Archive for the ‘Online Marketing’ Category
Tips for Internet Marketing
When setting up an online business, it is not enough that you are Internet-savvy. Being an internet business entrepreneur means you are within reach to millions of potential clients, which means unlimited income potential as well. Hence, you have to deliberate on your marketing strategy and play your cards right. Here are some simple internet marketing tips to get you started:
1. Build an attractive, easy-to-read website.
2. Know your products and your selling points.
3. Do your research on competitors’ products.
4. Market your product through newsletters, promos, or discounts.
5. Keep a database of your customers and keep them updated on new items or new sales
Guide to CPA Marketing
People looking to break into the online marketing profession should definitely research CPA Marketing. CPA stands for “Cost per Acquisition” or “Cost per Action.” Essentially, CPA uses a reward system for driving traffic to certain web pages or online surveys.
The pay-out for CPA marketing is pretty good. The average pay-out is between $.20 and $3.25. Longer detailed consumer registrations can garner as much as $120 per submit. To get started in CPA marketing you should join a CPA network. These networks will help you track advertisers, merchants, and required actions for your landing page.
Growing Your Business
Operating an internet business these days is tough work. There is a lot of competition out there and a lot of different theories as to how to stay on top. I’ve tried several different approaches to growing my business and have found a few that work well. They will take some effort on your end, but you’ll be happy with the results.
Of the internet marketing ideas I have tried increasing visibility through search engines has been the biggest boost to my business. You’ll want to start out by writing a few articles related to your business and posting them to online directories. Social bookmarking is also a great way to reach out to potential customers. All you have to do is include your URL and a brief description and then submit that information to social bookmarking sites. Finally, contact other webmasters whose websites relate to yours and ask for a link exchange. Most webmasters with a basic understanding of search engine optimization will agree to the swap.
Internet Marketing Tools: Google Trends
When we think of internet marketing tools, we often think of packages like Market Samurai or expensive software like Adobe Photoshop. If you think outside the box, though, you’ll find that there are thousands of internet marketing tools out there, many of them completely free. Google Trends is one of those.
Google Trends is useful because it lets you identify highly searched topics long before they show consistent volume in Google’s main search tool. Instead of reading vast quantities of news and paying attention to pop culture, you can spend 10 minutes with Google Trends to learn what’s hot.
But what good does that do? What if the topics you see have nothing to do with any of the products you want to promote? Does that mean that the results are worthless and completely un-monetizable?
Of course not! Where there’s an audience, there’s a product to be sold. Imagine this: Lindsay Lohan keywords are climbing the Google Trends list. You don’t know what product that might tie in with, but you DO have a basic clue about who’s searching for it. You can figure out what else that market is interested in, or what that audience needs, and then market that product or service to them.
Becoming a successful affiliate is not just about hard work. It’s true that you have to work hard (especially initially), but creative use of resources is every bit as important. By learning to harness unconventional internet marketing tools, you’ll be ahead of the game.
Internet Marketing Tips – Finding Independent Affiliate Programs
One of the best internet marketing tips I’ve ever received is to look for independent affiliate programs. Once you get outside the big affiliate networks, you’ll find programs that have fewer competing affiliates, along with better payouts (because they’re not paying a network to take part of your commission).
Of course, the fact that independent affiliate programs aren’t in a big network also makes them harder to find. It’s not impossible, but it’s definitely not as easy.
The best place to find independent affiliate programs is in affiliate directories. These directories lump many independent programs together so you can view quite a few in a short time.
Of course, you may not find what you’re looking for in the directories you check. If that happens, the next best course of action is to pick your niche, then search relevant keywords until you can find merchants in that market. From there, do a couple of things to see if they have affiliate programs:
-Check the footer, sidebar, and other on-site links to see if they have details about an affiliate program.
-Google the merchant’s name + “affiliate program” to see if anything comes up.
-If those two options don’t work, just contact the merchant. Most retailers of any size do have affiliate programs, and even if they don’t, they won’t exactly be unhappy to hear from people who want to promote their website.
Do you have any special tricks for finding juicy independent affiliate programs? If so, let us know in the comments!
Affiliate Marketing Training: Do You Need Dedicated Hosting?
Have you ever found yourself reading an affiliate marketing training
course that absolutely insisted that you needed to buy dedicated hosting from their suggested host? If you’ve read many ebooks, you probably have. Ebook writers have strong incentives to make these kinds of suggestions, given the large commissions awarded to hosting affiliates.
I’ll be honest, though. Not every affiliate needs a dedicated hosting plan. It really depends on your budget, the amount of traffic you expect to receive, and the amount of variance you can reasonably expect.
If you can afford it, a dedicated server is ideal for almost any active affiliate. Multiple shared plans can work well, too, but they give you far less control over speed and reliability. You have no ability to know whether a single user on the server will do something to jeopardize the stability of YOUR site. A good hosting company can dramatically minimize the odds of that happening, but the best protection is knowing that you’re the only one on the server.
A typical dedicated server package will cost anywhere from $100-200/month or even more, depending on the features, customization, and the amount of support you need from a hosting company. For someone without a highly technical background, I would recommend getting a dedicated package with a well-known provider like HostGator that will give you the full support you need in the event of any problems. They can also give you a huge amount of help when it comes to security issues. Security is one area in which you definitely don’t want to leave things up to chance.
If you’re a new affiliate with a brand new site that doesn’t need to be able to handle thousands of visitors daily, a shared plan is most likely going to be the most cost effective solution. For example, if you’re building simple SEO sites, a niche blog, or a small datafeed site, shared hosting shouldn’t give you any trouble. On the other hand, if you’re going to be paying for very large amounts of traffic, it would be silly to use a shared host and risk paying for traffic that lands on a crashed site.
