Entries Tagged 'Webmaster Tips' ↓

Today I wanted to introduce a great affiliate marketing resource that I have been spending a lot of time on recently.

As you guys know, I’ve been looking into affiliate marketing. Now, I already know a bit about Internet Marketing with a number of successful sites, so most of the e-books I found to mostly filled with basic online marketing material with a small part about the stuff that I needed to learn.

I joined PepperJam recently and found a link to Anik Singal’s Affiliate Classroom in their resource page. I took them up on the USD1 offer and enrolled.

Now this is what we are talking about!!

Interviews with Super Affiliates, Case Studies, Step by Step guides (Affiliate guides and not article marketing or what have you), monthly Affilaite magazine, all great stuff and I’ll be continuing my subscription due to how helpful AC has been to me. This is not a common occurrence let me tell you.

I’ve been a member for just over 2 weeks, downloaded and listened to about 7 hours of interviews on my iPod, read 2 magazines and I’ve barely scratched the surface. For beginners, they also have a step by step tutorial which takes the complete beginners from zero to profits in a unique system. I already make 4 digit profits a month so I didn’t go through this process, maybe later when I have more time.

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This is a question that is appearing in our forums a lot recently and to avoid repeating myself, I will do a post about it.

Quoting the Oxford Dictionary:

Marketing
the promotion and selling of products or services.

The question by itself is a lazy question and doesn’t provide the necessarily information that is required to allow a proper reply from people that wants to help. Some of the things you need to consider and point out if you are asking this question are:

• What are your skill sets?
• How much time are you planning to devote to making money via Internet Marketing?
• Do you have any areas of expertise in a subject or niche?
• How much money or resources can you spend on your ventures?
• What is your current knowledge of Internet marketing?
• Do you own the product or Service you are marketing?

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Yep, checked my stats and definitely traffic from John Chow’s blog.

Looking closer there was something else in with the referrer URL …

http://widget.blogrush.com/box.php?
f=XXXXXXXX&url=http%3A//www.johnchow.com/
&ref=&r=XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Oh well, no free lunch from Mr. Chow then and just the new BlogRush widget working as intended.

BlogRush has just improved their interface and removed over 10,000 blogs from their network to improve the quality. Thought I’d give it a go as it seems fun enough.

Its a Blog Syndication network, where you install their widget as per right hand column and you get credits for every view. These credits then allow your headline to be viewed on other blogs in your Blogrush category.

You also get credits for blogs you referred and also the but I like is their ‘rich gives to the poor’ type system where bonus credits are given to less popular blogs.

I’ll post more on my impressions on it later but for those that want to try it for themselves, be nice if you click on my referral link here .

The Internet is one of the greatest inventions in the past century because it allows people to have near unlimited choice. In the not so distant pass, say 10 years: -

• If I wanted to look for information, I’d go to the Library and hope that they have the relevant books available
• If I wanted to learn more about Bleach the Anime - I’d probably have to resort to badly researched magazines
• I’d listen to the radio or watch MTV to catch on the latest songs waiting for one that I’d like
• etc, etc …

Now, I can research myself to shortsightedness on any subject I want, download the latest Bleach episode minutes after it has aired in Japan and listen and buy music of any style at any time.

So, with the above in mind, why the need for your website - does it serve a purpose? Does it offer any benefits to the people that you are trying to reach?

• If you are doing an information / content Web site, does the content provide something of value to your visitors?
• If you are doing an affiliates datafeed mall - Does your mall enable your visitors to find their required products easier?
• If you are doing a directory, are you frustrating your visitors by recommending them sub-standard websites?

In a market of choices, Web sites that don’t offer anything to their visitors wont have a place, so please have a coffee and think about the below question,

Is my Web site giving my visitors what they want?

Further to my previous post on experimenting with WidgetBucks, I wanted to explain a bit more to you about this new buzz in the Internet Marketing world.

WidgetBucks is backed by Mpire, a company founded in 2005 that runs a pretty decent online shopping site of the same name. Their new venture allows webmasters monetize websites by installing widgets. A sample of one as below and is relatively simple to install,

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Today, I will introduce to you a new player to the website monetization scene - WidgetBucks.

I’ve had enough of AuctionAds as I am confused how an Ebay based affiliate scheme can result in so little conversions with the amount of clicks I was bringing them.

Using ArticleGOLD as my platform again, I have removed most of the AuctionAd scripts and in places replaced them with the WidgetBucks ones. I’ve hear good things of the WidgetBucks programme so it will be interesting to see the results.

Then I hit the first problem.

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This post is dedicated to the guys and girls at BlogCatalog - which is nice change as they seem to be bloggers with good blogs making bad money, rather than bloggers with bad blogs making good money.

Do you want to make money from your blog?

Well most bloggers wouldn’t mind but what you need to be careful about is how and when you start. I would suggest that new bloggers or new blogs refrain from any monetizing for at least 2 months of solid posting.

