If you have successfully done so, do remember to send an email to EzineArticles.com to claim your limited edition EzineArticles #HAHD mug.

For more information on the details to submit to EzineArticles, check out their blog post here.

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If you have bought Perry Marshall (he is the world number 1 Google Adwords guru) book: Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords, you may find the title of this blog post familiar. Recently, I took some time to re-read the book again and true enough, I gained new insights by reading a book for the second time.

“Those who test will fly, those who rely on brute force will die” is a perfect lesson for all of us if we want to make good money online. The reason Perry has this thought is because of the success that Wright brothers achieved in year 1903. Yes, everyone knows that the Wright brothers are the first in flight. But do you know that just weeks before the Wright brothers were to fly the world’s first airplane, there is a man named Samuel Pierpont Langley who was launching an airplane of his own, with the assistance of an entire staff.

Langley thought that by putting a big enough engine on the glide, the plane will fly. He was wrong. The plane crashed immediately after leaving the launching pad, badly damaging the front wing. Langley did tried a second time and the results was the same. The plane crashed almost immediately. After he was ridiculed by the press, he abandoned his vision and 3 years later, Langley died a broken and disappointed man.

Meanwhile, the Wright brothers had a completely different approach to build a plane. They believed that the gliders must be good enough to glide from a hilltop without an engine. Only after the gliders were able to glide from a hilltop with no engine, they would try to put an engine to it. So after years of experimentation, when they saw that the glider is working fine, they went to build the smallest engine and put it on the glider.

And just eight days after Langley’s second failed attempt, the Wright brothers made history whereas few people even know about Langley. So what does this historical story going to do with internet marketing and making money online?

If you have been doing internet marketing for a while, I believe you know that traffic is the most vital element if you want to succeed online. And one of the best places to get traffic is from search engines. The search engine is the motor. Your website is the glider. An engine without a good set of wings will not work. When you place an engine on a glider that can work on its own, you have a plane. Driving traffic to a website that cannot convert will not work. When you feed traffic to a website that can convert, you have a business.

As I ran an online marketing agency offline, I have met countless clients that want all the traffic in the world but completely neglect their websites. If your website is not good enough, no matter how much traffic you drive, you won’t make it. Therefore, it is extremely important to test the various elements of your websites (such as the headline, opt-in form, your offer, etc) and increase the conversion rate of the page.

Start testing small and gain insights about your market and traffic. Make minor improvements step-by-step and one day, you will definitely have a profitable online business. When you have a persuasive website, you have a glider. When you have a glider, you just need to place a small engine on it and you can fly.  Add Google or search engine traffic to a persuasive website, you will have a business that can soar.

That’s all for today. Hope that with this post, you now understand the importance of testing your page and improve the conversion rate of your website.

P.S: Some resources you may find useful:

1) Google Website Optimizer - Free tool to split test your web pages

2) The Secrets of a 10% Conversion Rate

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Other than stretching your marketing dollars, pay per click advertising also allows you to create a strong branding for your company. If you are providing a professional service such as air-con repair, you will want your advertisement to show up on Google and Yahoo when your target audience search for “Aircon Repair”. If your competitors are showing up on first page of search engines and your company is not, you are losing branding, online traffic and sales to your competitors.

When we create pay per click campaigns for our clients, we always bear the 6 golden rules in mind:

1. Always conduct research and competitor analysis. Before the start of a pay per click campaign, you should conduct a thorough research of your target market. It is important to find out your target consumer’s behavioural and consumption patterns in your industry. You should also find out how your competitors are performing on the search engines. Type in a few keywords on Google that are closely related to your products and services to see who you will be competing with.

2. Always set the campaign objective. Is your pay per click campaign meant to increase enquiry through an online form? Or are you running an e-commerce business that focuses on online sales? You need to determine the campaign objective so that you can create compelling advertisements to get the results that you desire.

