wide range of new signals for determining the answer to the question they have to answer for every single link: How much do we trust this link?


They've also introduced an increasing number of signals for evaluating pages beyond the link based signals that made them. If we look at the ranking factors survey results from SEOmoz for 2011 we see that link based factors make up just over 40% of the algorithm. However, in the 2009 survey they were closed to 55% of the algorithm.


So in the last 2 years 15% of the algorithm that was links has been replaced by other signals in relative importance. The results are from a survey, but a survey with people who live and breathe this stuff, and it seems to match up well with what the community as a whole believes, and what we observe with the increasing importance of social signals and the like.


This reduction in the relative power of links seems to imply that Google aren't able to trust links as much as they once did. Whilst clear they are still the backbone of the algorithm, it is clear Google has been constantly searching for other factors to offset the 'over-optimization' that links have suffered from. 

Are social signals the answer?

The SEO community has been talking a lot about social signals the last couple of years, and whether they are going to replace links. I'd argue that social signals can tell you a lot about trust, timeliness, perhaps authority and other factors, but that they are quite limited in terms of relevancy. Google still need the links - they aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Continue Reading Here

I believe link building will remain important for a long time. Google is making changes for the better, they want to make sure they can trust all links and they must make sure they provide good results to their users. Google has a business it has to run and they are doing everything in their power to make sure it's ran effectively. If you want to build a business online, it is your responsibility to make sure you build your online business to meet the needs of your prospects and to meet the expectations of Google. They created Google + so that people can claim their work and if you have nothing to hide, you should own it. This is one way to build trust and authority and Google will have a way of knowing if links are legit or not.

Pull In More Blog Readers By Dropping The Big Names

To get a quick wave of readers flocking to your blog, try dropping celebrity names in the title of your blog. Most people can't resist reading news about a famous celebrity and most folks want to be in the know of what's going on with them. Online magazines get some of the most views because they talk about the latest news events that involve celebrities. People will read anything that talks about celebrities.

For example, just recently the news dropped that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are engaged. Anyone who has a relationship website, or a website about celebrity marriages & engagements will enjoy a lot of  temporary traffic. You can even reel in long term readers because people may expect that you will bring more news of their favorite celebrity. The key to getting the traffic, you have to keep up with updates and try to be one of the first people to talk about it on your blog or site.

If you can do that, you may just show up on page one of Google. Also, any surge of traffic will capture the attention of the search engines and once people get to talking about your post and sharing it, your site will become more popular, your post may go viral, if it's absolutely great, and you will set yourself up for more targeted long term loyal readers.

Check out what Heather Green has to say about this topic:


One of the simplest ways to attract readers to any blog post goes by the same logic on which countless magazines—like Us Weekly, People, and Vanity Fair—thrive: people love celebrities.


Celebrities have the leg-up on most bloggers because they already have household names. All a blogger has to do to steal some of the spotlight, however, is drop the said name.


Take this post on Balanced WorkLife, for instance, called “Charlie Sheen’s Guide to Emotional Intelligence” or CopyBlogger’s “5 Things Depeche Mode Can Teach You About Effective Online Marketing.” Both bloggers take two seemingly irrelevant topics and tie the ends to make eye-catching and compelling posts. Even individuals out of touch with Hollywood gossip can’t help but raise an eyebrow at the pairing of Charlie Sheen and emotional intelligence. Who would have thought the YouTube sensation’s philosophy would have anything constructive to add to personal development? (Winning).


5 Sources for Getting Ideas


1. If you (or one of your friends) don’t already guiltily subscribe to one of the aforementioned publications, check out the latest gossip on stars and starlets online. Don’t forget the royal couple, political celebrities, and the latest goings-on in the music industry. Read the rest of this article here

To pull in more blog readers, you need to use some or all of these strategies in your blog. Give people what they crave. Read my recent post on content curation, you will see how this method will bring you in long term traffic and build trust and authority.

Is Blogging Better Than Facebook?

Many of you have been told that Facebook will help you to get your business noticed. But does Facebook really help you. And if you decide to buy ads from them, how many people do you think will see them? See Facebook controls who sees what. When you purchase the ads on any social networking site, they have to be approved and has the be the way they want them to be. Plus only the folks who like your page will see your ads, or those who have a certain interest.

