How to Win Affiliate Wars ..

Dominating affiliate marketing and becoming an excellent affiliate isn’t simple - it’s a real jungle out there in the affiliate marketing wars. Every new affiliate is also trying to make the sale - of the same product!

Since we were old enough to go to school, we’ve been pressured to fit in and be like everybody else. But now it’s time to project out into latest region, be different and learn to be a winning player if you hope to succeed in affiliate marketing.

Unless you’re a true Type A personality, this means some essential changes for you - no longer worrying about fitting in, being ok with making people jealous of you, ignoring those who talk behind your back - all required qualities in every super-affiliate and most others who want to have flourishing affiliate marketing businesses online.

And because affiliate marketing really is a business in it’s own right, first you have to make sure that you have your own website dedicated to your affiliate marketing promotions. This is very important as it allows you to build your own affiliate marketing opt-in lists and a chance to promote numerous affiliate opportunities and products instead of promoting just one affiliate link at a time - and having to start all over again for the next affiliate promotion you push.

Subsequently, always avoid using the affiliate marketing promotional materials that are provided by the affiliate administrator or merchant. You will discover that you make more sales when you create your own material, including free gifts such as reports and e-books. Use the copy and e-mails provided as a basis for your own articles and blog posts, and study them for any great selling points that were missed - those are the type of points to really hit home and take apart yourself from the affiliate marketing wannabes…

While you promote affiliate products in your affiliate marketing promotions, be sure to promote your website and your opt-in list more than you promote anything else. Super affiliates use article marketing, pay per click ads, forum signatures, public bookmarking and other Web 2.0 methods to drive targeted traffic to their affiliate marketing websites and opt-in lists, then promote the specific affiliate products to their opt-in lists and on their websites. Remember - bring the traffic to YOU - THEN launch it to them.

one time in a while, offer additional benefit gifts to those who purchase through your affiliate marketing links. You can create your own gifts, or use private tag rights products. Most affiliates don’t do this, however most of the very good affiliates do.

keep it for the more expensive affiliate marketing promotions though - it becomes less effective if you are regularly offering bonuses and, worse yet, you can end up like some who no longer get a buying response from their lists unless they offer some heavy-duty bonuses. If you condition your audience to always buying for the bonuses, you’ll see your affiliate marketing results falling when you don’t have new bonuses for them.

A further powerful affiliate marketing method is to host teleseminars to promote affiliate products. Your teleseminars MUST give your listeners useful information that they can use - and must be on a topic related to the affiliate product you’re promoting. Don’t make the bulk of the call a sales pitch - not only will they hang up, but they’ll avoid your calls in future.

Offer them good solid information, either on your own or through an interview, for 50 minutes of a 1-hour call, then use that last five or ten minutes to direct them to the affiliate offer on YOUR affiliate marketing website. Get their opt-in and then focus them through to the merchant’s salespage - and watch the nice bang you get in your affiliate marketing commissions!

If the majority of your affiliate marketing activities are in the same function, write and submit articles on a regular basis. Get your name out there and become a recognized expert in your niche. Also make it a point to actively participate in related forums and newsgroups - always with a link to your site in your signature. As your name recognition and reliability grow, so will the profits you’re raking in from your affiliate marketing efforts!

Summing up, always endeavor to do things just a bit in a different way to stand out from the rest of the affiliate marketing crowd, but don’t ignore any of the established marketing methods just because other affiliates are using them. Use EVERY affiliate marketing strategy you can - just be sure to ALWAYS put your own twist on them!

Avoiding Affiliate Scams

Affiliate marketing can be a profitable and fun way to build your business. However, it is very important to be sure that you are choosing the right programs. There are a lot of good programs, but there are an equal number of companies that are outright scams and will never even pay you for your hard efforts. Worse still the company can suddenly close and still owe you your commission.

How to avoid these scams: The best way to avoid these scams is to do your research well. Check out these points before joining:

1. Does the company have good support? Do they answer emails and have valid contact information?
2. Do they have a valid offline address?
3. What % of commission do they pay; 30%-50% is the best.
4. Tracking system - this should be in real time and accurate.
5. Products, should be well targeted for your market and of good quality

Where to research:

1. Forums, related to your industry. There are many savvy people who use the forums and you may be sure they will tell it like it is. There are few programs out there that at least somebody has heard of and can give educated advice on.
2. Discussion lists
3. Look into the program carefully yourself
4. Put the company name, plus the word scam, into the search engines and see what comes up. Use your own judgment, as sometimes these reviews may not be 100% unbiased.

