The Internet comes not just with better communication and information sharing, but also with a great potential to earn online. Thank the heavens for the World Wide Web. Without it, I would not have found out about a venture with this much potential for high returns. And for someone who wishes to earn a lot, that sounds really, really appealing.

What is Affiliate Marketing and How Does it Work?

When I decided to establish an online business venture, a friend recommended affiliate marketing. If this is a new term for you, I suggest that you spend time studying the concept, although it is fairly easy to understand.

Affiliate marketing is basically earning online through the promotion of another person’s (merchant) products or services. Then you earn through a commission percentage based solely on the translations you make (e.g. registrations, downloads, clicks, etc.). If you want to be part of this, you will then be called an “affiliate.”

Affiliates or publishers usually promote their chosen merchant’s products or services through their websites, social media accounts and blogs. To earn through this online venture, you can opt for any of these three methods:

• Pay-per-lead, where affiliates earn for every visitor that enters information or signs up on the affiliate link;
• Pay-per-click (PPC), where affiliates earn through each visitor’s click on the merchant’s link or banner; and
• Pay-per-sale, where affiliates earn for every product or service a visitor buys through their website.

When I was choosing a merchant, I picked a company that is relevant to my niche market. In doing so, I had higher translations as my followers can relate to the product I was promoting. I suggest you do the same. Also, make sure that the merchant has a good reputation in the market.

How to Become an Affiliate?

Affiliate marketing seems fairly easy, isn’t it? Here is a step-by-step guide to become one:

1. Choose your affiliate program.

You cannot simply choose a merchant through fishbowl method. This process requires careful selection, which includes these two steps:

• Research. Whether you’ve decided to stay within your niche market or to promote anything under the sun, you need to do some research on which products or services have a high conversion rate. Check out the seller’s website. Generally, a five percent conversion rate is already good.
• Join an affiliate program. Once you have settled on a particular merchant, you can now choose an affiliate program. Most online companies offer free signups, while others require a certain fee. It is advisable to sign up for a program with recurring commissions that will continue to add up with every referral.

2. Promote the product or service.

Once you have already signed up for an affiliate program, you can proceed on getting your affiliate links. Affiliate links will help you track the translations that you have. Afterwards, you can:

• Promote them on your website. If you don’t already have one, create a blog or a website where you will promote your affiliate link. What I did was search online for sources on how to create professional-looking websites. It will also help to look at other websites that you think have a really good structure.
• Write relevant content. If the merchant sells a particular product (e.g. e-book), it would be good to write an article that’s relevant to the affiliate link. In doing so, it would also be easier for you to recommend the product/service to your readers.

3. Generate more traffic to your website.

Of course, you need to actually have followers, in order to sell whatever it is that you are promoting. You can do this through:

• Article marketing, which involves submitting your articles to article directories. Don’t forget to include a link to your own website.
• Commenting on forums. Make sure to post messages that are relevant and not spam. Otherwise, the webmaster will ban you. On your profile signature, again, include a link to your website.
• Learn SEO. Search engine optimization is one of the most effective ways of generating traffic to your website. You can either hire a specialist or learn the tricks of the trade yourself.

What Affiliate Marketing has in Store for You?

The appeal of affiliate marketing is becoming more apparent, as plenty of bloggers and website owners are now venturing into it. Just what exactly can this strategy offer you?

• Internet-based business venture. You don’t have to go out of the house; you don’t even need to spend hours going door-to-door. You just need your computer and an Internet connection.
• High returns. According to reports, affiliates in the UK earned $2 billion in 2006. I told you, the returns are high. Affiliates can earn as much as $20/week or over a million dollars in a year.
• You get paid for what you do. The pay-for performance characteristic of affiliate marketing ensures that you will earn commissions from registrations, sales, or clicks.

Reasons to Become an Affiliate

So why did I become an affiliate? After asking around and doing my own research, here are the reasons that finally made me decide to engage in this kind of venture:

1. You Have Choices
   The good thing about affiliate marketing is that you have a lot of choices. You can join a lot of affiliate programs that suit your preferences and you can promote more than one product or service. Moreover, affiliates can put up different websites for promoting different merchants. This is how they earn a lot.

2. Less Risk, High Returns
   Affiliate programs are free. You can start on this venture with very minimal capital, as you only need to pay for hosting and the domain name. That is, if you choose to have you own website. If not, there are a lot of free hosting sites out there.As an affiliate, you don’t need to invest on developing the product or the service, which would take thousands of dollars. You only need to find a way to effectively promote it. And as stated above, the returns can potentially give you a million every year.

3. You Don’t Need to be a Pro to Succeed
   Unlike with applying for office jobs, merchants don’t require a sterling resume or an IT genius before accepting affiliates. This is open to anyone who wishes to earn money online.

4. No Hassle of Delivery
   You also don’t need to worry about the mechanics of delivering products. This is between the buyer and the merchant.

5. You’re the Boss.
   This is my favorite. The good thing about working online is that you work in your own time. You choose the amount of effort you give and decide how much you want to earn in a month. When you handle your own time, instead of working on a fixed schedule, you can devote it to other tasks like spending time with family and friends. Moreover, this has the potential to generate passive income, effectively giving you more free time in your hands.

Although affiliate marketing has the potential to give you a million dollars per year, this is definitely not an overnight success. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t just sit around and expect the money to come in. You also have to do your part to attract more visitors to your site. With perseverance, I believe that you will be among the ranks of the top affiliates in the world.

Author Bio:

Kyle Kam is a marketing consultant for Affilorama, an affiliate marketing portal. You can also check their affiliate marketing blog and affiliate marketing forum for more tips and information about affiliate marketing. They also offer, free affiliate marketing lessons for beginning and advance affiliates.