 Facebook and other social networking sites focuses more on whats hot for the moment. With blogging, you control what you do. You can put any kind of ads on your blog you want. Anyone has the opportunity to see your ads or content. Plus you're building your page rank and not that of Facebook or other social networking sites. Now you can still use Facebook and the like, but put more focus on your blogs. This even applies to article directories. When you're on someone else's turf, you have to play by the rules, on your blog you don't. Look at this info photo below which shows you ten reasons why blogging is better than Facebook:







So what do you think? Tell me your thoughts. Leave your comments.

Powerful Often Overlooked Traffic Tips

Many people start blogs and websites on a daily basis. Folks often get overwhelmed and tired of writing blog posts when they don't see traffic flowing in to their sites. If you fall into this massive group of people who struggles getting traffic, you need to be creative in getting visitors to visit you. I recently talked about how content curation can bring in tons of traffic, but there are other tips you can use as well. These tips are often overlooked and most affiliates don't even think about using them.

                                                                                                 

Here is a very good technique you can use from

Use the names of other bloggers in your blog posts – These days many bloggers set up Google Alerts. They receive an email Alert whenever their name shows up on blogs and on the Web.  What better way to bring to their attention your blog and an article you wrote mentioning them or an article they wrote?  Here’s a bonus tip: mention up-and-comers in the blogging world.  They often have the most interesting content on their blogs and they will appreciate the mention. If you only mention the most famous people like Pete Cashmore or Seth Godin, they get so many references daily (hundreds!) that they will probably miss your reference or won’t have time to visit your blog to check it out anyway. Read more good tips from this awesome writer here.

This tip is great. Bloggers and website owners love when their name is mentioned by other people and they love being credited. They are doing the same thing you're trying to do, attract more people. You gotta give a little to get a little. Always remember that.

Here are two great tips from John Chow's blog....

Trackback Links

Very few people talk about this, but it is quite effective. There are two advantages to focusing on generating trackback links. First, it requires you to link to other bloggers in your article, and this is healthy for your blog in the search engines. Search engines like it when people link back to other sites, since it is authoritative sites that usually do this. It means you can be trusted, and that you don’t only care about getting ranked.

The second advantage of linking back to other bloggers in your article is that it helps you score permanent links. Most bloggers display trackbacks on their blog, because it is a way to boost their ego and let everyone know that someone linked to them.

Trackback links won’t be deleted, they would always be given a priority by the bloggers that get them, and they are keyword rich since they contain your post title (this is a privilege ordinary comments won’t enjoy).

Linking back to other bloggers also helps them know you; it fosters a relationship between you and them, and increases your future chances of success. Link to other bloggers, there’s a lot of benefits for you in it!

And

eBook Distribution

If you search for education related keywords you will notice a lot of pdf files already indexed in the search engines. The fun thing is that if you try to read any one of those pdf files you will notice that those files actually have their own pagerank, which is often very high in most cases. In other words, if you could have 20 pagerank 4 ebooks linking back to your site with your desired keywords, you can imagine how much impact that will make.

Very few people write ebooks to build links, so this particular tactic is highly underutilized. Here’s your opportunity to capitalize on it.

Focus on writing quality ebooks, embed links back to your site in them, and try to market the heck out of them.  Read More Here

When you link back to other blogs, you build your brand and trust. This is what you want to do. Give viewers the best information and direct them to others useful sites. You don't want to be stingy and by not linking to others, you only hurt yourself.  I just recently talked about how content curation can attract more readers. If you use content curation in conjunction with these tips, you will create a long-term stream of traffic for years to come.

Also if you use the tip where you distribute eBooks, you can actually use content curation in the eBook that is indexed in Google with your links in your book and link to other sites with higher ranks. Google will associate you with the big dogs. People will be at your site and the if the eBook is interesting, they will stay on your site for a while. Google takes the amount of time someone spends on your site into consideration. It's like a positive vote for your site. You want visitors to stay glued to your content and you want them to visit other links through you.

Many affiliate marketers don't use these types of tips and if you do, this will be to your advantage. Too many affiliates only focus on promoting and selling, this is a very big mistake. They will never make money trying to "sell" someone else's product, that's the vendor's job not the affiliate's. The affiliates job is to follow the tips presented through this blog and the high authority blogs that belong to the big timers. I link to blogs and sites with helpful information and as an affiliate, it is up to you to follow the info. You should focus on providing advice and recommending a product, not selling it. If you show your audience that they can trust you, they will be more likely to buy the product through you if it is something they can use.

