Tip of the Day

For my friends that are also doing affiliate marketing, and more specifically online malls, and credit cards here are the hot deals.

Online Mall:

1. Acai Berry Blast
2. iDebtAssistance.com

Credit Cards:

1. First Universal Platinum
2. Horizon Gold

I have mentioned these here because they are high converting offers. So if they are within your network or you are part of their affiliate programs, it is in your best interest to implement campaigns to market these items.

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Free Marketing Strategies: Blogs Demystified

Blogs can have powerful uses when applied to affiliate marketing, or any other type of business. Blogging does a couple of inherent things. First it keeps you active in the subject matter of your blog. For example, my blog is about affiliate marketing, and in maintaining this blog I am constantly staying active. I am constantly searching for additional information that may help my business, and in so doing, I am also gathering subject matter for the blog. Because I am active in this way, I am growing in this area of expertise. Thus eventually one could say that they are a subject matter expert. Second, as you maintain your blog you will garner a following, as well as become part of the larger blogging community. Those that read blogs or are looking for the type of information within your blog, will also leave comments, either asking for more information on a particular topic, or asking about related information. All in all it really does help bolster knowledge in the subject matter of the blog.

I will restate the basics of how you blog should be formulated:

1. Blogs should stick to one niche and not deviate from it.
2. Blogs should be updated regularly. Decide on once or twice a week and stick to the same day if at all possible.
3. Blogs should reference other sites, blogs, articles, or material on what you are speaking about
4. Keep each blog entry relevant and interesting.
5. Be credible and always fact check.
6. Correct things that need to be changed.

There are a couple of good blog sites that are more widely recognized. One is www.blogger.com, and the other is www.wordpress.com. Wordpress is more commonly used by business, but blogger is as well, and may have a larger following overall. I chose Blogger because it is driven by Google, and it allows you to have Google ads on your blog via Adsense, which honestly is another means of making money with the blog. So, based on the words in your blog post, relevant ads will be shown. If ads are clicked on, you are paid for that. So the larger following that you are able to acquire, the better you will do with making money that way too.

When I got the comment to expand the information on free marketing strategies I noticed that I was missing something. The missing item was, how to drive traffic to the blog. One thing that I have come to understand is that publicizing your blog does not happen on your blog. Yep, I said it. It does not occur on your blog. What does that means is that you? Here are the basics:

Outbound links to other sites from your blog posts are seen by those sites as inbound links/back-links, and their authors may click back through to see what you’re saying and what you’re all about. That’s why it is important to pay attention to who links to you, and respond. As you write your own blog and link to blogs of others, that is one form of publicizing your blog.

Blogging in falls into the general category of social networking, and with that comes need to be active in the community. Does that mean going and talking to all of your friends, friends of friends, and so on? No, it simply means that you need to be mindful of the opportunities as you are looking for information on your own business, whether that information comes from other blogs, articles, and the like.

Bringing attention to your blog will happen in many ways:

• If you are part of other social networks such as facebook, linkedin, myspace, and the like each time your update your wall, status, or profile information, everyone in your network sees your updates on their network home page.
• When you happen to see a blog that has useful information in it, leave a comment. It will serve as a link back to your blog. Think carefully then about what you say in the comment.
• When you happen to see useful information in a forum, leave a comment to the post
• If you are not part of Twitter, you should join. When you post an update containing a link to your blog via tweets those following you or those discovering you will be able to see such posts. You should not however post every update. Your blog should be posted in your bio thus making it unnecessary to post every blog update. If it however something that you deem important, by all means post it.
• If you are part of StumbleUpon, as you stumble on useful information, leave comments. Oftentimes those you leave comments for will in turn leave comments for you. If someone stumbles onto your blog through stumbleupon and leaves comments for you, you should be nice and respond.
• If you are part of Delicious or Digg (very much like StumbleUpon) the same process applies.
• If you place your blogs link in the signature of your emails, that too is a way to publicize your blog
• When you pass out business cards which contain your blogs link, that is a way to publicize your blog
• When you meet people in networking events, business conferences and the like, and an reasonable opportunity arises to talk about your blog, bingo, another way to publicize your blog.