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That doesn’t mean that you can’t emulate the success of online stores like Finish Line and 6PM. What it does mean, though, is that you’re going to have to get creative when trying to bring people onto your website to purchase and to actually get them to make the purchase.

Whenever I work with an online retailer to help them grow their business, the very first thing that I do is check to see if they are collecting people’s emails in some shape or form. The reason I do this is because, fundamentally, the email is the most intimate way in which a business can interact with their current customers and potential customers.

Therefore, if you are not already collecting people’s emails, you should be. And this tip is regardless of the size of your business. You can have only one product for sale or you can have ten thousand products for sale. If you are trying to sell something to your visitors and get them to open their wallets, you need to have some sort of an email collecting system in place.

Here’s the reason…

If you are collecting emails, you are getting into people’s inboxes. Therefore, when they check their phone; check, your email shows. When they open up their email on their desktop; check, your email shows. Look on a tablet; check, your email shows. In other words, the email that they are checking, your company is going to show and that’s important.

Another reason is the simple fact that one’s email is very intimate. We tend to trust, just a little bit more, what flows into our inbox. So, if a company says something, we’re more inclined to believe it than if we see it on a social network or something along those lines.

Okay, that’s great, but the title I said above was how discounts and email marketing can increase revenue.

And the secret to that is to give away the discount in the email. Here’s how.

During the year leading up to the big holiday season, send out emails that are informative. If you run a clothing retail store, send out a monthly or bi-weekly email that talks about the dos and don’ts of fashion. White socks should not go with black dress pants, right? Maybe talk about what’s trending right now with an unforced link to your offerings. It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that you’re sending them information on a predetermined schedule that they find useful.

The reason you do this is to build their trust. Remember how we talked about the inbox being intimate? Well, by interacting with them via email over a long period of time, you can increase that level of intimacy. And you’ll do so over months and months until the time comes, right around October and November, where you pull the trigger.

Send out an email saying that you’re going to be having a great sale coming up. Ask your visitors to retweet and share on Facebook the fact that the sale is coming up. Some might, some might not. But, you want to use these subscribers to start getting interest to the site. And, if they do retweet and share, more people will know and more people might subscribe to the newsletter.

The day before the sale, send an email reminding everyone that there is a sale the next day (and talk about the sale a bit). Tell them that you’ll be giving them a killer coupon and that they’re going to love it.

And finally, the morning of the sale, email the coupon out. At this point, you would have created a lot of buzz and people, if they trust you (which they should since you’ve been building rapport by sending out those emails monthly), they are going to purchase.

Email marketing is a fantastic tool to engage with your customers. And, by using it to get coupons out and build buzz, you can quickly increase the profitability of your business this holiday season. The best part is, each year, you can keep building your list and it’ll just turn into more and more money for you.

Jay is an Internet marketer who helps smaller companies try and emulate the success of companies like Finish Line and 6PM with their own online stores. By using coupons and discounts, even small e-commerce sites can succeed. He runs a coupon website that offers the finishline.com discount code and the free shipping 6pm coupon code.

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A blog sales funnel is a carefully thought out system which leads visitors through your website and converts them from visitors (leads), to subscribers, to prospects, to customers (the ultimate goal) and then on up the value chain.

Why a funnel?

The concept of a funnel is that the top is the widest part. Here you’ll use a blend of marketing strategies to entice, or “sweep”, as many people to your site or blog as possible. As you will only convert a certain percentage of visitors (leads) into subscribers (or prospects) the funnel narrows as you qualify your potential customers.

A typical blog sales funnel would start with visitors opt-ing in to your list in exchange for a free gift. Then, when they feel comfortable that you deliver good quality content that meets their needs, they may buy a low priced product or sign up for a 30-day trial. As the relationship develops, a certain percentage of your customers will sign up for high ticket priced items, such as a training course or coaching. As the trust builds, so does your income!

So, for example, you may have 1,000 visitors to your site, which means 100 subscribers opt-in to your email list, of which 20 or 30 become customers and, of these, 2 or 3 buy your mega training course or one to one coaching

How to create a sales funnel for your blog

The starting point for any sales funnel is to be clear on the goals for your business or blog. Are you looking to make quick money online from a niche site or are you building an authority site? Is it all about making money or do you have a bigger picture view?

For me, my goal is to build community. My efforts are focussed on building my opt-in email list and Facebook Group to at least 1,000 members and developing quality communications with my list. I do monetize my list but in a low key way and I won’t hit the monetization button any harder until I’ve earned the respect and trust of my list.

Next, make a list of the products and services you have to offer and their prices. To have an effective sales funnel you will need a mixture of free products, low and high-end products and perhaps products in different media.

Now write each of the following categories on a piece of paper and see if you can fill each one with some products and services:

• A Freebie or $1 Guide (1 or 2 page pdf or “cheatsheet”)
• $20-$49
• $100-$150
• $500-$995
• $10,000

Let’s look at some examples:

For the top of your funnel (to get people to opt-in to your email list) you need a freebie or $1 Guide. There are different trains of thought on which is better (free or “pay a minimal amount”) and I could argue both ways. The point is to offer your visitors something of value (i.e. relevant to their needs) in exchange for them giving your their email.

Other items in this category could include a free trial, 7-day e-course, or a newsletter. Pick what suits your market best and is relevant to your business. Always offer something of real value (not just some rehashed PLR product), and keep your personal brand in mind because for most of your visitors this will be their first interaction with you so you want to make a good impression.

Moving through the funnel, you need some low priced products in the $20 range such as an e-book, report, podcast or video. “How to” products are good in this price range so think about a How To book or video showcasing your expertise in your niche.

