I found a real nice tool to help you increase your pagerank, backlinks etc. The software is free but there is a better version for sale if you want to take the cash out for it. You can download the free version here.

If you want to go check your pagerank goto THIS LINK or if you want to see the amount of backlinks to your website goto THIS LINK

Good ranking! 

Maybe the single greatest part about affiliate marketing is the incredibly low initial investment you need to start earning money for yourself. All you really need is a website. That’s it. There are so many free programs out there that will walk you though basic web design, even if you know nothing about it, you can be up and running in the span on a day. All that’s left at this point is finding an affiliate marketing program to subscribe to.

Here are a few tips on starting up your affiliate marketing campaign today:

• Never pay to join
  There are tens of thousands of affiliate marketing programs you can subscribe to. The list is essentially limitless. An important piece of advice, though, is that if an affiliate marketing program wants you to pay money to sign up, you might want to think twice. I personally don’t like signing up to a program that will make money out of me anyway. Unless the initial investment is very small, there are many other choices that you could make.

• Join a program that cares about you!
  Some of the big time programs will even train you and give you tips on the right keywords to put on your web pages so random web surfers will find you, click on your link, buy a product and earn you money! They support you, help you and teach you. I have found a few of them but one that really stands out is Moreniche and Trafficsynergy.Moreniche offers the most amazing help with keyword, landing pages, techniques and the list just doesn’t stop. What I have experienced with Trafficsynergy is their awesome support from affiliate managers to anybody working there. So go on and give them a try!

• Don’t use a low-quality webhost provider.
  This can be a tough choice for those looking at keeping their costs at zero or as close to zero as possible. Your new money making website need stable and good hosting, not some free hosting site that crashes all the time. Your web site is a money-making machine for you, don’t trust it to a company that isn’t going to do everything they can to make sure it’s up and running 24/7.There are a few good and affordable web hosts like Thinkhost and Hostgator that has great packages and deliver great customer service. I personally host websites at both of them and I’m a very happy client. The last thing you want is to buy some ads to run and in that time your site goes off!(it’s happened to me). Use them and rest easy knowing that your website is in good hands.

As you can see, there are a few ins and outs to affiliate marketing that everyone needs to know. But the key here is the fact that you can earn money with not much work involved. It can get complicated, but that’s why you need to work with great companies like Moreniche and Trafficsynergy.

If you haven’t ever tried affiliate marketing, why not give it a try?

Have any of your Diggs been buried by some know it all idiot? And then at the end of the day he actually was wrong about the point he made for his reason to bury it.

Well… It gets me /

In that time (the 90s) they started building websites for people all over (which is real ugly) and all the websites had a link back to this town website Secunda.co.za.

So the other day I was looking at a couple of websites built in that time and I saw the backlinks which were mostly images with “alt” in the image tags. All the links pointed to Secunda.co.za and another website and the anchor text was “club Internet” and “club Internet link”.

“Club Internet” you might think! Well it was in the 90s so to have internet was like being in a club, very small.

This is what shocked me:

The Secunda website ranks #1 – #2 in google south africa for this phrase and there is NO text like this inside the whole website! I mean none! No Club Internet here!

I was truly amazed with this, I have underestimated the power of the ANCHOR TEXT. I am now experimenting with anchor text to this blog, “affiliate marketing”. If all goes well I will be ranking #1 in google south africa with the next pagerank update.

Well, let’s see…

So some of the local business saw the opportunity and started buying bulk generators to resell here to other business etc. A smart move from their side but for people like me with lots of computers equipment generators can harm it and also it’s a bit expensive. I decided to look around if there is any other options around… So I found it with a bit of a surprise.

www.powerboxes.co.za is a company that sells power boxes that gives automatic emergengy power for 8 Hours. It works great for PC’s, servers, TV’s, VCR’s and most electronic equipment. 8 Hours is perfect cause the power just goes down for 2 – 3 hours.

The best thing about this is that they have an affiliate program and because the current & great need here is power it will sell. People is looking for answers about this crisis and all you have to do is follow it. They might search in google for “Eskom” or “Eskom power crisis” or even “power generators” and all you have to do is have your little ad up “Forget about Eskom, get 8 hours of power, safe and secure” and you will start selling big soon.

I know most of you live outside South Africa, so look for a need / or a niche and work on that.