Use Content Curation To Attract Readers

As you may already know, content is king on the internet and if you want to build a brand and attract readers, content curation is the way to do it. Within the past year content curation has became a popular way for bloggers and site owners to bring unique visitors to their site and it has become a way to quickly create content for the blogs. Content curation actually cuts your time in half when it comes to creating a post for your blog or fresh and new information for your website. This method will help you to rank higher for the more difficult keyword and allows you to keep your readers on your page longer.

What is content curation you may ask. It's basically a method where a person takes information that someone else published on their website and sort through it and find the most interesting info and shares it with the readers of their own blog. It's kinda like that 7th grade book report you did on your favorite book. People have used this method for years. News broadcasters use it, and so do authors.

Content curation will allow you to post information more often to your websites and blogs, and you know the more pages you have indexed in the search engines, the higher you'll rank and the more traffic you will receive. Its a win-win for you and the site you are linking to.

You'll be building trust, building your brand, and you'll become a popular hub where you will attract readers to and through your blog.

Let's see what the people over at SEOmoz have to say about content curation:

The Ark is that outstanding content someone has produced and that no other will be able to see again, because it is forgotten and hidden between gazillions of other contents.

Apart from the gigantic volume of pages present in the Internet, for a long time, search spam has been making the discovery of reliable sources difficult; and – let's be honest – Social Media has enhanced this issue, because it added even more noise and dispersion. Actually, as Mitchel Kapor said once, getting information off the Internet is like having a drink from a fire hydrant.

To tell the truth, this problem is not new.

What is Content Curation?

Since the beginning of time, human beings have collected the best humanity has produced in art, literature, science; we invented the museums, the libraries, the Encyclopedia and  have written essays and done research. We have always looked at those ones, the curators who were knowing the right sources of that knowledge, to which being able to access to will have solved our needs.

Content Curation is the online expression of something, which is in the same nature of human beings: the need to collect and catalogue only the most interesting things about a subject so to share it for the common benefit.

This is especially needed in the Internet era. And, as Rohit Barghava wrote in the Content Curation Manifesto, Content Curators will bring more utility and order to the social web. In doing so, they will help to add a voice and point of view to organizations and companies that can connect them with customers – creating an entirely new dialogue based on valued content rather than just brand created marketing messages.

Actually five kind of Content Curation types are classified:

1. Aggregation, which consists in curating the most relevant content about a topic into one single location. This is the most common way of curating content, and it is at the base of the majority of the content curation services actually present online;
2. Distillation, which purpose is to distill the overall noise about a topic to its most important and relevant concept. The best cases of social content curation can be catalogued into this definition;
3. Elevation, when curators draft a more general trend or insight from a mass of daily musings;
4. Mashups, or to merge different content about a topic creating a new original point of view of the same;
5. Chronology, which could be defined as historiographical content curation. Usually it consists in presenting a timeline of curated information to show the evolution of a particular topic.  

Why do I Need to Curate Content?

There are at least six reasons for considering Content Curation as a tactic to follow in your Web Marketing plan.

Conquering the Long Tail

From a strict SEO point of view, to have a section of your own site dedicated to the curation of the best content related to your market, or to dedicate a section of your blog to it, is a powerful way to enhance the long tail reach of your site.

Obviously, you need to follow the principle of Content Curation as described above (discovers and curates, adds value commenting and providing perspective, crediting the sources) in order to not simply push duplicated content onto your own site.

Tools like Scoop.it, with the opportunity they offer to export your curated content feed into your site make this operation easier.   See Original Source

See when you use content curation, you will increase your chances of becoming an authority, Google will see that people are talking about your site or blog and people will love your site. Google will love you because they like to see that your are creating a buzz and sending people to other sites. You will become an information hub or source that is generous and helps others. Google is all about helping people and providing quality info and with content curation you will be doing just that.

At the end of the day, you can drive more affiliate sales, sell your own products, and create content in a fraction of the time. Your blogging days will become easier, you will not burn yourself out, and you won't suffer from writers block. Also you don't have to worry about duplicate content when using this method because you will still be adding your own unique content to your post. See you'll only be taking the most interested info and putting that on your blog and you will be giving credit to the original source. It's like borrowing information and sharing some of your traffic which in turn will attract more readers to you.