Now that you’ve converted your subscribers to customers (ta da!) you are going to move them up the value chain with higher value, higher priced items. These could include products and services such as a teleseminar series, 30 minutes of free coaching, an ebook (more in-depth than the lower priced one), or package a group of lower priced products together.

Another way to increase value is to use membership or “continuity” programs. You can use the sales funnel to start people off at the base level (maybe a free trial), and then offer a tiered membership moving from bronze at $9.99pcm to silver at $19.99pcm to gold at $999 one-off annual payment for example.

Next, look at products or services in the $500 bracket. Think about teleseminars, webinars and workshops. Also coaching, or some bespoke services you can offer.

At the bottom of the funnel (top of the value chain), come up with one service that someone will pay $10,000 for. You may not be able to imagine anyone paying you $10,000 but having an ambitious goal like this will inspire you to keep improving the products and services you offer.

I could only come up with one idea for my $10,000 level, and that is a year’s worth of coaching, twice a month, with one to one meetings every quarter. You can probably think of many others.

So, jot down all the ways you can monetize your blog or business. Think about books, videos, audios, DVD’s, training courses, membership programmes, webinars, workshops, coaching, mentoring, consulting. Also check out fellow bloggers in your niche and see how they’re monetizing their sites and which products and services they’re offering.

Now for the exciting part. Based on your traffic and your conversion rates you can calculate your potential income, or work back and see how many visitors you need to your site to meet your income goals. So, for example, if you want to make an additional $2,000 a month, and you have a range of $47 ebooks and videos, then you need to sell $2,000/$47 = 42 copies per month. Assuming a 1% conversion rate, you’ll need to generate 4,200 visitors a month to your site.

If you have a $99 product, you only need to sell 20 per month to meet your goals, or generate 2000 visitors.

So, now you’ve created a sales funnel for your blog and maybe even have a business development plan for new products and services.

All of your content and communication is now going to focus on moving customers from the low end/freebie products to the higher priced products. Think about the benefits your customers will get from each product and sell those benefits.

If you provide excellent quality content and products, and have a clear plan for your sales funnel and how to move customers through it, you’ll find maximising your monetization is rewarding, and fun.

Cassie Hicks

Women’s Way To Wealth

Cassie maintains a blog – http://www.womenswaytowealth.com/blog where she discusses different strategies and tips for creating Home Based Businesses. She enjoys writing for savvy women who want to create their own incomes while looking after their families.

At http://womenswaytowealth.com/success-kit you can sign up for a free “Home Business Success Kit”, a valuable, interactive guide to help you develop and build a home based business that will make you money for years to come.

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Unfortunately, the coupon business is not an easy one.  And since there are so many websites that have the same types of coupons for companies such as Navteq and Island Surf, trying to get people to come to my site was, as you might put it, a complete annoyance. I almost gave up, but I found a way to increase the number of people coming to my website and, more importantly, I started to do well in the search engines.

The most basic understanding of how Google works is that links are the end all be all of rankings. While some would say this isn’t true—and in part, they are correct—links are still very, very important. They provide the “trust” that Google needs to know if your website is really worth all that much.

The problem with link building is that it can be very hit or miss. What some people say about link building doesn’t actually work. And, in part, some people will probably say that my ideas don’t work either. However, I have seen the use of guest blog posts to increase my revenue and truly believe that it is one of the best ways to increase revenue.

The primary reason that guest blogging is so useful is because you are getting a vote of confidence from a wide slew of bloggers because you are giving them content. In other words, because you are writing a high quality, unique article, the blogger is thanking you by throwing you a quick little “vote” with a backlink.

You might say, “But if that’s the case, Google will discount guest blog posts since anyone can do them and they’re not a true vote.”

That was the conventional wisdom; however, even months after the Panda update has come out and other updates previous to that, guest blog posts have still worked. And the reason they still work so much is because of the editorial nature of the beast.

When Google came out and said, “that’s it, paid links are bad,” people freaked out. In particular, people who owned directories were freaking out. What if I ran a directory and part of my business was getting people to pay to get into the directory? Now I was out of luck because I couldn’t run the directory.

Except, Google didn’t discount all of these directories. What they saw the payment scheme as was the “cost” to edit the link. So long as the links were niche related, Google saw that the payment wasn’t for the link, but for the editing process to be included in this high quality directory. Naturally, directories have died out, but the idea behind the “edited” link stands.

If the blogger is running a blog that is updated with high quality content and sometimes has a guest blog post, then obviously that blog owner is taking into consideration the guest blogger who submitted the article. If the owner thinks that the content is great and the guest blogger is good, then the article gets published.

So, you understand why guest blog posts are great, but how did I make it work for me?

I started to target specific pages on my blog that I thought would give me a nice boost. If I was ranking #5 for a keyword, I might do a few guest blog posts with a link back to that page. The idea was, by getting a few high quality, direct links, I might get from #5 to #2 or even #1. What I found was that I was beginning to rank higher and that, in turn, sent more traffic to my site.

Guest blogging, single handedly, saved my coupon business. When nothing else was working and Google was on the hunt for paid links, the only way I was able to do it was with guest blogging. And it worked. The site is making more money than it ever has before. But, coupons will never be an easy niche. And with the likes of Groupon, it’ll probably get even harder. I can take it, though. I’ll find something else.

And that, really, is the biggest lesson to take. When a business is dying, you can either let it die or adapt. I adapted and found guest blogging. It saved my business. What will you adapt and do to save your business?

Jay is an Internet marketer who owns a coupon website with discounts to products such as Island Surf and Navteq. Because of guest blog posting, he was able to increase people seeing his island surf promo code and navteq coupon codes.

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For those of you who have missed my spamming of Twitter with this most amazing news, that is exactly what my little family is doing.

