For more information you can contact Vinu at Vtrio.com. <- convert to email address obviously. Tell him Evan sent you for the best rates!

Intro: Niche website/blog building is an integral part of publishing content on the web, generating traffic, and therefore producing affiliate sales. Content is king and the more content you are able to allow the search engines to “spider” and then rank, then more possible traffic you can generate to your sites. Here are some site, SEO, and linking concepts to get you moving in the right direction:

Site Building Tools – I highly recommend WordPress to build sites with (our free site builder with free hosting uses Wordpress. There are many sites builders you can use to get a presence up on the web. Make sure to set it up properly with good titles and categories. If using WordPress, utilize tagging as well which multiplies the actually amount of spiderable pages on your site.

Site Organizational Strategy – When you go to launch niche sites, to promote affiliate merchants, make sure to stay organized in a spreadsheet with info like: Merchant promoted, platform used to build it, login info (passwords), and posting frequency, i.e. (Date.com, WordPress, Evan@exper.com (jimihen5478321), twice daily). This will help you stay organized and will allow you follow a pre-established plan of action. Strategize on posting frequency to maximize your efforts.

Daily content posting – Posting content daily (i.e. articles, bog posts, essays, merchant reviews, product reviews) is a great way to ensure that the search engines will be coming back to your site frequently to check for new content to “index”. Over time, the more frequently you post, the more pages you will have in the search engine’s “cache”. The more pages you have in the cache, the more possible times your site’s pages can come up in the search results for various search terms, i.e. “Purchase flowers in Las Vegas”. Daily content posting is the best way to increase the number of pages on your site and therefore increase the amount of possible traffic you can generate with that particular site.

Use the Best Plug-ins to Enhance Your SEO – One of the advantages to using WordPress to build your sites is all the amazing plug-ins you can add to your site to increase functionality and “stickiness”. Here are some links to the top plug-ins available:
http://yoast.com/top-wordpress-plugins/
http://wphacks.com/wordpress-plugins/
http://mashable.com/2009/03/20/wordpress-seo-plugins/

Socially Bookmark Articles – Social bookmarking is a great way to generate traffic, inbound links, and better rankings for your site’s content. You have to join the sites and create a profile. This will allow you to bookmark any articles you wish. You can submit your own articles to these sites and other people may bookmark them if they find them interesting. You should bookmark mainly other people’s articles and some of yours as well, so not to appear like a spammer.

Top Social Bookmarking Sites: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-bookmarking-websites
Social Networking - Create a Twitter account and Facebook Fan Page for each actual entity you wish to build up. Example, you are running a site advertising flower affiliate merchants, so you would create an identity “FlowerGuru” on Twitter and a FlowerGuru Fan Page on FB. This will allow you to advertise these groups on your sites and generate followers and fans. Then, these followers and friends can be messaged and communicated with to generate traffic back to your sites. Social networking is very powerful and shouldn’t be abused. Always remain professional and post content you think your followers and fans would benefit from, i.e. helpful tips, informative articles from trusted sources, interactive polls, and affiliate promotions. Try to avoid being annoying because you will lose followers. You should also have a main personal identity that you can maintain in order to network professionally and with actual friends and business associates.

Coupon Sites – Coupon sites are all the rage because people are looking for coupons to save money with retail merchants. Many affiliate merchants provide coupon codes to affiliate to help them promote. Some merchants provide coupon feeds that you can grab and publish on your site on a page or per merchant. You need some skills or tools to accomplish this. Posting unique merchant descriptions and merchant reviews will allow your site to rank well because it has unique content and isn’t just posting coupon codes. Unique content is absolutely essentially to good rankings, especially for a coupon site when there is so much competition and possible duplicate content.

Communities and Forums – Launching your own social communities is great way to build something real and substantial that will grow over time. Social communities are great for repeat traffic and building a large member base. Like sites, the larger it builds the more traffic it can generate. Ning.com is a tremendous free tool for niche community building. Vbulletin for forums.

Link Building Strategies – Acquiring inbound inks to your sites is essential to building better search engine rankings over time. There are many different ways you can get links to your site, such as:
- Blog roll links – when a fellow blogger links to your blog sitewide, you can reciprocate
- Blog commenting – posting comments on blogs related to yours (Google Blog Search)
- Forum posting with signature link – Join multiple forums, set-up sig links, start posting good comments

Site Stickiness – Site stickiness is a tremendous concept to grasp and implement. Making your site more sticky will allow you to capture more from your site’s traffic. Some essential sticky features are: newsletter signup, bookmark this site, follow on Twitter and FaceBook Fanpage, and RSS Feed.
RSS Feed Submissions – Every blog has by nature RSS feeds included. RSS feeds allow you to syndicate your content all over the web and into people’s feed readers. Your RSS feeds need to be manually submitted to get the best effect. Definitely check out Robin Good’s site for more excellent info on RSS and the top 200 RSS directories to submit to: masternewmedia.org

Content Ideas – Coming up with article and blog post ideas can be challenging at times. Here are some examples of article titles:
- “Top 10 ways to Find a Date Online”
- “Best Ways to Lose Weight in the New Year”
- “What are the Top Phone Service Providers for Home Phone Service”
Also how to’s, breaking news, and new product launches are good topics to write about.
Brand Your Affiliate Sites – Creating a brand with your affiliate sites is a good idea because people will remember your site and revisit them frequently. Give people a reason to bookmark your site or join your newsletter. Treat them well and grow them huge over time!