The golden rule to avoid being scammed is to look before you join, and do not be afraid to ask other people’s opinions. If it looks too good to be true it very likely is, so do not get involved with a company that needs to hype up its opportunity or program. When you are alert and use caution before rushing into something you will be able to choose good reliable programs that will help you in reaping profit for many years to come.

Online Advertising Will Continue Growing despite Weakening Economy

On August 2008, eMarketer has released the latest projection about Online Advertising. The interesting point is that advertiser will spend more money on online advertising. eMarketer saw online advertising growing from $24.5 billion in 2008 to $28.5 billion in 2009. eMarketer benchmarks its online ad spending projections against quarterly reports by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which uses PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to conduct its surveys. For the first half of 2008, the IAB reported 15.2% growth for online ad spending, which is in line with eMarketer’s predictions.

As lately reported, many companies consider to increasing the online advertising, one of them is General Motor. General Motors is leading the auto industry in shifting their traditional advertising campaigns to online marketing. The third-largest advertiser will spend half of their $3 billion advertising budget online. They give it 3 years to get there. Last year GM spent $197 million online.

The survey of McKinsey & Co on June, showed, 91% of 340 senior marketing executives worldwide are using online advertising, and over one-half indicate that their companies plan to maintain or exceed current levels where possible. Even more telling, 55% of marketers said they’re cutting expenditures on traditional media, precisely in order to increase funding for online efforts.

The prediction above even more reinforced by the latest news about the internet search giant Google. Channelnewasia.com reported at 17 October 2008, “Google earnings up despite weakening economy”. Net profit rose 26 per cent in the third-quarter from the same period last year to 1.35 billion dollars while revenue was up 31 per cent at 5.54 billion dollars, beating the expectations of Wall Street analysts despite the weakening US economy.

“Why is online advertising more profitable than traditional media? According to eMarketer, There are the seven reasons:

1. The Internet is inherently more measurable and accountable than are traditional channels.

2. The Internet allows for better, more-granular targeting than do other forms of media. That reduces media waste and can save marketing dollars.

3. The Internet is interactive, thereby allowing for a higher degree of engagement with consumer and business prospects and customers.

4. Particularly among younger consumers, the Internet is accounting for a larger and larger share of total media time; numerous studies demonstrate that teens, millennials and other younger cohorts are spending more time online per week than they are watching television.

5. The Internet plays into the consumer-in-control movement and therefore provides new opportunities for marketers to be a part of their conversations about interests, attitudes, shopping plans and even brands.

6. New Web 2.0 phenomena such as blogs, social networks and Twitter provide marketers with the potential to gain rich insights into consumer behavior and attitudes (the Internet is like a perpetual focus group on steroids).

7. The Internet, unlike any other medium or channel, allows marketers to reach prospects throughout the entire consumer buying cycle, from initial awareness through pre-information-gathering to sales and post-sale feedback and support.

Pagerank=Money?

There are many online business using the Google pagerank as the main pre requirement to accept the blogs within their network like TLA, Paid Reviews, and more. The TLA publishers who have website/blogs with the higher pagerank certainly get more money. Because the value of a link are depends on the pagerank of the site. For paid review also using the same approach, they will pay more for the website/blog with the higher pagerank. The other business that will give you more chance to get more revenue which is based on the website pagerank is paid survey.

The question is, will your income stopped when you get slapped with a decrease in your Pagerank? Yes, if you have only joint the business that accepted the website with the PR. Nope, if you have another business which is ignore the PR.

So, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. Yes, diversification in making money online is very important. When making your living with online business it is best to diversify. Don’t be hanging on to the business which is too “pagerank oriented”. As we know, Search engines like Google can suddenly change the rules, algorithms and bring you ranking down to the bottom of the engine. Many advertisers company that inconsiderate the PR, and many affiliate business available. You can join with them and make money. Remember, to gain the success on make money online the important thing is how to promote your business/blog, it’s not only search engine. So, don’t worry about your ranking down to the bottom, you can still grow up and receive money by your website.