After spending 3 months in Huntsville, Ontario for our (working) honeymoon in 2009, we said to ourselves, that if we ever get the opportunity too move to Canada – we would. So with my business/income being solely from my online ventures, and Isabelle (our daughter)  being old enough to fly (she just celebrated her first birthday!), we have decided that now is as good a time as any to take the leap.

We Have One Way Tickets & A Lot Of Goals!

A couple of weeks ago we booked our flights and in late February 2012 we will be flying to Los Angeles and then 5 days later we take the final leg of our journey to Toronto.

With no return tickets, we are going with the plan of ‘at least 12 months’ and if we love it, we will stay longer.

We are going to be living in the Muskoka region (which is said to get EXTREMELY cold), which just so happened to be listed as National Geographics’ No 1 Best Summer Trip Location of 2011, but have a whole list full of trips and things we want to do which we like to call our ‘Canada List’ (Kinda like a bucket list).

With grand plans of seeing everything that the Northern Hemisphere has to offer, considering how long away we will be staying and the fact that I just love a good reason to start a new blog – I came up with the grand idea that now would be the perfect time to start a travel blog!

Why We Would Want To Start A Travel Blog…

• To Keep Family & Friends Updated

  This was our first point and something that we consider really important. While we will have skype to chat with family, we can’t constantly keep everyone up to date with what we are doing in a detailed way (Facebook will be suffice for most people). So whether we do a fully fledged blog or not – we are definitely going to have one just for family and friends.

• To Keep A Journal Of Our Time Away

  This move is massive for us, and something that we want to remember for the rest of our lives. A blog is the journal of today and having such a detailed look at our time away will be something that we can look back on.

• To Share What We Learn About Long & Short Term Travel

  There are plenty of people wanting to travel (both long-term and short-term) who use the internet to search for answers to their questions. Already we personally have had to work through a lot of things ourselves with choosing the right visas, searching the best ways to travel with a young child, and when you add in the mental aspect of moving overseas  – I am sure that already we have a lot to give.

• To Give Me A Reason To Take A Heap Of Photos On My New Canon EOS 60D

  A more selfish reason, but I love my camera and since I already am starting to take photos of everything, it would be great to have another reasons (and canvas) to display the photos that I take.

• Business Opportunities/Income

  While making money from this would be well down on our list of reasons, I will obviously SEO all our content (because that is just what I do), and if we do create this travel blog then we will do it well. I could see the opportunities to review travel related products, attractions and even accommodation.

This is quite a positive list that makes me just want to jump out and start the blog today, but there are a couple of niggling thoughts that are holding me back.

Reasons To Give The Travel Blog Idea The Flick…

•  There Are Already A Gabillion Travel Blogs

  I know that is a made up figure but travel blogs are the flavour of the month (or year) , and already there are so many that it makes me wonder if there is anything that we could add into a such a noise filled niche.

• Another Blog That Requires My Time

  While I have got much better with my time management, I’m not sure if I really want to give up more of my time to working online (another blog). The one note I will make on this point is that my wife Fiona (her Twitter) will do her fair share of posting on the blog, and her sister and fiance (will be husband) will be joining us in Canada for at least 6 months – so we may have two additional writers.

Over To You…

So I have said my piece, albeit a lot longer than I expected, but I want to hear from you.

1. Does The Internet Need Another Travel Blog?
2. What Would You Like To See From A Travel Blog?

Love to hear your thoughts…

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As one of the most popular, user friendly and free web-based services for analytics available, GA uses JavaScript embedded into site pages to give statistical traffic information. This works differently than information you would get through other web statistics programs, such as Webalizer or AWStats, which gather information through a web server log. As a free service, GA is quite capable of providing site statistical information you can use to streamline your site.

One the other hand, unfortunately users that have JavaScript disabled in their browsers will not be included in the traffic statistics provided. Also, because it is a free service, there is limited support and the speed at which the data is gathered is somewhat delayed as opposed to real-time programs. However, there are some excellent paid services available such as Webtrends and Adobe SiteCatalyst (Omniture) if your budget will support the cost.

So assuming you are going to start and possibly stay with GA, an overview to what it includes would be condensed statistics on a dashboard that can be expanded in order to view the detailed version. This dashboard allows you to change the arrangement of the statistics, as well as add or remove any of the statistics displayed. The default setting analyzes data from the previous 30 days. However, this date range can be customized and you can do comparisons of date ranges if desired.

The report displays main categories such as:

Goals Overview - Gives full statistics that can be customized to show the results of performance goals assigned, and it allows you to map out exactly what your viewers will be doing on the site. This means on an e-commerce site for example, you can track viewers and assign values as they proceed through each step in the purchase process.

Site Usage - Site Usage is broken down into subcategories, which in turn can be clicked to show more details and information gathered within the time period specified:

- Pageviews - Shows how many pages each viewer visited.

- Visits - Shows the total amount of visits or traffic to your site.

- Page/Visit - Gives an average of the amount of pages visited by viewers.

- Average Time on Site - Tracks the average time each viewer stays on your site.

- % New Visits - Filters and gives a percentage of new viewers rather than repeat viewers in the total amount of visits.

- Bounce Rate - Shows a percentage of viewers that left your site, or “bounced,” after viewing one page. It’s important to remember there are a lot of reasons why only one page might be viewed. These reasons can include finding your site by mistake when they were searching for another page or you may have an image or file hosted that is viewed on it’s own, negating a reason for viewers to actually visit and surf through the entire site.

Traffic Sources Overview - Shows what sources are directing traffic to your site whether through search engines using keywords, from direct URL visits or through referral links.

Visitors Overview - Gives the same statistics as Site Usage and also provides data such as Absolute Unique Visitors, as well as a Technical Profile section, which gives statistics on connection speeds and specific browsers that viewers to your site are using.