What Is Content Curation from infogal31

In order to get started you will need to find content that you can successfully curate. There is software available that will help you and you can also use the Google search engine and type in a phrase that will relate to what your content is about. You can check out the software using this link.  You will increase your chances of building backlinks and a chance at possibly building relationships with the owners of the content you use.  

Use Social Proof Marketing To Drive Affiliate Sales

In order to drive more affiliate sales, you have to show proof the product works. As I said in previous posts, you have to build trust to make sales in affiliate marketing. This is one of the best ways to do it. Buying the product and using it helps you to promote it better and it will come from the heart. People will know if you've actually tried the product because they will see your enthusiasm and how excited you are about this great product.

Show people people you've used the techniques. You don't have to giveaway all the details, just show them the basics. People want to know if the product is going to work for them and they want to know that you are not just trying to make a fast buck. Your heart has to be in it and willing to help people.

How can you show proof? By writing honest reviews, and include a video of yourself using the product. Don't write a review like your doing a research paper for your 7th grade class. Write the review and tell the prospects how this product helped you in your own projects. For example, if you are a woman who lost pregnancy pounds using an eBook, you could video tape your results and show them to other women who is trying to do the same thing. Provide update videos on your progress and recommend the eBook to others. Start a blog and embed a video of yourself in your website. Show pictures and videos of you and your child. People want to see that this product is working for others. They don't want some fake review posted by a none caring affiliate who just want to make sales.

Be precise, answer questions, provide tips, and show pictures in your video of your results. Videos don't lie, so people will trust you and they will buy the product.  Social proof marketing is the way to drive affiliate sales. 

Market Your Affiliate Business Without Advertising

Every type of business need customers to be successful and advertising can be horribly expensive. To make an income without spending money and worrying about your competition you should market your affiliate business without advertising. Well in a sense you will still be advertising, but in ways where customers won't think you're advertising. In the long run, you will have the potential to make more affiliate sales and gain trust from your future prospects.

These are a few ways you can market your affiliate business without advertising.

Print out business cards.

You can easily do this if you have your own website. Pick out a great design with your information, which should include your website, email address, Skype, Facebook, and anything else you feel that is important.

Give away something for free. 

Now this is powerful. People like free stuff. This is the best method of advertisement. Most people don't even realize that this is a form of advertising. Big business do it all the time. Some give away coupons to get a free sandwich, they have their customers do surveys for a free drink, and sometimes you can find a gift card in a newspaper where you can go to a department store and get something for $10 or put it towards your purchase. See this is a win-win for the customer and the business because people love free.

What you can do is create a free report that is very helpful to entice them to purchase. Or put together a bonus package for your customers of very good quality. Make sure the bonus product you put together is related to the affiliate product you want to promote. This bonus can be a video, eBook, report, anything. You can even offer your time to the first 5-10 customers who make a purchase through you. This will create urgency. People will want to purchase a product through your affiliate link if your bonus is a banging one. Make your bonus be the best. You may even want to offer more than one bonus. This will make people confident to pull out their credit cards and make the purchase. You'll boost your affiliate sales and conversions will skyrocket. Giving away something for free can create a marketing buzz too.

You can go offline and give away something free too. You can go buy some cheap ink pens, get your website printed on the pens and give them away. You can use t-shirts also. T-shirts come in bundles and can be purchased at a discount. People will flock to you and get your shirt or pen just because it's free. Out of curiosity, people will visit your website and if the product happens to be something they can use, they just might buy it.

Give to your favorite charity.

Yes that is correct. When you let people know you want to give to your favorite charity, people may be more prone to by from you. For instance if you are an animal lover and you're promoting an eBook on how to train your dog, you can tell the customer, 25% of all the commissions you make will go to your favorite animal charity. There are a bunch of people who believe in animal rights and love dogs so they will want to purchase the book through your affiliate link because you are giving to a good cause. Plus this build trust. Just make sure you do as you say and give the set percentage to charity.  If you have a fan page on Facebook or if your website is popular and you receive a lot of visitors, this would be the chance to let people know. You will boost your income and you may be able to write it off on your taxes. (you'll have to check first).