New websites in 2008

I am an affiliate marketing junkie. That’s where the money’s at, so that’s where I am focusing on. Building websites around a niche or a product with a good affiliate merchant. I am still in a struggle about launching websites local(.co.za), international(.com) or both?

Projects I’m busy with at the moment and in this year is:

Lifechanger.co.za

It’s a project I am working on with some of my Canadian friends and it holds great opportunity of revenue for me, them and anyone else joining the system. Unfortunately it’s South African only for now…

Gaming Websites (including egames.co.za)

I am moving slowly but surely into the online gaming sector, because the market is huge. People play online games every day, at work, home or just when they are bored… I will also be launching more interactive game websites all over the net and not just locally. I am still testing different affiliate programs on these websites but I personally think that ring tones might do the job. I’ll let you in on the best way to monetize these types of websites as soon as I know.

AffiliateGossip.com

This is like my baby, my joy, my pride. Launching early this year it will be the main and leading Affiliate Programs review website. I’m not doing the XHTML/CSS myself, rather decided to get the pros to do it for me.

Here is a preview of the search results:

You will see a list of programs like the above and then click on “Template Monster” in this case to get a full page overview of the campaign.

The great thing about the website will be that there will be tons of great functionalities like:

• Search by Niche / product / service your website delivers
• Search by Country, so that you can get international and local campaigns to run
• User reviews of merchants and networks

There will also be other areas like:

• Forums
• Free guides for beginners to experts on affiliate marketing
• Monthly Newsletter with all the new merchants added

So I look forward to launching some great resourceful websites this year, so keep tuned in to hear all about it.

UPDATE: Oh yes, I am also planning to release a couple of nice WordPress Themes this year!

So what ideas do you have for 2008?

1. Crawler Based Search Engines
2. Meta Search Engines
3. Human Powered Search Engines
4. Pay for Performance Search Engines

Crawler Based Search Engines

Examples: Google.com, Yahoo.com, Msn.com

Exactly what the word says, they crawl the web using what they call robots or spiders. They continually follow links from websites to other websites and then again links to other websites… When they visit a website they look for all the on-site links and saves it into an Index.

When a search is done using that search engine your pages that was indexed will be displayed in the search. The position/ranking of your pages is determined by a lot of factors including relevance, keywords, title, description, content and backlinks (links pointing from other websites to yours).

Meta Search Engines

Examples: www.metacrawler.com, www.dogpile.com

These are search engines that gathers listings from other search engines, rather than using its own resources and tools.

Human Powered Search Engines

Examples: Dmoz.org, www.sabest.co.za

These are typically directories where manual submitting is applied. You as the webmaster needs to select a category and enter all your website’s information manually. In most cases the directory editors validate and review websites before accepting, so in this case it does matter how professional and resources full your website is.

These directories is important for your pagerank and to get indexed when you start up a website. Crawler based engines such as Google.com regularly index these human powered directories and you need to get found.

Pay for Performance Search Engines

Examples: Google.com, Yahoo.com, Msn.com

This is typically a PPC (pay per click) module that is merged with most search engines. You can easily rank higher than your competitors without doing any Search Engine Optimization by paying a per click or flat fee.

For you as a website owner your main focus must be to get high ranking in crawler based sites. Why?

Cause the most users use them and it’s totally free!

So to take the time and code a Poll system is just hectic. Way too much time!

So I found this awesome new resource called EasyPoll and it works wonders. It works on any platforms like wordpress, blogger and even if you have a Myspace account/page it works wonders for myspace surveys.

And they have a couple of options for the design like the example below:

So why Polls?

To start finding out what your target market wants! If I could create a website and already know from the start what they would want on that website there is no possible way that it won’t be a success.

Even if you have a blog, you can find out what your readers want or want more off. Just be subtle and think smart with your questions and answers.

So go ahead an signup for your free polls!

Guest post by Wogan May from WoganMay.com

HostPaid.com is a revolution in the world of free hosting. Unlike other free hosts – one-man, underskilled, overambitious sellouts – HostPaid has approached the free hosting market with a different idea in mind: Free hosting that lasts.

HostPaid is run by several webmasters who, discontent with the available free hosting services, have struck out and established their own. Some of their core principles include quality, service, and stability.