Keywords - Shows both paid and non-paid keywords that viewers are using in search engines to get to your site. It shows the value of each keyword by giving the viewer information from each, showing average pages per visit, time spent on the site and conversion rates.

Content Overview - Gathers and shows statistics on the most popular pages visited on your site. It gives details on the amount of page views, unique page views, average time spent on any specific page, bounce rates showing the percentage of single page visits, exit percentages showing the percentage of exits from any given page, and $ Index which is calculated if a value has been set on any page in your Goals section.

Map Overlay - Displays a visual report giving statistics on the geographical area of each viewer. This report is clickable and will give more specific details broken down into country, city, etc.

All of the statistics above are freely accessible from Google Analytics. It is possible to fully customize them as well by setting filters to get specific information for segments of viewers. These filters are found in the Advanced Segments option. Also, using Site Overlay, you can view statistics on links viewers used to arrive to your site. In addition, there are many more statistics available that will allow you to arrive at the information and data you specifically require for your site.

Keeping in mind still that it will not provide information for users with JavaScript disabled, GA is still a great tool that can give plenty of information from generalized traffic statistics for viewers, to highly detailed information for specific viewers. By using a combination of web server log statistics and a web-based analytics program such as GA, you will get a more complete and accurate picture of viewers to your site, which will help you with determining the right strategy to gain the traffic you need for a profitable business.

Brian F. is a SEO and blogger for InMotion Hosting, a web hosting company in Los Angeles.  He often writes tutorials on how to write advanced segments in Google Analytics.  You can follow him on Twitter @BrianAFlores. 

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This is a guest post by Justin from The Uncommon Life. Interested in writing for StandOutBlogger?

There are no secrets on how to rank high with the major search engines because effective search engine optimizations are now immense. What is search engine optimization? Before we discuss that thing, you have to understand first how search engines work and a bit of know-how.

Search engines are into providing their users with the most relevant and up-to-date information to match the search term that was used.

They are sophisticated pieces of technology which allow users to quickly find relevant websites by searching for a word or a phrase. Search engine results are useless to users if the information doesn’t relate to the search term, or if the results are old. People expect the most up-to-date and fresh information that is useful to them.

Updating your website everyday and adding some materials will help you get noticed by the search engines. So, if you are going to sell any type of product or service online, you have to optimize your website for the search engines, in order to boost traffic and sales. It is because over 90% of your business will likely come directly from search engine results. And for that reason, it is absolutely important to optimize your site for search engines for you to have the greatest deals in the entire world.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process by which webmasters or online business owners utilize strategic copy to augment their website’s status. It is certain that the internet has grown so fast over the years and the competition for the best search engine position has created an enormous market. Therefore, better understanding the fundamental elements of Search Engine Optimization is vital for an online business’ success.

Making use of effective search engine optimization techniques will improve the page rank of your website. There are many tricks that can be used to increase page rank; the most effective method is to provide high quality content consistently. This seems like a simple concept but there are many websites that fails to provide content that visitors find interesting. Sites which provide content that are interesting, well-written and regularly updated create highly engaged visitors who are more likely to return to the website in the coming days. So, if you can set your website apart from those boring, lifeless sites then do it. You’ll surely have a step closer to achieving high page rank through search engine optimization.

The next significant factor for an effective search engine optimization is to include keywords and phrases within your content. To make sure that you are properly targeting your market, you have to make sure that the keywords and phrases you have on your site are the keywords and phrase that your site is actually optimized for. The more keywords you use in your content, the more likely it is that online visitors will find your site when they do some research with those words. If you are unfailing with these techniques, then your overall search engine optimization will increase, boosting your page rank.

You should also develop a linking strategy as a part of your search engine optimization. Not only does this provide free advertising for your site, but it makes the impression that your site is imperative because of its affiliated links. For each link that you have pointing back to you, that is another chance for your potential customer to find you. The more inbound links that you have pointing to your site, the higher you will be ranked in the search engines.

Another is to develop a content stratagem. People who get to search from the internet are looking for information. The more information you provide for them and the more helpful it is, the more likely you will make the sale. Writing articles is the most effective way to build up content for your site. When writing articles to post on your site, make sure that you develop a clear means of arranging their content. You can do this by simply adding a new page to your site. This will allow room for extra articles to be added as you write them, and will allow you to build up an archive of articles which will maintain to draw online visitors. Make sure also that you have included your archived articles in a directory that is next to the root web of your site so that the search engines will catalog your online articles.

Always keep in mind that search engine optimization methods are important in developing your site’s status. With that thing in mind, make sure that you write high-quality, keyword rich content and link your site to and from a deliberate family of other sites. These things will help improve your site’s popularity and coerce increased business through your online business.

Justin helps people find their passion and live life on their terms. He has created a free resource to show you how to set up a blog  in 30 min or less. For more on Justin go to theuncommmonlife.net.

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We aside from heading away to Rainbow Beach for 5 days with my little family, I have been getting started on my first new niche site and I can reveal a little information about the niche I am targeting as well as the work I have done and the results I have achieved so far.

So Whats The Niche?

Now I’m not giving away the keywords I am targeting or even the exact niche I am targeting, but I can tell you three things that will give you a bit of an idea:

• I Will Be Targeting Australian Search Traffic (so .com.au or .net.au domains)
• All 4 Niche Sites Are In The Same Broad Niche (to allow networking)
• The Broad Niche Is Something To Do With ‘Health & Well Being’

Definitely a niche that I have never been in before but I am excited to see how these sites grow because it is definitely a ‘buyer’s niche‘.

How Has The Site Progressed?

Well the first site is definitely taking shape. After installing WordPress and my selection of current favourite plugins, I added my heavily customised versions of the fThemes Incorporate theme.

