From UTalkMarketing

Over the next few weeks, various UTalkMarketing folk will be writing a series of articles on digital marketing to help you and your business make the most of the opportunities it provides.

 We live in a time of both extraordinary change and opportunity for marketers. Digital marketing gives us the chance to deepen our relationships with consumers and drive enormous value for our businesses.

 We think marketers today have the chance to redefine marketing for the next 50 years. To give you an idea of the scope of the opportunity:

• 19% of all marketing spend in the UK will be on digital in 2009
• Google is already bigger than ITV in the UK in terms of advertising revenue
• By 2011, online commerce in the UK will be worth a staggering £52bn

Digital marketing comes with a language, skills, and techniques that can be picked up with hard work and trial and error. Many businesses spend thousands of pounds on agency’s who do the work for them. This doesn’t necessarily need to be the route for everyone – especially small businesses with no budget. Many of the skills can be taught and if you look beneath all the jargon – it’s really not that hard!

Here is an introduction to the different forms of digital marketing for you to get started.

How to get the most from digital marketing

They key to getting the most from online marketing is getting the basics right first. If you’re a small company, you need to think smart and think where the big wins are with the minimal amount of effort (and man power).

A brief introduction to search

Search marketing is the marketing technique du jour. Even up to CEO level, managers are concerned about their strategy for the huge expansion of marketing in the area.

Search companies like Google, Yahoo and Ask are like the operating systems of the internet.

You need them to find the information you want, and they are essential to users because of the sheer volume of content on the internet.

Search is a god-send to marketers, because people are communicating their intentions through the search terms they type.

Someone who types “cheap flights”, for example, is very likely to be booking a flight in the future. So if you sell flights and you can get them to your website, you have a very good chance of converting them into a sale.

PPC (Pay Per Click)

As the title implies, you pay each time someone clicks on your ad and is transported to your website. Whether they then buy anything is immaterial – you still pay.

PPC ads are the results that appear at the right hand side of the search results page (in blue) and also sometimes appear at the top.

The position that your ad appears in is crucial – the vast majority of the traffic goes to the top 5 adverts. How do you get your ad position higher? Spend more money! There are other, more complex techniques too, which will be discussed later and feature in our digital training.

Most businesses should buy the most important keywords relating to your business. You need to put yourself in the place of your customer. What would you search for to find you? Keep it relevant.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Search engine optimisation is about how high your business appears in the unpaid listings that typing in particular terms brings up. This is also known as “natural” or “organic” search.

The order in which search results are displayed are crucial to generating traffic to your website. Less than 10% of people look at the second page, and the majority of traffic goes to the top five results. You need to be on the first page.

The rankings are determined by a complex algorithm which companies like Google guard closely, and these are explored more in our SEO Skills Accelerator course (www.utalkmarketing.com/Training/seo.html).

The top determinants though are how many other sites link to yours, the relevance of your page to the search term, and the click-through rate your results produce.

Our view is that you cannot afford not to think about SEO. It’s free and despite the rocket science that most agencies claim to be experts in, the basics are very simple.

Online PR

The growth in traffic on the web has led to a huge rise in the number of places that you can place news stories. Many web sites boast audience numbers which are at least as big, if not bigger than their magazine counterparts.

They are also more desperate for stories and exclusives, because they are frequently ignored. Once there, your story will live on and can be found through search even thought it’s not on the front page any more.

Community sites (and there are many!) also pose a PR challenge. The web allows your customers to talk to each other, and when you let them down, talk they will.

The key is managing what’s happening online and getting people to talk about your brand by giving them something good to talk about!

Online Display

There are a number of online advertising display options, the best known being banner ads. There are a range of other display options, such as MPU’s, interstitials and homepage take-overs.

A key debate over the benefit of online display is the post-impression impact. Research by a number of companies, not all of them web site owners, has demonstrated that web display advertising has an impact on brand equity, and on short-term purchasing.

So even though someone doesn’t click on your advert, you will get some benefit. Normally you will get around 50% more people being influenced by the advert and coming to your site than a simple measure of click-through would indicate.

Generally online display is not worthwhile unless you are spending at least £3-5k on a campaign (which not everyone has a budget for!) We run an online display course to help with this complex area (www.utalkmarketing.com/Training/digital-display.html)

If you want to know more, UTalkMarketing run a variety of digital marketing training courses for all levels. See our training courses here: www.utalkmarketing.com/Training or email daniel@utalkmarketing.com

www.utalkmarketing.com is the first B2B user generated content site for the client marketing community set up by Niall Mckinney, ex Chief Marketing Officer for lastminute.com.