Put Your Website On Your Vehicle.

If you decide to use the last tip and give away free stuff, put your website on the backside of your vehicle and let people know you are giving away stuff for free and visit your site for details. You can say free _____ with purchase of ______! Visit _______ for details. Keep it simple.

Make a professional name tag.

You can make a name tag with your name and business title. Plus a shirt with your business logo. This can prompt people to ask you questions and you can sell yourself. Just think if you are promoting how to make money online and you walk in a store and go through the line of a cashier who wants to make money in her own business. She may ask you how because she sees your professional name tag. You can share your website with her and if she likes what she see or hear from you, she may make a purchase through your affiliate link. You never know until you do it. Just wear your tag or shirt a couple times a week and go out and mingle with others. Or network with people in various places.

Go to a business expo.

Set up a booth at a business expo and explain your business to others. Yes this can work with affiliate marketing. If you are promoting a make money product, this is the best way to do it. You can even print out some free reports to give to people or direct them to your website. You can record your voice on a CD or a video on  a DVD with info and give it to the people. Also give away your free stuff at the expo.

These are creative ideas to get yourself out there. There are many other things you can do to promote your business, but you should make sure you include ways to market your affiliate business without the advertising. Implement these strategies in your affiliate business and see what happens.

How Buzz Marketing Can Increase Affiliate Sales

Buzz marketing is a great method you can use to boost your affiliate profits. When you generate buzz, you put yourself in a position to get your site seen, stir up conversation and the opportunity to make money.

                              

Buzz marketing is a technique that is also referred to as viral marketing, or viral advertising. Basically, it is a method that is used to bring attention to a website or product by way of word of mouth, text messaging, YouTube videos, social networking sites and countless other ways. This type of marketing will rely heavily on how many people you can get to share it, how good the content is you are trying to promote and if the friends of your friends will share it.
                                                               
See buzz or viral is something that has to be created. People like to share funny and crazy pictures and videos. They like sharing pictures of cute kittens. Humans are very social beings. Being social is a method of survival in many cases. We love it.

But how can you start using buzz or viral marketing in your affiliate marketing business?

Well I'm going to tell you. You need to have something awesome to share with others and something that they will be willing to share with their friends. Buzz does not last very long, so it is vital that you create the buzz right the first time. You can do this by creating a joke or a funny video. Even a picture that is very cute. You want whatever you use to be the next best thing. Something no one has ever seen before. It's got to be something that's on fire, amazing, captivating and compelling. Steve Goldner, told his clients to think like a movie producer when it come to creating buzz or viral marketing campaigns. As he said compelling shots and scenes from an up coming movie drums up excitement and the desire to see the film. This is what you want when you create your viral piece to get the traffic to stampede to your site.

One thing you don't want to do is make it like you're selling something or make it seem commercial. People will not share your content with family or friends if your content comes off as some type of a money making campaign. You'll end up destroying your buzz marketing efforts and once you screw up there is no turning back. This has to be done right the first time.

Now if you have a dag-um good product, I mean a very jazzy product you're about to launch and you know it will sell and you know you have targeted traffic, that would be the only time I would focus a viral campaign around a product. But it's got to be the absolute best. You really got to bring it and bring the best.

Use social media and word of mouth to get it flowing. Make sure you do that. If you can do this, your site will become popular, rankings will soar up, search engines will pay attention and send traffic your way, and eventually you'll get targeted traffic, which means an increase in your affiliate sales. Creating buzz will create the biggest affiliate income you could ever dream up for many years to come if you do it right.

                                                                           

                                                           

Write A Guest Blog Post & Get Visitors

A free and effective way to get your blog noticed is writing a guest blog post. When you first start a new blog, you will not get much traffic to your blog in the beginning. It can take several months to years to start getting a steady flow of traffic. Many people start looking to be a guest and do a blog post on other peoples blogs that is receiving visitors. It is a potent way of getting your blog exposed and it is better than paying for an ad, and Google knows the difference between traffic that comes from paid sources and natural unpaid links.

If you are good at writing and like to write, you can be a guest on blogs. I'm going to give you a few tips on how to do it.