As you get more involved writing comments, responding to comments, bookmarking sites, leaving testimonials, your following will grow. I will further extend this in my next post. There are other thoughts on my mind that I just have to write down. I am still learning this as well, so as I come across information I will definitely write it down.

There were some sites that I ran across via stumble upon that really have helped me understand what must be done to attract attention to this blog.

10 Reasons why readers do not leave comments @ Sucessful-Blog.com. A very informative and witty understanding as to why post and comments threads sometimes run people off.

Blogging Basics: Getting Attention to your Blog @ everdotconnects.com. Very eye opening as to the many ways that one can attract blog attention.

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Free Marketing Strategies: Web Directories Demystified

I noticed a comment on one of my earlier posts and wanted to follow up on the information in that blog. There are several topics in that post, so what I will do is take one at a time and expand on them over the next few days. I will start with Web directories.

I mentioned before that Web directories are just that. They are directories on the world wide web that specialize in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links. There are different types of directories, both free and premium pay. I have personally been working with the free ones, because I am trying to gain a larger initial return on investment (ROI), before expanding my budgets.

The free directories are human-edited directories. Human edited directories are liked by the search engines because they tend to house much more reliable links and information on the websites that it contains. Because of the search engine/web directory relationship, web directories tend to have good page ranks. Linking your affiliate website to these directories will improve your pages ranking with Google, since it is Google that is the progenitor of page ranks.

Page Rank is calculated as follows: This is a simplified equation


Thus if you wish to calculate your page rank which we will consider page "A", and you are linked/back-linked to pages B, C, and D, your page rank is the summation of the page rank PR() of a linked page divided by the number of outbound links L() that page has. So it would make sense that as you continue adding your page to web directories and as the entries get approved you will see your page rank slowly increase since this effect is cumulative.

There are a couple of good tools for quickly getting a calculation of your page rank, or the page rank of any page. One tool is located along the left frame of this blog. It will show you the page rank of the URL you enter. This tool is called page rank checker. Another tool that I use to check not only the page rank but the validity of the page rank is called check page rank.



I have been paying particular attention to check page rank. Here are a couple of screen shots for your consideration. I will explain what is in them. The figure shows the page rank out of a possible 10, the link popularity, major web directory listings, and registered domains. Besides the page rank itself the other interesting thing to note is the link popularity. Link popularity is just another way to say the number of pages linked to your website. This is important because you will be able to keep track of how many of your web directory entries are being approved. The major web directories, DMoz, Yahoo, and Google are paid subscriptions and come at a premium. For example a listing of your website in Yahoo's directory would cost $300 US per year. Eventually I would apply for an entry into the major web directories, but perhaps some time later.

Improving your page rank in the search engines will mean better placement for your pay per click ads, and subsequently lower cost/click, as well as your website appearing higher on regular searches. Another added benefit is that you increase organic searches through referring sites. By that I mean all of those web directory entries that you create will increase organic searches. Organic traffic is traffic that comes from sources other than search engines (Yahoo, Google, MSN...).

Before I mentioned the resource that I have used to add web directory listings. The site is addurl.nu. When you go to this site you will notice a very long list of web directories (nearly 1000), sorted by page rank. Take this list and do the following:

1. Do submit your site to 10 web directories per day, as this keeps you from appearing as spam, and will assure your page rank being genuine.
   
2. Do follow the instructions for each web directory, though they are very similar
3. Do wisely choose the category for your listing (ex. credit cards go in personal finance, or finance and investment)
   
4. Do keep your website title short
5. Do keep your website description to the point, clear, and not more than 300 characters
   
6. Do not submit to directories where you must pay for a regular submission
7. Do not submit to directories that require reciprocal links.
8. Do not submit entries with reciprocal links.
   