The traffic that your new blog gets in those months doesn’t make it worthwhile and more importantly you want your visitors to stay and read your posts rather than send them away or cause distraction to your blog’s mission.

Once you have traffic and subscribers to your blog, you need to consider how you will make money from it. Every method to monetize from your blog has its advantages and disadvantages so I’ll try to cover some of the most common ones in this post.

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Depending on which internet marketing community you frequent, you will get different advice to this question. Google itself doesn’t tell you not to, just that you should add a ‘no follow’ tag to your sold links.

The argument that Google itself makes money from paid advertisement I think is weak as their guidelines is to prevent manipulation of their SERPs. The argument that they recommend directory submissions to Yahoo which charges USD300 for a listing holds more weight though.

The way I see it is that the search engines don’t want to penalize your site for selling links but rather penalize your links. There are numerous big firms and established websites with valid links to their sponsors, partners, friends, etc. I think its too hard for algorithms to differentiate with near 100% accuracy whether links were sold or valid, the risks to their SERPs quality in getting these algos wrong will urge search engines to look for alternatives to handing out penalties to sites. So the likely scenario if a search engine doesn’t like your linking methods is that your outbounds will be affected.

Is that so bad a thing?

Of course if you overdo your link selling with no regards to the quality of sites you are linking to then thats something else entirely and maybe topic for another post. I recommend that if you do wish to sell links, try to make it a bit more established in your niche first though as outbounds links from your site gives hints to search engines what your site is about. Think of the message you will be telling the search engines for your baseball site to have 10 site wide links to health sites and 2 to celebrity blogs.

The above are just my views as I just got an email notifying me that someone subscribed to a text link on one of my old sites. I didnt even recall I had any sites set up with TextLinkAds before that email. Anyways, as a test I set up their code on a couple more content sites I had to see if these can stack up.

The beauty of TextLinkAds though is that I don’t have to do anything, they market, place the links, remove the links, etc. Also learnt that they had a new feature for bloggers where I think people buy words on your blog posts, again its completely hands off so i threw in the plug-in on one of my blogs and one day later I got a subscription…. not bad indeedy.

The only compliant I have with them though is that they take 50% of the sales. I realize that its a service but 50% seems a bit too drastic. I won’t be using them for my established sites but if you have any old sites lying around, preferably with high Page Ranks, its a nice effortless way of making a bit of money from them.

Here at Xenyo, we run a few websites out of interest and for experimentation purposes. We’ve even dabbled in a few made for adsense sites … of course for experimental purposes….

Anyways, what I wanted to post about is what I think is important when creating a new concept for a new website. We like to make good websites when we can as to us it represents that greatest chance of success so this post is about creating a website that you can be proud of and have fun doing.

But what about all those MFAs raking in the cash I hear you ask. Well the successful ones which is less than 1% of the total has a very serious advantage of having vast SEO/marketing knowledge and resources behind it.

If you go down this route than all the best but you’ll be going up against seasoned pros as well as countless newcomers that have heard the stories of these sites making thousands and they seem Sooooooo easy to make. Unless you have a a great strategy, luck and money then I don’t recommend you going down this route as apart from being hard, its boring.

Oks, so what do you do? Preferably, you have an interest and preferably that interest is one that is in a good niche. It doesnt have to be one of the so called high payout ones like loans, cars and whatever but if your favourite pastime is discovering the worldwide varieties of toilet papers then maybe you should consider expanding that niche to Toilet utilities.

The reason why it’s important that the niche is important is that there will be down times like when your site isnt getting much search engine love or worst still gets too much search engine attention resulting in a penalty. Time when your motivation will be put to the test. In those times, it helps to be working on something that you enjoy anyways because work on it you must in sunny days and rainy days. Oh, the knowledge of the niche that you have already and the community of your associates also helps to kick things off.

Here are some steps to get you started.

1. Dont Start!!
Hmm, thats a weird first step but its true. So many webmasters think of a niche and then throw up their wordpress and maybe a forum and hope lady luck is with them. Do the first step is STOP … you need to think about what your site is and what your site will be.

2. Your Mission
First think about the goal of your site. What I find good is to limit yourself to 2 sentences to describe the mission of your site. thinking about this will give you ideas on how to begin your site.

3. Key Advantages
List out your skills and your resources. What will be the key advantage that your site will have over its competitors? Is there something important that your competitor sites are lacking that you can implement on your site? Can you provide knowledge on your site that no one else can?

If you can’t think of any key advantages then what is so great about your site that will make people stick around?

4. How people use your site
Can I start working my site now?

No … think about how people will use your site first, what are you main sections? Can you simplify things? The golden rule is not to have anything on your site that is not necessary. I think this section needs to be discussed in more detail in future posts but before you start working on your site, it is invaluable to spend time with a notepad and think away.

5. Work on your site to your Mission
When working on your site, keep going back to your mission as thats what you want your site to be and thats what you think will make your site a success.