The next thing I did was do some more in depth keyword research using Market Samurai, and picked out about 10 extra keywords related to my niche topic and then hit up my article writer (read: How To Hire An Article Writer).

She is a fantastic writer and well priced, but as expected it takes her about 4 days to get my 10 articles back to me, so I decided to write a couple up myself.

Now, I knew nothing about the niche, so I spent a couple of hours researching what it was all about, to get a good understanding and wrote the content for the homepage, an extra page and a blog post (3 pages in total). And after that I wrote and submitted an article to an article directory just to get the indexing process start.

This is time when I went away for 5 days with no internet access, so I had no idea what to expect when I came home – but I was pleasantly surprised!

Not only had a couple of my pages been indexed, but my main keyword was ranking 16 in Google.com.au already!

How I Use My Outsourced Articles

When I got home, I was happy to receive the articles that I had got my writer to create for me and I wanted to share how I personally use them.

1. As Pages/Posts For My Niche Site
   I can’t write all the content myself so I always outsource the topics that I really don’t have an interest in or understanding of. I will probably use about 3-4 of the 10 articles on my site.
2. As Guest Posts On Other Blogs
   I definitely focus on quality over content for my backlinks. I’d rather have 5-10 backlinks on quality websites than 500 spammy, weak backlinks. Guest posting seems to provide very solid backlinks for me, so I have already had two accepted and will probably submit one more from this list of articles.
3. Submit Them To Article Directories
   Your link building strategy definitely needs to have diversity, and this is why I still submit to article directories and Web 2.0 websites (such as HubPages and Squidoo). I don’t worry about do-follow and no-follow, instead I try to create a natural spread of backlinks.

 What About The Results?

Google Rankings

No I already told you that I have a couple of pages index and the main keyword ranking quite well, but let’s look at some screenshots (with keywords blanked) to show you exactly how I am doing.

I still got a couple of posts that haven’t got indexed, but so far so good. Oh, and the orange ‘D:’ for those of you who don’t use Market Samurai, means that the keyword is in the domain – which just means the right pages are ranking for each keyword (not just tags etc).

Search Engine Traffic

Now while I cannot boast a flood of search engine traffic, I can happily announce that the trickle has started.

2 are for keywords I wasn’t actually targeting, but one was for keyword 4 above.

What About Monetisation?

Now I know Adsense has played a huge part in most of my niche sites so far, but for this site I don’t think I will use it. There are plenty of great products to promote and I really want to make my Clickbank checks a little more consistent.

I’ve added a Clickbank text adblock (that looks like an Adsense text ad), as well as a couple of image ads promoting Clickbank products and also testing a product on MarketHealth to see if it actually converts.

What Do I Think?

Definitely a promising start, and hopefully when the guest post links kick in I will see the rest of my pages indexed and some improved rankings. My goal at the moment is to add 2-3 new articles a week for the next couple of weeks as well as a couple more guest posts and articles. I’d like to see it hit 100 search visitors in September, which is button for my to start working on my second niche site of this challenge. Oh, and one commission would be a good start :)

Any thoughts? Comment below!

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How Images Can Help With SEO

1. File NameHaving one of your target keywords as your photos file name is a great way to not only boost on-page seo, but it also might see you get search engine traffic through Google Images.
2. Alt TextMy currently favourite SEO plugin is Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin that is basically like All-In-One SEO – but does a lot more. And what it does is analyse your post and rates it on a heap of different factors related to your focus keyword (so that you can fine tune your content). One of these SEO factors is having your keyword in your pictures Alt Text. The reason this is important is because it is your way to tell Google what the picture is and allows you to focus Google’s attention onto your main point.

Since images are important, we need to get our hands on some that we can use – and if you have a lot of niche sites and are producing a lot of content then buying all these images can get expensive! iStockPhotos, which is probably one of the most well know royalty free photo websites are quite expensive, with photos ranging from about $5-20+, which I am sure you would agree would add up quite quickly!

Why Can’t I Use Free Photos From The Internet?

You know what? There is absolutely nothing wrong with finding free photos and using them on the internet, AS LONG AS the website specifically says that you can use them for commercial purposes.

There are a couple of websites that have quite a lot of free photos that are also royalty free, but the problem I find is that while the quality is good, it is not great and I can never seen to find the type of photo that I am looking for.

What About Google Images?

It can be quite easy to just do a search of Google Images, find a photo that you like and copy and use it on your own website. Aside from the fact that you are stealing someone else’s property, you will also lose some of the SEO value because the same image will already be ranking in Google Images  – most likely for the same phrase as you are targeting.

It just makes sense to use royalty free photos, and I want to share with you my latest hot find when it comes to cheap royalty free photos.

Where I Buy My Royalty Free Photos

I have always been a massive fan of the Envato network. I’ve bought quite a few WordPress themes through ThemeForest, and I’ve even designed a few items and listed them for sale on GraphicsRiver, but there latest marketplace is quickly becoming my favourite:

Introducing: PhotoDune

PhotoDune is a royalty free photography marketplace that already has over 220,000 items for sale. Each item is priced based on their size and since most websites only need the ‘extra small’ or ‘small’ sized photos they will only set you back $1-2.

Here are a couple of the photos that I have recently bought for the first site in my new niche site challenge.

*Using their watermarked images as I only have single licenses – which allows me to use the photos on one site*

As you can see, the photos are vibrant and professional and from memory I paid $1 for the first one, and $2 for the second (cause I needed a larger size).

If you are looking for cheap royalty free photos for your websites then head over to PhotoDune and see what they have to offer!

Where Do You Get Your Photos?

Do you have a favourite website (either free or paid) where you get your photos from? Leave a comment below because I would love to check them out.