9. Do not attempt to utilize a service that submits your website to some large number of directories.

Reciprocal links are links provided to you at the time of your directory submission. You are supposed to take the snippet of code, and enter it into your website. So because we are adding our affiliate website to lots of directories it is not in our best interest to do submissions with reciprocal links because it would mean you would need to edit your website to display a link to each and every directory, which does not make sense.

Below is a typical submission form. The various sites may differ slightly but all of the elements needed are the same. For example, some sites use captcha to verify your submission, while others allow you to enter meta keywords from your website, as well as meta descriptions. The typical procedure to add your website to the directory is:

1. Browse the directory looking for the proper category that your site belongs in.
2. Once you have found the proper category, click the "submit link" or “add site”, or comparable submission link. Sometimes it is on the top of the page, sometimes it is in the left frame or the right frame. You may need to look for it.
3. Once you have done that, the form below appears.
   
   

Just so you would know, Google.com has a page rank of 10, and has a link popularity of ~341 million.

Recently I had a drop in page rank when Google redid the way that it calculates page rank. I mentioned that there were practices that merit penalty, none of which I am doing. I mentioned page rank sculpting, and link selling. So, with that in mind with the decrease in my page rank I subsequently saw a decrease in traffic through my site. I said all of that to say this: Since my page rank has again started increasing I have again noticed a marked increase in traffic. My page rank is currently 1 for my credit card website, and 2 for my online mall website.

This is direct evidence of the importance of page ranks. I would say that from just an increase of 1 my traffic increased by at least 300%.

Feel free to leave comments if there are questions, as well as a way to write you back.

Next topic: Free Marketing Strategies: Blogs Demystified

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Page Rank, and Search Engine Optimization

What I have noticed recently as a result of travel for training, is that if you do not stay on top of your search engine optimizations it would appear that your page rank will fall. I had been up to a Google page rank of 3 before the travel. The fall also coincided with various changes that Google implemented for, how do we say, clearing away the excess. By that I mean there have been inflated page ranks out there apparently due to page rank sculpting. There are those of us out here that really knew nothing of page rank sculpting but have gotten caught up in the penalties that have been passed out. At the same time, blogs are abuzz with complaints of lowered page ranks.

There are a few articles out there on exactly what page rank sculpting is, and while interesting, it is not recommended. The gist of what page rank sculpting happens to be is this:

It is the blatant manipulation by a webmaster to alter how page rank flows through a website. This means directing flow to certain areas of a website over others to artificially increase the page rank of particular pages, rather than having the overall website page rank being distributed evenly over the entire website.

No one really knows the update frequency of Google when it comes to page ranks but it would appear that it is on a three month cycle. So it may be that I end up stuck with a page rank of 0 for a while, which is rather unnerving. At least until I pink Google to figure out what is happening, as I am not doing anything that would merit penalty.

The infractions that would merit penalty are, the selling of links, and page rank sculpting.

References:

________________________________________________________

Page Rank Sculpting @ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

Google Changing the Page Rank Algorithm @ http://www.dailyblogtips.com/google-changing-the-pagerank-algorithm/

Google Page Rank Changes in Progress @ http://www.dailyblogtips.com/confirmed-google-pagerank-update-in-progress/

Google Further Clarifies NoFollow and PageRank Sculpting @ http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/090616-130132

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Tools and Tips – For your PPC Campaigns

I promised to address tools in this post. The tool that I wish to talk about this time is Google Analytics.

Analytics is useful and I would dare say essential to the streamlining and optimization of the total solution when it comes to affiliate marketing. The total solution in this case consists of online marketing campaigns, via CPC/CPM efforts, SEO optimization, Blogging, Social Bookmarking, as well as web site content. Basically it is useful for any effort that is used to drive traffic to the affiliate website.

Web analytics more specifically is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web page usage. There are two categories of web analytics; off-site and on-site web analytics.

Wikipedia states to following definitions for off-site and on-site web analytics:

Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis irrespective of whether you own or maintain a website. It includes the measurement of a website's potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole.