I’m going to do this step by step if you complete everyone as described you will be on to a winner

The Aim – To pick a keyword relevant to the product your marketing, be included in the SEPR’s for that keyword; get highly relevant traffic quickly and for free! And make sales!

Step one! – Keyword Research

This is the most important thing you will do! You need to decide on two major points; firstly, what it is you are promoting, and then summarise it into short phrases.

Then secondly find out what phases people search for when looking for sites like yours.

So for example…

My site will promote Zotrim a weight loss aid, it will offer comparisons, medical research to back it up and offer the user the opportunity to buy the product.

So what keywords do people use to find the product I want to sell? And how many people search for those keywords every month?

I can now go and use a traffic estimation tool to see how many people are searching for my keywords try: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

What have I got, what have I done?

I have a short list of keywords, relevant to the product you wish to promote and know how many people search for those keywords every month.

Step Two – Choosing you Domain name

Based on my short list of keywords form the keyword research I did, I am now going to pick a domain name based on these two main factors:

Domain extension – I want to promote in the UK so I really want a .uk

Keyword rich URL – I want one of the keywords on my short list to be in my domain name

So after a bid of digging around I’ve found DoesZotrimWork.co.uk

•  Plus points: 
  •   [does Zotrim work] on exact match gets 91 searches on google every month
  • “does Zotrim work” on phrase match gets 110 searches on google every month
  • The whole keyword is in the domain name in order
  • It’s a .uk extension which is great for the UK market

Step three – Your website copy (text)

Remember your aim (to get in the SEPR’s, for your chosen keyword) so now you are looking to write interesting copy, with a balance of keyword density (how many times your chosen keyword appears in the text) and information for the visitor on the product.

Choose an angle – Conceder what you are trying to do: review, promote, compare, etc

Bolding – bold important words and phrases, a lot of people “skim” information websites get their attention as the scroll down the page!

Be clear on your call to action – set people’s expectations if you’re passing them to the merchant’s sites to buy, tell them!

Use features and befits – point out features but emphasise benefits, think about the demographic, what objections they might have…

Think about the layout – use images to break up text use product images with a mix of life style images (find images in the moreniche resource centre).

Step four – Website layout

So you have a keyword rich domain name, you know what keyword your going after and you have keyword rich copy (text).

You know need to think about how you are going to present your copy and most importantly what your call’s to action you care going to use!

How do I insert calls to actions? Your copy will find natural breaks insert calls to action there for example:

During a customer intervention, 61 overweight women took Zotrim for a period of 4 weeks. From here their hunger and eating patterns were recorded, whilst their weight loss and waist measurements were also taken at the beginning of the study, during week 2 and lastly on week 4.

•  Weight Loss Study
  • Average weight loss: 4lbs in 6 weeks
  • Average waist reduction: 4.3cm in 4 weeks
  • Subjects consistently felt fuller for longer
  • Changes witnessed through Zotrim over these 4 weeks compared favourably with long term weight management therapies

Get your 4 week supply with free shipping click here

So as you can see there is a clear call to action, with a reason and a befit for the visitor to complete the action and with relevance to the text it follows. Keep the calls to action regular but make them reliant, a user should easily find what to do and how to do it!

Step Five – putting your site together

There are many HTML editors the best is Dreamweaver however at £400 it’s a bit steep, try http://www.net2.com/nvu/ it’s free!! There are various HTML templates you can find all over the internet, and on the moreniche resource centre

Things to think about….

Meta Data and Titles – include you main keyword and any other secondary keywords example:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> 
<title>Does Zotrim Work | Zotrim does it work</title>
<META content=" Does Zotrim Work – get the facts backed by real medical research to make up your own mind!" name=description>
<META content="Does Zotrim work,Zotrim does it work,Zotrim review,Zotrim reviewed" name=keywords>

H1, H2 and strong tags…

Now break up you copy and use H1 and H2 and strong to indicate keywords to prove relevance to the user and search engine for example:

<h1 class="style2">Weight Loss Study - <strong>Does Zotrim Work</strong></h1>
<h2 class="style2">Here is some evidence that should go some way to answer the question <strong>Does Zotrim Work?</strong></h2>

Remember if you mention you primary keyword put <strong></strong> round it to bold it and illustrate its importance to the visitor and the search engine!

Then use the rest of you copy as the body of the site, including a mixture of life style images and product images. Don’t for get to use alt tags on your images, why not use a keyword there are various images you can use in the resource centre at moreniche.com.