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First The Back Story…

In October 2010 I was getting a bit complacent with my online business and decided I needed to really ramp up my workload. To keep myself motivated I set myself a challenge to create a brand new $1000/month niche site income from brand new sites by the end of July 2011.

After a slowish start and quite the rollercoaster ride in the middle, I hit my target a month early and just this last month (July 2011) I have actually doubled it – making $2,000 in July from sites I had created since the start of the challenge.

While I will continue to maintain these websites, I have tossed up the idea of selling my two biggest earning sites from the challenge (about $1,500/month), which would result in a niche house deposit or pay for our move to Canada but soon realised that it would take too big a chunk out of my online earnings to be an option at the moment.

Which Is Why I Plan On Doing It All Again!

So I decided, that before I can consider selling these two sites (both in the same niche, so would sell together), I needed to have a couple more sites that were well on their way to taking their place in my portfolio.

This is why I am kicking myself back into overdrive and firing up a brand new niche site challenge that will hopefully see my with growing, profitable replacements by the time we pack up or lives and move to Canada for 12 months (which is March 2012).

So Whats The Challenge This Time?

I learnt a lot from my last challenge about what works and what doesn’t so I am setting some specific criteria to the challenge this time that will keep me focused and give me the best chance of achieving my goal again.

Here is what I am going to achieve:

• Create A $500/Month Niche Site Income From New Sites By March  7, 2012.
  

  Once again 8 months, but this time I have halved the target monthly income. I did this because my focus will be on building premium niche sites with a huge focus on quality over quantity. They will be build slower  than usual but with a focus on long term profit. This means that the focus will be on content before profit and while I may hit it lucky and reach my target monthly income (TMI) before March, if I do then I will just adjust my TMI higher.

• Achieved By 4 Sites Within The Same Broad Niche (Networking)
  

  A couple of things that I learnt from my last challenge was that to many sites spreads your focus to wide and also having a couple of sites in the same niche can be very beneficial for both interlinking and directing hungry visitors to more information. This is why I have limited this challenge to just 4 websites, within the same niche – and I won’t be buying any new domains until the challenge in completed.The domains were purchased earlier this week and I am currently getting the first one installed and themed up (ready for content).

• Start Building Next Site After Previous Site Is At Least 1 Month Old And Getting 100+ Search Visitors A Month

  I really struggle with working on multiple sites at one time, so when I have a couple of sites to work on, I like to spend a couple of days to a week on one site and then alternate my work onto another site (giving the first site a chance to find it’s feet in Google and just have a rest).So to make sure that each of the 4 new sites have a solid head start, I will work on one site at a time, get them ranking, begin the trickle of search engine visitors (minimum of 100/month), before I give it a chance to settle by moving on to set up my next site.

• Focused On Clickbank & Adsense For Income

  While my online income has really started to diversify between a growing number of affiliate networks, one that I have never really been able to master is Clickbank. Sure I get a $500 check from them every 3-4 months, but I’ve always had the goal in my head to see a figure like that monthly from then, so I was excited when I saw a lot of great products in their marketplace that were related the niche I was targeting.So I have decided to put a big focus on Clickbank for this challenge, but will also be adding my new best friend (Adsense) to these sites as well. 

  $500/month works out to about $17/day, so I either need a Clickbank sale a day or about 34 Adsense clicks (at 50c/click – guess). Hopefully with both networks it will make the goal a little easier.

Follow My Journey…

Over the next 8 Months, I am planning on doing regular monthly updates on traffic/income as well as hopefully sharing some juicy posts on some of the things I am learning along the way that will help you with your niche sites.

So if you want to keep up to date with what I am doing you can:

• Subscribe To StandOutBlogger By RSS
• Follow Me On Twitter
• Like StandOutBlogger On Facebook

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Who Is CheckMyStats?

CheckMyStats is one of Australia’s leading affiliate networks, and before you instantly turn off because you are not Australian, they host a large range of affiliate offers for Australia, US and UK markets as well as other offers for a worldwide audience.

Currently with over 180 different offers for you to promote, their focus in on CPA leads, where you get paid for each person you refer who signs up for an offer.

The benefit for US affiliates in promoting offers from CheckMyStats is the strong Australian dollar (which means extra money in your pocket when it get’s converted into US$.

How I Use CheckMyStats

Currently I use CheckMyStats almost exclusively for my online surveys for money site.

If you have been following my niche site challenge, then you will have seen me mention this CPA affiliate network and seen my monthly income increasing from them each month.

Starting with $35 in November 2010, last month in May 2011 I made $210 through CheckMyStats.

This is solely through banner ads and within-post links. (You will notice the my site now has an email list – I have been using a different affiliate network for the list to compare conversion).

What Type Of Offers Do They Have?

As I mentioned earlier, there focus is in CPA offers, but they do have a few %/sale and CPC offers as well.

A few of the popular types of offers are:

• Paid Survey Companies
• Freebies
• Daily Deal Sites

I would estimate that about 60%+ of their offers would be able to be categorised in one of the above categories (all seem to offer $0.50 and $3.50/lead), but they do also have dating, betting, accommodation and a large range of other offers.

What About Payments?

When I first started using CheckMyStats each month I would receive a hand written check (which was a nice feel), but a couple of months ago I was asked if I could get paid via Paypal – which is how I have been paid for the last couple of months.

Their website states that they pay via Check, Direct Deposit or Paypal, but for international affiliates I am guessing Paypal would be the best option.

They pay on the 20th of each month (as long as your affiliate balance is over $50 (on a max 30 day term).

And here is something that I like:

Payment Assurance – We ensure Merchants place a deposit into their account so you receive commission payments in a timely manner.

My Final Thoughts On CheckMyStats…

My experience with them has honestly been fantastic. It is not one of my biggest earners, but they always pay on time and their communication is fantastic.