On-site web analytics measure a visitor's journey once on your website. This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase. On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.

The Tool

Google Analytics(GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates very detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. One of the best perks of this tool is Its aim at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew.

GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing, social bookmarking, blog, social networks, and even digital collateral such as links within PDF documents. WOW!!!

GA's approach is to show high level dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set. Through the use of GA analysis, poor performing pages can be identified, where visitors came from (referrers), how long they stayed on any given page, and their geographical position. It also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation, and website testing.

From the dashboard there are several metrics that are most apparent. Those metrics are: visits, page views, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on site, and % new visits. The graph above shows the visits, and pages/visit.

The Metrics (under the Site Usage section)

Visits – This metric is obviously the overall number of visits that a website will see on any given day

Page Views – This metric is how many pages were viewed on any given day

Pages/Visit – This metric shows how many pages were viewed per visit on average

Bounce Rate – This metric shows what percentage of visits ended with the visitor navigating away from the landing page without taking any other action.

Average Time On Site – This metric shows the average amount of time a visitor spends perusing the site

% New Visits – This metric shows the average of how many visits are unique on a given day

Visits, Page Views, and Pages/Visit really give an indication as to how relevant our efforts are to attract attention to the affiliate website. Ads and ad bodies must reflect the information that is on the landing page. Blog information must be relevant to the niche it focuses on and related in some way to the affiliate website. Display ads must also prove relevant to the landing page, and so on.

I have been informed recently that a bounce rate close to 50% or less is most typical. It is when the bounce rate is consistently well above 50% that one should be concerned. It is a clear indication that the marketing efforts need to be revised in some way. Relevance is definitely key when it comes to marketing. Keep in mind however, that not all CPC/CPM marketing offered by the various search engines are created equal. It is obvious that the most popular search engines present higher quality traffic. The top three are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. There are smaller entities that offer CPC/CPM marketing and those are: 7search.com, Search123.com, Miva, AdBrite. I am currently using Google, Yahoo, and Miva. Unfortunately Miva is not yielding the highest quality traffic, as I have seen high bounce rates recently. Thus I will try MSN next. Initially I went to Miva because the charges we significantly lower.

There are more sections on the GA dashboard for drilling down to more advanced information. The sections are:

1. Visitor Overview
2. Map Overlay
3. Traffic Sources Overview
4. Content Overview

The visitor overview shows a graphical view of the number of visitors/day within the dates selected. The Map overlay shows where the traffic is originating. The darker the green is on the map the denser the traffic is from that location. The traffic sources overview shows a graphical view of where traffic is coming from. The three sources measured are, search engines, referring sites, and direct traffic. Under each of these sections is a “view report” link. This expands the report to show highly detailed information of its parent section. (ex. you can see metrics on each of the pages viewed under the content overview report)

Integrated with AdWords, users can review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. These can also be monetized. By using GA, marketers can determine which ads are performing, and which are not, providing the information to optimize or cull campaigns.

Getting started with GA is relatively simple. Setting up profiles within GA takes little effort. The process is as follows:

1. create a profile for your website
2. copy the generated code, and place it into the body of your websites home page.
3. Allow up to 24 hours for the metrics of the first day to be collected.

The snag that most run into is the copying of the generated code into the body of the website home page. If you do not have control over your website, then you must let your webmaster do it for you, if there is no facility provided for you. If you do have access to the source of your website then adding this is academic. It is non-viewable code so there is no need to worry about anything being displayed on the web page.

I have read that the official limit on profiles is 50, and the upper limit for metrics is 5 million page visits per day.

References:
__________________________________________________________

Bounce Rate – Demystified at Web Analysis, Behavioral Targeting and Advertising

Web Analytics at Wikipedia

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Tip of the Day

Due to travel, my next post will be a little delayed. In the mean time have a look at an SEO tools site where there are so many tips and ideas on SEO that it would really astonish you, as it did me. The site is at:

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/

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