Avoid Preselling On Your Squeeze Page

Affiliate marketing is becoming a more challenging business to get started with all of the panda updates and changes in the search engines. This means it will become more difficult to build natural traffic to your websites. This doesn't mean it is impossible; but you will have to work a little harder to work around these changes.

One way of attracting more visitors and subscribers to your page is to create squeeze pages that are rich with content and take the focus off of preselling completely; don't even do a little preselling. People are becoming more and more aware that affiliates are trying to make a buck so don't even do the preselling on your squeeze pages and avoid them on the main pages of your website. If you want to attract visitors, make sure your squeeze page offers a valuable report and make sure your report has your blog or web address so you can send them back to your website or blog. As you know, people are looking for information not to spend money and that's cool. See the more people visit your site, Google will take notice and you will be rewarded with more visitors.

Your report need to be about something that is really hot and sizzling now. For example, people need methods and want to learn how to successfully publish with kindle. If your blog is about self publishing perhaps you report can be related to the subject of publishing for Amazon kindle and making money selling and writing booklets.

Not preselling may go against what you learnt in the past but this is mainly for the squeeze page. You don't want to run visitors off because they see a preselling method 50 miles away on the page.

Now when you send emails to your subscribers your autoresponder need to have all high quality content; but when you want to make a product recommendation, I advise you to send out a content filled e-newsletter 2 times a month and recommend your products in that newsletter.

You should do this in addition to sending out your helpful emails. Most of your emails should contain the URL to your blog posts. I advise this because Google will take notice that people are visiting your site from your email and since a majority of people use gmail, Google will see this and you will start to show up in the search engines. And when you do recommend a product, don't just say click here for more information; give them a reason to click your link. Ask them if they are tired of their problem and tell them the solution the product provides, then tell them click the link to get the secrets.

Always remember that the trust you build with your visitors and subscribers will make them more likely buy a product from you and they will, in most cases, turn into repeat buyers. Don't worry if they don't buy from you now because it is later that matters the most.



How To Write For Kindle

Amazon is a great place for authors, internet marketers, affiliate marketers, or anyone who has knowledge about a specific subject to make money online. Amazon offers plenty of income opportunities. I recently did a post on using KDP select to increase traffic to your website and I talk a little about how to create a short report to put on the Amazon website. Before you decide to self publish to kindle, you need to know how to write a kindle book. I will explain how you can do this in three simple steps.

-Pick a Profitable Niche & Research

This step is very important. You want to make absolutely sure you pick a money making niche. Picking a profitable niche involves a few moments of research because you need to give people what they want. If you are an affiliate this can come easy for you because you should already have an idea what people want. And you will perform your research much like you would do for affiliate marketing. If you are used to writing short reports to give away to your subscribers list, you could write the short reports and sell them on Amazon KDP. Just put a link to your website in your kindle eBook. You can use Google to find a niche and you can also use Amazon to see which categories sell the most books. You can also use others book selling platforms (websites) to find niches that make money by doing the same thing. Check out the book How To Find A Profitable Niche For Amazon Kindle Publishing which explains exactly how to choose a money making niche for publishing eBooks on Amazon.

-Create Content

The next step you need to do is create the content from the research you preformed. To do this you should create an outline of how you want to write your book. You need to include a compelling introduction and a table of contents. When publishing on Amazon, people will get a chance to see inside your book before you buy it so it is very important you impress your viewers and they will be more prone to buy your book. You also need to create a compelling title with keywords so that your title will show up in the search engines. If you are not a good writer you can always hire someone to do it for you for cheap. Simply put out an ad or contact someone you may know who love to write. You can also find a private label rights (PLR) book for the subject you choose. Just make sure you add research to it and change up the information to make it your own. You also don't want to publish the book as is because this is not allowed on Amazon.

-Create Your Book Cover

If you know how to draw, you can simply draw a picture to use for your book cover and scan it on your computer. You can also use Paint on your computer to draw on there if you're good at it. You can also take a picture with a good camera and use it for your cover or find a picture from a picture website (royalty free image). Your book cover need to be compelling and eye catching. Once you find or create your picture, go to a site where you can add text to your picture or drawing. There is a site called Picfont and you can upload your picture and put the title of your kindle book on your picture.