3. Always build targeted keyword list. Not every keyword is useful to your pay per click campaign. You need to conduct a research and build up a list of targeted keywords. If your business sells products directly online (like cameras, books, etc), do not forget to target product-related keywords. People will usually type in the model number or the product name in search engines when they are in the buying process, so you may want to make sure that when they search, they can see your ads that are relevant to the keyword.

4. Always run tests. Once your campaign is up and running, you need to test the performance of your advertisements. Always split test your advertisements so that you can delete the loser and create a better advertisement to increase click-through-rate.

5. Always track performance of campaign. You should monitor your campaign closely. In pay per click advertising, your competitors will always bid a higher price to outrank your advertisements. So you need to make sure that you are kept in the loop. Also, delete keywords that do not bring you much traffic and add in new powerful keywords to drive more traffic to your website.

6. Always conduct a review after campaign. At the end of a campaign, you should always conduct a review on the performance of the campaign. Find out which area you can improve on and learn from any mistake that you make during the campaign.

When done right, pay per click advertising is definitely a great marketing channel for a business. Stretch your advertising dollars today!

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Now, let me share with you a few tips to optimize your articles:

1. Place the most important keyword in the Title of your articles. The keyword should appear right at the beginning of the title. You should try mention the keyword at least twice in the title of your article. To avoid spam, you can use different variations of the keyword in your title. If the keyword you want to optimize is search engine optimization, an example will be something like this: “Search Engine Optimization - 8 Search Marketing Tips to Make Your Site Sky-Rocket to the Top”.
2. Mention the keywords in the first and last paragraph of your article. Don’t forget about this.
3. Submit your articles to social bookmarking sites. Sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit are very popular social bookmarking sites with high traffic. Once your articles are live, you should bookmark them. Also, remember to send post them on Twitter too.
4. Identify the most popular article and create even more back links to it. After a week, you should be able to see which article performed the best. The next thing you should do is to write even more articles and in the author resource boxes, place a link back to the most popular article.
5. Use other effective methods to create more back links to your articles. Other effective methods to create back links are blog commenting, forum marketing and creating Squidoo lens.

Remember, you should always create back links for the best articles. When you write a lot of articles, there will be hits and misses. Don’t spend time dwelling on the misses. Concentrate your energy and effort on the hits.

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With better Quality Score, you are going to pay lesser per click for each keyword. This will make your Adwords campaign more profitable.

One effective way to improve CTR and Quality Score is the Peel and Stick Adwords Strategy.

When you run an Adwords campaign, you will usually categorize the keywords into different ad groups. After some time goes by, you will notice that some of your keywords get more clicks than the other. They are performing much better than you expected.

This is the time to apply the Peel and Stick strategy. For the keywords that are getting you more clicks than you expected, you will want to “peel” and “stick” them into their own ad groups. It is something like copy and paste.

By doing so, you can write ads that are very specific to these keywords which will greatly increase your CTR. With higher CTR, Google will reward you with good Quality Score and lower the price you are going to pay per click.

You can apply Peel and Stick within the next few minutes and increase your profit margin right away.

Talk to you soon.

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Who is PotPieGirl? She is a work-from-home mum with 4 kids who made 6 figure income online.

PotPieGirl has a really easy to understand one week marketing course that she will share with you how she stumbled upon the exact steps to make $154,819.96 a year as a super affiliate. Check out PotPieGirl’s One Week Marketing here.

The most amazing thing is that she actually found the time to build a 6 figure online empire while taking care of 4 kids.  How did this girl do it?

Whether you are an aspiring affiliate marketer, work-from-home mom, or experienced internet marketer, you should check out PotPieGirl’s One Week Marketing Course. She’s not pulling our legs.

Click here –> PotPieGirl’s One Week Marketing

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When it comes to creating Squidoo lens consistently, many affiliate marketers are intimidated by the idea… they think that it is hard and will take them a lot of effort. But the truth is, it is not hard at all. And you can create a Squidoo lens that can make you money online in less than 1 hour.