The other question: Will people stop going to your blog if you’re a PR0? No, your friends still visit your blog, although your PR drop to zero. So many ways to get the real traffic to the website, moreover if your blog has became a famous blog, your loyal reader still continue visit your website faithfully.

The following is the blogger, who didn’t care about google pagerank. His website still survive and continue deliver the money even though it has been slapped to PR0.

Tyler Cruz has been slapped by Google, they slapped him back to PR0! But what was happened? Tyler’s blog continues to grow and his RSS feed subscribers still went up this past month. Now, he’s well over 1,200. So, that must tell you something!

It has not affected traffic or earnings in the slightest, nor had I expected it to. PageRank has never been of any importance other than ranking you better in some ad networks such as ReviewMe and Text-Link-Ads. Other than that, it is meaningless, especially since DMOZ went downhill.

I really don’t mind too much that I’m a PR0, since PageRank lost any real meaning over the past few months; great blogs and sites have low PageRank, while scraper sites or brand new blogs have higher ranks. The whole point of PageRank was for Google to show users the ‘quality’ of a site, and now that is useless.

Check Yes, People CAN Make Money Online Without a Pagerank! Ask Tyler Cruz for more detail.

So, why a lot of people tend to stress how important Google Pagerank is, meanwhile they can still get money without pagerank?

Search Engines, Give You More Money

Blogging is a global phenomenon, blogging has brought many unique opportunities to these bloggers that would not have been available in the pre-blog era. Bloggers believe that blogs are being taken more seriously as information sources. One in five bloggers don’t think that newspapers will survive the next ten years. Half believe that blogs will be a primary source for news and entertainment in the next five years. So that, blogs has became an increasingly attractive platform for advertisers. More money opportunities with blogging.

The majority of bloggers have advertising on their blogs. Marketers realize that bloggers are creating high quality content and attracting growing, loyal audiences.
Among bloggers who have advertising on their blogs, two in three have contextual ads (such as Google AdSense). One-third of bloggers have affiliate advertising on their blog. One in five negotiate directly with advertisers and one in ten sell advertising through a blog ad network. State of the Blogosphere, Technorati.

Bloggers employ a variety of technologies to attract visitors. Top audience-building strategies include: listing their blog on Technorati and Google, commenting or linking to other blogs, and tagging blog posts so that they are more easily searchable. All of this hard work has paid off — half of active blogs attract more than 1000 monthly visitors. Only a few bloggers did not know how many monthly pageviews their blog received. All this hard work has paid off for active bloggers in terms of site visitors.

Top traffic-building strategies include: listing their blogs on Technorati and Google, commenting on or linking to other blogs, participating in a blogroll or blog directory, and tagging blog posts so that they are more easily searchable. Active bloggers have learned a variety of techniques for attracting visitors to their blog, conducting an average of five different activities to attract visitors. Blogs with decent traffic and a voice are also getting snapped up by blog-ad networks, which in turn package them as niche audiences to advertisers.

Especially for search engine, traffic from search engine will bring you some of your most valuable visitors. They have found our blog when they were searching for a product or information. This makes them warm, ready to buy visitors who are very likely to not only click through to your sponsor’s sales page but actually buy the product. There are 3 major search engines; Google, Yahoo and MSN.

So how do we get the website listed, or indexed, with these search engines? The answer is “keywords.” These are words found in your website that will attract your targeted market to your website when they are found in the search engines. Keyword research is very important. You will need to find keywords that are high in demand, many searches, and low in supply, less websites.

We can do this by going to goodkeywords.com and finding the keywords for your site. To find more specialized keywords, we can go to a program like wordtracker.com, and also use digitalpoint.com

Check out your competition:
The 1st ten websites listed in the search engine, will be your competition and you should check out the links they have going to their site. If possible try to get these to your site also. This will help you to get a better position in the search engines. The most important way of linking is back links. You can get these by article distribution, to all the article directories. This will especially increase your page rank with Google and get you a higher position in their engine.

Google will give special preference to your content and resources for your visitors.
Make sure you optimize your content at about 3% for Google and up to 5% for MSN and Yahoo. Also use anchor links to link your pages and for external links, these will utilize your main keywords and the search engine bots will easily follow them to get around your site and view every page for indexing.

Keep your site ever fresh by adding new content every week.
This will allow the search engines and especially Google to index new pages and increase your Page Rank. These are just a few points to help you to keep a good position in the search engines.