If you’re not sure about what you’ll need, talk to other affiliates or even your affiliate manager. If your budget can handle it, always err on the side of buying a better hosting plan.
Learn Affiliate Marketing at Your Day Job
A lot of people spend tons of money on online marketing courses, but they fail to realize that they could actually learn affiliate marketing at their day jobs. It takes a bit of luck and some strategy, but it’s absolutely possible to get paid while learning with someone else’s money.
Just as we all advertise products for merchants, there are thousands of merchants and companies out there that need help from in-house employees. Add that to the number of agencies looking for in-house online marketing help, and you’ve got a serious demand in a subject that colleges don’t really teach yet.
Consider that even the most experienced online marketing experts have just 10-15 years of experience. Most have more like 1-5 years of experience, though. What that means is that it doesn’t take much at all to rise to a position of authority. If you’re even a little bit good at what you do (and you’ll have to be, if you want to work for yourself someday), you will enjoy great benefits and frequent raises. In some cases, you can even coerce your employers to pay for training courses or networking events that will help you even more.
If you’re going to be stuck in a day job a while longer, you might as well try getting a job in your desired field. You’ll learn a ton, make great money, and have valuable contacts and insights for when you do branch out on your own. When you finally do get to the point where you’re working from home, you’ll be prepared for the challenges ahead.
What Everyone in Affiliate Marketing Should Know About New Twitter URLs
Most of us in social media affiliate marketing are aware of Twitter’s plans to change the way their links work. In short, their new plan means that it’s going to get much, much harder for the people who use bulk follower tools and spam complete garbage to anyone who will click on it. They realize that those types of promotions provide an extremely negative user experience, and they’re hoping to minimize that.
In the future, all links are going to be routed through t.co links (Twitter’s own shortener) and also through the Promoted Tweets platform. This means that they’re going to get significantly more data on what’s going on, and they will ultimately be able to cut off the traffic to a URL if they find that it contains malware or negatively affects the user experience. They’ll also be adding a feature where users can hover over the URL to get a bit of information about it before clicking. To anyone who has ever clicked on a compelling Tweet’s link, only to be greeted with some junky site, this is no doubt a welcome change.
A final added benefit of the changes is that the URLs will be even shorter than in the past, with sites like tinyurl.com or bit.ly. It just doesn’t get much shorter than t.co. For users who have a tough time keeping their Tweets short enough, this will be a great addition.
The main takeaway for us affiliates, though, is that we’re going to need to add more value to stay alive on Twitter. If you Tweet out relevant links that your followers enjoy, you will see nothing but positive changes with this new format. On the other hand, if you spew out as much spam as possible as quickly as possible, you’re going to find your profits hampered.
Any tips or ideas for dealing with the changes? Feel free to share in the comments!
For the Seasoned Affiliate: Online Marketing in a Changed Landscape
Even for the seasoned affiliate, online marketing can be a new and challenging landscape. Every day, new changes come up that make it harder than ever before. In the last year, we’ve seen new FTC guidelines, huge waves of Google AdWords bans, and major changes to the type of ads Facebook allows. For many affiliates – even 6-figure monthly affiliates – this has lead to a dramatic decrease in earnings. For many, it has been like starting over.
For those who are looking for new sources of income online, there are a few things you can do to stabilize things for the future to ensure that you never take such a huge hit again.
- Diversify. Too many affiliates have just one or two successful campaigns. That means trouble if something happens to one of them. Even if they’re not all huge, try to have a few smaller ones that you could live off of if you ever had to.
- Save Money. Don’t spend all of your profits. Save back plenty in case you need to go into experimental mode again.
- Never get complacent. Even if you are making $100k/month, you should still be testing new traffic sources and campaigns. That’s the only real way to maintain that level of success.
- Create something of value. I’m not saying that every site you make needs to be content-rich and Google-friendly, but you should have something that’s an actual “web property” if you are in this for the long-term. It could be a top-notch blog, a content portal, or a product, but you should have something you could actually sell (ie not just a landing page).
What do you think? Do you have other strategies for weathering the low points and creating a long-term income online? Share in the comments!
Internet Marketing Ideas: Valuable Links for SEO
When it comes to internet marketing ideas, it’s not exactly revolutionary to come out and say that you need inbound links to rank well in the search engines. We all know that much. Google has made it very clear that they value sites that are valued by others (in the form of inbound links, which act as popularity votes). Among links, though, they’re not all created equal. There are definitely some links that are more valuable than others – but which ones? Below, we’ve covered a few of the most important factors in determining the quality of an inbound link.
- Anchor Text: Anchor text is crucial, as this is one of the best ways to tell Google what a page is about. If you want to rank for a particular phrase, it’s vital to have inbound links that use that phrase as their anchor text. This one small step will dramatically improve your ability to rank.
- Pagerank: Pagerank gives you a good idea of where a site stands in terms of inbound links. Ideally, you want as many links as possible from high Pagerank sites.
- Relevance: It’s not just about anchor text. If a site relates to your topic, the link is going to be worth more to you.
- Purity: If a link is purchased, it’s probably worth less than a non-purchased link. Obviously, it’s impossible for Google to know which links are paid in all cases, but it’s not too difficult to figure out the ones purchased through major link buying services. It’s also not at all difficult for your competitors to report you for link buying. The best case scenario is one where you build links manually and don’t buy any at all.
What other traits do you look for in your links? Although these are some of the top factors to consider, they’re not the only ones. Weigh in on the comments!