In this blog post, let me share with you a step-by-step guide that I used personally to build money-making squidoo lens:

1. Product research. This is the most important part of creating a squidoo lens. If you do this correctly, you will win half the battle.  Firstly, decide on one product to promote. You can go to Clickbank and choose a product there. You should choose a product that address a real PAIN in a market. Personally, I will choose a product with a good brand name. An example is: “Confession of a lazy super affiliate“. This is because if the brand name is good and popular, there will be many people searching for the name in Google and it is easier for your squidoo lens to rank high for these keywords becasue they are less competitive.
2. Keyword research. After you have chosen a product, do a keyword research on it. The overall strategy is to focus on the brand-related keywords with search volume.  These keywords are highly profitable because people who search for these keywords are most likely in a shopping mood.  And they are less competitive which make it easier for your lens to rank higher on Google. Other than brand related keywords, you should also select a few general keywords that are related to the market. It will be good to sprinkle them into your content later.
3. Choose a good domain URL for your squidoo lens. This is another extremely important step. You MUST include your most profitable keyword in the URL of your squidoo lens. In this case, it is the product name. By having the keyword in the URL of your lens, you score a lot of relevancy point. This means that Google will see your lens as very relevant to the affiliate product and more likely rank your lens on first page.
4. Include at least 5 content widget in your lens. Usually, I will include 5 text widgets and 1 guest book widget. For the first text widget, write a brief introduction about the problem that people in the market are facing. For other text widgets, you either write a review on the product or write 400-words articles that are related to the market. Make sure that you place the most profitable keywords in the title of the widget, including your guest book. After which, publish your lens.
5. Social book mark your lens. Once your lens is live, submit your lens to the various social book marking sites. This is to alert Google that your lens is live and make them index it quickly.
6. Build back links to your lens. Although a keyword-optimized lens usually can get good organic rankings on Google, you still need to give it a final push. You should build some back links for your lens. One of my favorite way to build back links for my lens is to write articles and submit them to the various article directories like EzineArticles.com. In the author resource box, I will include the link to my lens. There are other methods to build back links like directory submission, blog commenting and forum posting.
7. Create other related lens and link them all together to create a network of lens. This step will make the differnce between you and other affiliate marketers. After you have created your first lens, you should rinse and repeat the process to create other related lens. Then link all lens together to capture a bigger market share.

For a more detailed step-by-step system to build highly profitable Squidoo lens, you should check out this excellent secret Squidoo guide.

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Today, the economy still look very pessimistic. Every business is affected by this recession and I bet that affiliate marketing is affected too. But, regardless of the recession, some products will still sell no matter what.

The products that still sell are the ones that address a real PAIN in a market. If you offer what they are looking for, they will find money to buy from you no matter how bad the recession is. A good example is the weight loss niche. When you think real pain, think of the women who are getting married soon. They will do almost anything to shed some pounds so as to look good in their wedding gown.

So you must be able to find a market with people that are hungry for your solution to solve their immediate problems. Then any product that provides the solution will definitely still sell well during this recession.

Another type of products that will still sell well are low-priced items. Low priced items that over-deliver what the market want will almost certainly sell like hot-cakes… especially in the Internet Marketing niche. During this recession, people are tightening their wallets. If you want them to take out their credit cards, offer something that they absolutely can’t resist.

So if you are an affiliate marketer, go and do a thorough research now. If not, create your own kick-ass products today. You can create your own info product in less than 24-hour… find out here.