They constantly are sending my updates on the latest offers and rate increases, and whenever something is happening with an offer I am promoting (such as it being pulled), I always get an email letting me know.

So if you are looking for a CPA network then I do recommend you check out CheckMyStats and at least see if they have any offers suited towards your sites.

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Email lists and I have always had an on again off again relationships, because I am constantly getting told by the ‘gurus’ that the money is in the list – but for me, this never seemed to be true.

Today I want to take you through a mistake that I made that saw me delete an email list with almost 300 people on it, what I was doing wrong and how I went so long without realising I was making a mistake!

Let’s Start At The Beginning…

Before I started my niche site challenge, I already had quite a few blogs and a couple of niche sites, and one of the sites was getting some decent traffic (about 1-2000 visitors a month) and was making me a bit of money through Adsense – with absolutely no work.

I’d done the research well from the beginning and now had totally passive, search engine traffic and I was looking for ways to capitalise on it better.

Now the site was in the ‘Australian franchise’ niche and there were not a whole lot of affiliate products to promote, so I decided that these people are looking for a business – why not try to sell them an online business?

So I got to work creating a 7 day e-course that would take them through a different way to make money online each day.

It was great in concept, and to be honest there were a whole lot of affiliate products for me to choose from (I was using Clickbank) – but there were some fatal flaws.

I Didn’t Have A Problem Getting Subscribers!

Thanks to Popup Domination and the constant flow of search engine visitors I had a steady flow of new subscribers each day who would jump on to day 1 of my course.

In fact I was getting about 5 subscribers each day for the month or so that I ran the popup and I was getting excited because I was sure that my e-course was going to convert into some niche commissions.

… But It Didn’t!

I was checking my Clickbank account on a daily basis and maybe see 1 click each day generated from the autoresponder sequence.

There I was with a list of 270 subscribers that were not converting so I decided enough was enough and turned the popup off and just let it make money with Adsense each month.

Fast Forward 6 Months…

So here we are back to about a week ago and I am looking at a couple of my sites that are doing quite well with traffic and so I decided to give list building another go. I logged into my Aweber account, set up two new lists and put them to work on my niche sites (no free ebooks or courses, just ‘signup for updates’).

One of my lists started converting like crazy (8-15 subscribers a day, from just a sidebar opt-in) and so I created a couple of emails for the start of an autoresponder series and today I decided I wanted to see how the emails were being received.

The problem was that although I knew how to check my click through rate (CTR) on a broadcast email, I had no idea to check up on the individual emails in a follow-up series – so I did some digging in Google and found this post on Awebers Blog. So I followed its instructions into the ‘Reports’ tab in Aweber, and was confronted with this graph:

It may look a little confusing so let me break it down:

• The List Has 84 People On It
• The First Follow Up Message Has Been Opened 64 times and Click 33 times
• The Second Follow Up Message Has Been Opened 36 times and Click 35 times

There is a lot more you can read into that graph, but for me, it means I’m getting a decent open and click through rate.

We will come back to this email list for some more stats, but I want to jump back to the first list that I have up on and show you the same chart for that list (and see if you can work out the problem!)

Graph For Franchise Site Follow Up Sequence:

The last line of the graph says it all, but I never took the time to check my stats.

• 2,036 Emails Sent
• 177 Opens
• 45 Clicks

And That It Why It Wasn’t Making Me Money!

Where Did I Go Wrong?

To be honest I went wrong in quite a few different areas (especially even considering a list in the ‘make money online’ niche), but the one thing I did that instantly set me up for failure was:

I was focused on selling instead of educating!

If you looked at the ways I set up the course, each email was focused on selling people a product that they had to pay for.

I know that I personally never open these emails – so I don’t know why I expected other people too.

People don’t want to feel used, that they are just another number that will hopefully result in someone making some money. They sign up for an email list because they want information – they want to learn. So your job as a list owner is to feed and nurture their knowledge increasing journey.

This is something I took into account with this latest list, where my follow up emails structure is:

• Focus On Content
• Link To Related/Popular Articles On Your Site
• Use HTML Emails (Pretty Looking – I Use ThemeForest For Email Templates)
• Include Advertisements (Both Text & Image – Linking To Affiliate Programs)

Let’s Take A Look At The Click Breakdown For One Of My Follow Up Emails

Here is a graph for the second follow up message that has been opened 36 times and clicked 35 times:

That is right, I have 9 separate links in this email!

My goal was 3 fold:

• Keep people learning with the content of my email
• Link them back to articles on my site (more Adsense income)
• Have them click on the advertisements and hopefully buy something.

But Isn’t My Focus To Make Money?

A lot of you will probably look at the above pie chart and the fact that the majority of my clicks are going back to articles on my site and start wondering about leakage – because most of us are taught that we need to funnel our list into clicking on our affiliate links. BUT, I see it a different way.

• No Use Constantly Pitching Products If You Are Going To Burn Your List After The First Couple Of Emails
• Why Not Focus On Educating And Let The Reader Decide When They Are Ready To Purchase Anything (affiliate link)

Do this and you will not only have a much more responsive email list, but you will also make a lot more money in the long run – because your subscribers will hang around.

So after all that, I went back to my initial list and just deleted the whole thing from my Aweber account, because there is no use paying for subscribers who are not reading your emails.

What Have You Learn’t From Your Email Lists?

Enough about me and my sites. I’d love to hear some of your stories about email lists and the things that you have learnt (both good and bad).

I personally use Aweber for my email lists, and I used their on board reports to generate the above graphs.

If you are looking for a company to handle your email lists then I can highly recommend them, and if you sign up, they will only charge you $1 for your first month – which gives you a chance to get started.

Download a free trial of Market Samurai the product that I use to find and rank my niche sites!