We do not overload our servers, nor oversell our resources (even though we’re giving them away). Reliability is a key factor in the service we provide as is quality. Simply because we provide a free service doesn’t mean we should skimp on what is important. –Jonathan – Owner, HostPaid

HostPaid officially kicked off very early in January, 2008. In accordance with their policy on not overloading servers, they only had 50 accounts to offer. At the time of this post, only 20 of those accounts were taken. I’m willing to bet many more will vanish soon. And with account features like these, I’m surprised there are still accounts available:

• 1GB disk space
• 10GB monthly bandwidth
• Cpanel 11.17+
• Unlimited ftp/email accounts, sub/parked/addon domains, and MySQL databases
• Choice of own domain, or a HostPaid subdomain
• Everything else you would expect from a paid webhost
• Legendary server stability
• Top-notch customer service

Furthermore, HostPaid promises to deliver (and has delivered) on three more very important fronts. And by doing so, they set themselves completely in a class of their own:

We offer quite a few things that are simply unheard of in the free web hosting industry, specifically, a Server & Network Uptime Guarantee, an Ad-Free Guarantee and actual web hosting account support from a real person. – Jonathan – Owner, HostPaid.

Since HostPaid is looking to offer high quality free hosting, they need a system that generates income for themselves – yet keeps the system free at the same time. This is achieved through the mechanism of affiliate referrals. Before you can register an account at HostPaid, you need to sign up at one of their affiliate networks. It’s a process that, as Jon explains, benefits all parties concerned.

The affiliates listed are not *just* to provide income for HostPaid, they are also there to help our clients earn additional income from their website. … If you’re a webmaster and you sign up for one of the networks and our hosting, you’ve just “killed two birds with one stone”, in a sense. You now have reliable hosting to host your website and a way to earn income. – Jonathan – Owner, HostPaid

Account setup was phenomenally fast. I registered at DealDotCom, then applied at HostPaid. They created and activated my account within six hours after registering, and I was able to log in to my cPanel!

And, as mentioned in that list, their support really is top-notch. I signed up with my primary domain (WoganMay.com), but I asked them to change it – and they complied within two hours. Then I was having trouble adding a domain on – and they sorted it out just as quickly. I’ve been at many, many free hosts in my time, and I’ve never seen service like this. The most I’ve ever gotten was a “lol, try adding it again”-type response – and that was from an “industry leader in free hosting”.

Another thing that I really like about HostPaid is that they really listen to their customers. I recommended a few changes to their cPanel and welcome emails, and they actually heard me out. HostPaid definitely has that human touch…

I don’t even get this level of service from my local paid provider – never mind for free! The support was also amazing – they obviously knew what they were doing. At the speed with which they serviced my requests, I can only assume that they have years of experience in this industry.

To be quite honest, this level of quality shouldn’t be free. Yet, it is, because four people decided it was necessary:

My name is Jon (Jonathan) and I am the Owner of HostPaid. There is also Kim, who is our Account & Affiliate Manager, Josh who heads our Support Department and James who also works in our Support Department. – Jonathan – Owner, HostPaid

Speaking from personal experience, I really have to say that I’m above impressed with their services. Because they’re only aiming at a small user base for now (50 clients), I’m confident that their quality of service will remain this high for a while yet. And since they’re so dedicated to what they’re doing, I can only expect more good reports to follow.

As of this moment, there are 30 accounts left, before they close their first server to registrations. If you’re looking for an excellent, no-nonsense PAID host, then you might as well get it right now, for free: Click here!

Summary

Forget everything you thought you knew about hosting. With founders as dedicated as these, HostPaid is definitely set to be a major success in the long run. So if you’re looking for no-nonsense high-quality web hosting, just click here: http://www.hostpaid.com/why-choose-hostpaid/

Wogan is a novice web developer, author, philosopher, daydreamer, debater, blogger, chef, critic and friend. He is also Christian, white, male, unprejudiced, deep and inexplicable in the best of times. He lives in South Africa, and hopes against the tide of corruption and failure. You can find him at WoganMay.com

So how good are you with Search Engine Optimization?

Well SEOMOZ.org developed the mother of all SEO Expert Quizzes to determine your expertise in this area. Take some time and take the test at SEO Quiz and let us know what’s your results.

I will post my own results in the comments (Just need to get some time to do the quiz)