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In this blog post, let me share with you 5 tips to make your pay-per-click campaign convert better and boost your profits:

1. Use your own landing page. Many affiliates drive pay-per-click traffic directly to the merchant’s sales page. Don’t do this. Instead, create your own landing page. When you use your own hoplink (affiliate link) and promote an affiliate product using Adwords, Adwords will only display one of these affiliate hoplinks per search term. This means that you are competing with other affiliates for one adwords position. And usually, it goes to the highest bidder. But with your own landing page, you don’t need to worry about the 1 hoplink per search term issue anymore. This will give you more opportunity to get your ads displayed and usually you will find that your cost per click is lower too.
2. Optimize your landing page. Your landing page should have keywords that are related to what you are promoting. Make sure that it is optimized with the most profitable search terms. Also, all the keywords that are used in your Adwords campaign should also be placed on your landing page. This is to increase relevancy and improve your Adwords Quality Score. With better Quality Score, you will pay lesser per click.
3. Use your landing page to capture visitors’ email addresses and names. You can build a profitable list with your landing page by using pay-per-click advertising. Use an autorespondent like Aweber and capture their email addresses and names before directing them to the merchant’s sales page. By doing so, you can send them a series of follow-up messages to build relationships and upsell other products.
4. Track your campaign performance. Install Google Analytics code on your landing page and track your campaign performance. With this, you will get to see the demographics of what countries people are coming from who click on your ads. This information is very important. For example, if you find that majority of your traffic come from Canada and there is very little conversion from that country, you should stop your ads from displaying there.
5. Split test your landing page to increase its conversion rate. Test different headlines, sub headers and other elements to increase the conversion rate of your landing page. You can do this for free by using Google Website Optimizer.

Hope that these tips will help you to make your pay-per-click affiliate marketing campaign convert better.

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Google is the most popular search engine in the world and its pay per click platform (Google Adwords) can be considered the best too. Today, only Yahoo’s sponsored search marketing platform comes close to Google Adwords.

If you want to drive lots of traffic to your website, you must master Google Adwords. It is a little different from some of the other pay per click platforms. If you do not know how to use it properly, it can sometimes cause you a bomb in advertising cost with mediocre results.

Now, let me share with you 7 tips to run a successful Google Adwords campaign:

1.    If you are new to Google Adwords, turn off Content Targeting first. I will recommend you to start with the search network and exclude content targeting at the beginning. This is because if you are not familiar with content targeting, you are going to spend lots of money on it and get mediocre results.

2.    Set a daily budget and maximum cost-per-click (CPC) for keywords. A daily budget will ensure that you will not overspend. So determine how much money you want to spend on Google Adwords. Then divide the amount by 30 days. Also, you can set the maximum cost per click for each keyword. The maximum CPC allows you to determine the highest amount that you will bid for a particular keyword.

3.    Bid on the right keywords. If you bid on irrelevant keywords, the cost-per-click of each keyword will be higher and you are going to pay more for the campaign. Therefore, always conduct a thorough keyword research to make sure that you have a set of keywords that is related to what you are offering on your website.

4.    Place keywords in the right ad groups. If you place all the keywords in one ad group, it is very hard for you to write targeted ads. When your ads are not targeted, there will be lesser people clicking on them. This will decrease your CTR and cause you to pay more for each click.

5.    Do split testing by running 2 ads at a time. Always run 2 ads at a time to make sure that you keep increasing the CTR of your ads. With higher CTR, you will pay lesser per click.

6.    Place keywords in the title and description of your ads. Placing keywords in the title and description of your ads will greatly improve your CTR, which translates to lower cost per click. But this is only possible if you place related keywords in separate ad groups.

7.    Use negative keywords. If you think of any keyword that may cause your ads to show but is not related to your campaign, be sure to place it as negative keywords. You may think that Google Adwords is a pay per click model. Even if the negative keywords trigger your ads, as long as searchers do not click on it, you do not need to pay. Although this is true, but indirectly, you are going to pay more. This is because when these negative keywords trigger your ads, the total impressions of your campaign increase. And because these keywords are not related to the campaign, there will be little clicks coming from them. This means that you will have a very poor quality score and low CTR. Poor quality score + low CTR = expensive cost-per-click.

And do not forget to track campaign performance. You can use Google Analytics to track traffic, conversions and ROI.

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