First you want to contact many bloggers that do allow guest posting. Make sure you look at their blog. Read it and subscribe to them. Be willing to follow their guidelines and rules. Some bloggers don't like giving new bloggers a chance so make sure you have been blogging for a while before you contact anyone and build your reputation and rank. And when you do contact fellow bloggers, be yourself. When you send them an email asking to be a guest blog poster, show them you are a trustworthy person and don't write your email as if it was an ad. Read their blogs guidelines please before emailing them. You don't want your email to suck. This is very important or you may not be taken seriously and you'll lose the opportunity to be a guest on their blog. 

If a blogger decides to let you write a guest blog post, make sure you write on something that will fit their blog. What I mean by that is you want your post to be on topic and in alignment with the content on their blog. If you're a guest blog poster on a weight loss blog, you may want to consider writing a post on how to gain muscles to boost weight loss efforts. Stay away from subjects that are too off topic. 

And when you write your blog post, make sure you write one that is very detailed and aim for post that are longer than 1000 words. The longer and more information the post provides, the better. It can be kinda hard to explain something or help others if the post is less than 500 words. Plus the owner of the blog may not want to include your post on their blog and link back to you. One of the main reasons why people guest blog post is to build back links to their blog but you have to provide good quality content on their blog. 

It is important that your guest blog post doesn't have any spelling errors or grammar issues. The best thing to do is pretend this is for your blog you're writing for. Is yours full of misspellings, does the post make sense and help others? 

Also once you finish the guest blog post, you're not really done. You'll have to interact with people who decide to leave comments. Answer questions and reply back everyone who leaves a comment. Treat this post as if it were on your blog. It is your duty as a blog poster to show good ethics. 

Follow these few important tips and you'll start to build back-links, get noticed, and gain exposure for your blog and gain a new audience who otherwise may not have known your blog exist.

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6 SEO Secrets & Tips

Many people who get started in affiliate marketing learn after a short while that one of the keys to getting traffic and ranking higher in the search engines is knowing a little information on SEO secrets and tips. But the question I have for you today is, how important is SEO. If you are a reader of my blog many of you know that I recently wrote a blog on too much SEO.

Now I'm not saying SEO is not important, because it is, but worrying too much about learning the best SEO secrets and tips can lead to you not focusing on providing good quality content to your readers. Google may actually penalize you if your main focus is on using the best SEO secrets and tips.

I'm going to give you a few things you should focus on so that your site can rank higher and receive more traffic.

1. Unique and good quality content. This is a must if you want the search engines to send you traffic. Google is going to focus more on sites that will provide this to their readers. If you can't do that people will not stay glue to your site and your site will be ranked really low.
2. Include the keyword in your domain name. You want to use a domain with your keywords but you don't want it to just be your keywords alone. Example if your site is affiliate income you want to use something like affiliate income now or make affiliate profits fast. But then you don't want to crowd your site or blog with just keywords, including the one in your domain name, because you can get penalized by Google and the other search engines if you do. 
3. Research keywords. This is important. You need to do research on which keywords are used from around the world. You can get ideas on multiple keywords by doing a search using the Google Keyword Tool. You type in the keywords and press enter and you will get many keywords. This is mainly a guide and should only be used as such. 
4. Use long tailed keywords. You should definitely use these in your post on your blog or sites. An example: instead of saying Nike shoes, say Red Nike Running Shoes For Women. This way people will have a better chance of finding your site and spending money through you as well. You will not make money as quickly if you say just Nike shoes because you're not being specific enough. 
5. Reduce clutter on your websites and blogs. You want to make sure people can search your sites with no problem and you don't want a whole bunch of ads cluttering your sites. People can get turned off if all they see are ads and not helpful valuable content. 
6. Make sure you direct your visitors to highly imporant websites. Show your visitors they can trust you by link them to sites that provide information similar to yours. You want to be a giver not a taker and you need to share. If another site has more information that can help your readers, send them to other websites that have high quality content. There are many of them around. Even if it means you don't make a profit. Don't worry about making money all the time. It is not as important as providing your readers with helpful info. You will eventually make money. Your primary focus is to make sure you meet the needs of your audience. 

These are just some of the helpful SEO tips you can use to help you rank higher on search engines and get traffic. No, this post was not meant to show you how to optimize your website, html codes or use SEO tricks to boost your rankings. It's about providing pure discrete info to readers without polluting the web and wasting space on the search engine servers. 

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