As you can see it is not that hard to write for kindle. Writing for kindle takes a little research, quality content creation, and producing a good book cover. Now you can publish your book on kdp.amazon.com .



Google Plus Circles & Hangouts For Business

As you already know, communication is the key to a successful business and Google Plus can help you to communicate with your customers and other people. Two great ways to communicate with your customers is by using the Google Plus Circles and Hangouts features. With the Google Plus Circles, you can organize people in one or many circles. For example, one circle can be for your customers and you can have other circles for your friends, family, and business associates. If you want to, you can send just your customers a message on updates for products and anything else you need to tell them without everyone else receiving the message. Circles are convenient and it saves you time and money.


Google Plus Hangouts is also a great way to communicate with customers and business associates. You can use video to do a live presentation of how to use a new product, you can use this feature for free training, conference calls, and webinars. You will gain more trust from others because they will be able to see and communicate with you and you can answer any questions live.  It is a great way to be in front of customers without having to leave your home or make arrangements to travel. It will be easy for customers to talk to the owners of a project and it will make them more comfortable and you will have more conversions. 


These are just a few of the wonderful features of Google Plus. If you are not using Google Plus for your business, you should. I believe pretty soon a whole lot more people will be on Google Plus and they will have a much better chance to rank higher for their keywords because this is a product of Google. 

Use KDP Select To Increase Website Traffic

We know that we need traffic to our websites and blogs to make money and to build a fan base and following. In affiliate marketing that can be tough. In this blog I've shared some ways you can increase the traffic to your website and how to make an affiliate income. But there is another way you can get people to flock to your sites and blogs; that way is through publishing a kindle ebook on Amazon.

Amazon KDP Select Program is a great way to get people to download your books for free. It is a program that is suppose to make you money when people borrow your books through Amazon Prime. The bad thing about this program is the people get only one borrow per month so it really isn't that effective. But for a person who is trying to build a business, Amazon KDP Select will allow you to make your book free for 5 days out of a 90 day period only if your book is exclusive to them. You would have to price the book between $2.99 and $9.99 to be apart of it. I know 5 days is not a lot, but you can use these 5 free days to to get visitors to your site and spread the news about your business because Amazon has a huge amount of targeted traffic monthly. This is what you can do to use KDP Select to gain more visitors and traffic to your site: 
  1.  Create a short information guide. This is where you will focus on solving a pressing problem. This can apply to any niche. If you have a blog about weight loss, you can create an information product that focus on building muscle to increase weight loss. You can write a short 5-7 page guide on things a person can do to build muscle. Then put your website address or the name of your business in the book so people can visit your site. Also put your email address in there. Then upload it on Amazon KDP Select and price the book at the lowest price of $2.99. When you set the promotion for the book to go free on the days you choose, people can download the free copy to their kindle or computer (when they download the kindle app on the PC) and read it. This is the best reason to use the Amazon Kindle Select Program. Your primary focus is to get people to see your info guide and your site, not to make money from it. But you can make a few bucks when you are not using your free days and get a few sales. My book, How to Create a New Information Product in 90 Minutes Or Less, will show you how you to create an info product in less than 90 min.
  2. Find sites that will let you announce when your book is going free. Author Marketing Club is a great place that will let you promote your kindle eBook and they will offer other helpful benefits to authors. 
  3. Make sure you are really helping your future customers. Provide them with very helpful info to make them want to check out your site and keep your book. If it doesn't help them they can decide to get a refund. And if it does help them, they may share it with others.
So far I've had some success with the program by getting my name out there. I've made a small amount in royalties from the USA sales and a a small amount of £ from UK. And that's from all six items I sell through Amazon KDP, including a short romance novel I wrote and I recently signed up with KDP at the end of April. So it's not that bad for earning a few extra bucks. In my opinion it is best to use this platform to get future customers for you online business more so than making a lot of money from it. 

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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 belowRead 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.