Content provided by Experience Advertising, a leading affiliate management and social media management agency.

There are many other excellent benefits to have social media managers in place. Don’t settle for less than decent social media management. Your social managers should be extremely proactive, responsive, and engaging in order to do it truly effectively. Make sure to check out Experience Advertising for your best social media management solution.

Murray how did you get the project?
I had a meeting with the team behind UrbanStone.co.uk for another project and they had googled my name and seen my affiliate blog prior to the meeting. Once we had finished the meeting they told me about this project and asked if I could help. They saw the success of my blog and that I offered blog outreach. I always tell people, blog about what you want, the services you want to offer or the products you want to sell, so few people do that.

What is blog outreach and how you can it help?
Well firstly by contacting bloggers I know ad asking them to post about them. They want to rank for shopping deals and compare shopping prices as well as terms like freezers. In the first week I have had either write about them or commit to write about them. This part of blog outreach really is about who you know. Once people start blogging about a company people do start to come to you.

Why did you take on this project?
I saw that they have started their own blog and having spoken to the team at length they are serious about blog outreach.

So is it just about SEO?
No it is also about building traffic and buzz about the site too.

What are you looking for?
Be honest and write for your readers first, I am looking for bloggers who can build buzz about the site.
I want bloggers who have a real audience and can send traffic the only way you are going to be able to do this is if you are able to maintain your audience with quality posts.

What advice would you give to bloggers wanting to offer blog outreach?
Try and think what an advertiser is looking for from blog outreach and what their objectives are and then start working with smaller clients before moving forward.

How can bloggers contact you?
Stop by my blog and say hello or email me at mrn@(nospam)murraynewlands.com

Have you heard about SponsoredTweets.com? It’s the latest way to advertiser through the Twitter platform with people who have a good Twitter following. You have to pick and choose who you want to Tweet your message and you can track the performance through links. From my initial experience with Sponsored Tweets it has been really great exposure for my campaigns. Also, I’m ready to be one of their Tweeters and make some money by Tweeting other people’s messages. I can approve or deny any requests to Tweet which is really cool. I’m completely stoked with SponsoredTweets…they have done a great job with the platform. It’s pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. And they a really nice looking affiliate program as well. You should definitely check out and sign-up for SponsoredTweets!

1)Increase Sales- Good product reviews on the right blogs will lead to more sales from that blog’s readers. There are respected blogs in every field and thousands of readers who use the web to research their purchasing decisions-
2)Increase traffic- A review on a blog that ranks well in search engines is a powerful and effective way to increase search traffic. Since the reader is already online, they are just one click away from your product, a huge advantage over a product review in printed media.
3)Improve Search Engine Ranking- More links to your website will increase the search engine position of your site. This will help people find your product online directly through search engines.
4)Lead the Conversation- If you are not leading conversation in your subject area someone else will be. By reaching out to bloggers, you can start the conversation and make sure you are there to comment, respond and take part in whatever direction it goes.
5)Build Relationships- Reaching out to bloggers will help you build a relationship with the online influencers in your market- and that will add value and presence for your company in the online space.
6)Valuable Feedback- Engagement with your audience will lead to useful feedback for your company. If you are reaching out to bloggers, you will certainly get feedback from them. Even more important, you will get the extended feedback and exposure from their network through social media channels and blog comments.
7)Get the Jump on Competition- You should be building relationships with the blogging community before your competitors do. The online community knows what companies “get it” and who is good at
8)Follow Your Own Lead- If you have read this far you already know you need to do blogger outreach. You are getting guidance from a blog right now- the people you need to reach will do the same.
No matter your reason or duration, understand that blogger outreach is building a relationship. Bloggers respond well if you communicate with them as individuals, not to being on an impersonal mailing list. It’s best to learn something about their blog before contacting them and have a good idea of what they write about and their perspective.

Murray Newlands on blog outreach.

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I know a few people traditionally find eCards cheesy, but this is done *right*! Save a few trees, time and money, and check it out here.

Their affiliate program is available through the CJ affiliate network: https://signup.cj.com/member/brandedPublisherSignUp.do?air_refmerchantid=2838046

Thank you,
Evan

Experience Advertising uses personalized affiliate management techniques to connect with their affiliates to increase production. They also have a philosophy of actually doing the work for the affiliates, such as composing original content and helping launch niche sites and blogs free of charge. If you are interested in growing your affiliate program to it’s fullest potential you should definitely check out Experience Advertising.