Summery…

So now you should have: in-depth keyword research, a primary keyword, knowledge of how many searches your keyword gets, a keyword rich URL, keyword rich copy, search engine friendly layout and some strong relevant calls to action…

Step six – GET IT LIVE!

Remember we were getting in the UK Google SEPR’s so you need UK based hosting, a very basic package ideally with FTP access should cost no more than around £2 per month!

Use http://filezilla-project.org/ to upload your web site (it’s a free FTP solution)

Step Seven – get indexed

Now it’s time to get Google to notice your site, Google suggest using this http://www.google.com/addurl/ however think about getting your site noticed faster by getting links to your site, think about sites that get indexed or crawled by Google regularly many social sites, digg for example gets indexed almost hourly! However make sure it’s relevant we have done a lot to make this site as relevant as possible to our keyword let’s not spoil it now!

Step eight – chart your progress

You can check to see if your site has been indexed by typing Site: domainname.co.uk in to Google.com. Once your site has been indexed find it in the SEPR’s for your keyword. Chart its progress day on day, week on week.

Depending on what position in the SEPR’s it’s at, you may want to start building links with relevant sites to increase your sites natural position in the search engine page results.

What you should have: 

• Summery  
  • In-depth keyword research
  • Keyword rich URL
  • Keyword traffic
  • Keyword rich copy
  • Strong calls to action
  • Search engine friendly website hosted on a server in the country you want the traffic from
  • Knowledge of how to get the site indexed, and increase SEPR’s position

I hope this has been of help to people, this is one way of getting targeted traffic and there is nothing to stop you from doing it again and again and again! In fact know people who make a lot of money that way! If you need any help or advice I‘m offering Moreniche – Zotrim affiliates one to one coaching on this, contact me for more information.

Luke Wallace
Luke.wallace@moreniche.com
MSN: lukewallace@hotmail.co.uk
Skype: lukewallacemn

Just kidding. Forget copywriting, backlinks, campaigns, design, CSS, XML, RSS and other 3-letter acronyms for the next minutes.

Let’s talk about being human and what it takes to be an affiliate marketer in real life.

I have a short one-week vacation so I’ve put together some tips for the lovely MoreNiche blog.

So here’s what you gotta do to be sure you can enjoy your high affiliate commissions for years and years to come.

• Avoid stress. Mental, physical and emotional. Plan and prepare for your activities in advance. Write stuff down. And I literally mean writing down with pen and paper, it’s easier to carry papers around and stick them on things than txt files.

Text files can easily be deleted and edited. It’s harder to do the same with written notes and that is, mainly, a good thing.

• Backup your virtual assets and practice preventive maintenance on your car and household applicances.

• Simplify and automate. Make your online work and your life easier by turning to automation. Don’t fall in love too much with your first commissions. Affiliate marketing is a longterm investment. And remember, what can’t be automated can be outsourced.

• Take care of your eyes. Follow the 20/20/20 rule. For every 20 minutes you keep your eyes on the computer monitor look 20 feet away for 20 seconds. Keep contrast to medium-low values and set dark/grey backgrounds from your desktop and your windows.

Adjust your monitor in such a way that you will look down on it rather than up. This will prevent neck and upper back pain and will also keep your eyes lubricated because you will blink more.

• Get in shape. Start doing some serious physical exercise (jogging, martial arts or going to the gym). And read my weight loss blog for tips and inspiration. ‘Nuff said.

Make a habit of making simple exercises when your back or wrists get sore. The carpal tunnel a is passageway in the wrist through which nerves of the hands pass. Frequent use of the mouse can cause thickening of the ligaments can cause carpal tunnel syndome which is described by numbness, tingling and pain in the hands and wrists. Massage your hands and wrists from time to time and try some simple exercises.

• Improve your posture by strenghtening your back muscles. Sitting too much in front of the computer usually causes your shoulders to become rounded and fall forward and your upper back protruding. It’s time you become self-aware of your posture. Try doing this right now: keep your back straight, suck your abdominal muscles in and pull your chin towards your chest. Inhale slowly using your belly. See how good that feels?

• Spice up your emotional life. Make love and friends. Take time to play and listen to new music. Strong emotions increases your quality of life.

• Boost your brain power. Scientists have proven that eating the right kind of stuff will increase your brain power, beside making you healthy.

I always munch on chocolate chip cookies while working on my sites. Why? Carbohydrates are pure brain fuel.

Inspiration and work power are not some mystical forces, fellow marketer!

Your left brain hemisphere is responsible for rational thoughts, language, reason etc. It even keeps your right brain hemisphere in check. But if you want to connect two apparently unrelated things you don’t want rational part to limiting your ideas.

• Don’t waste your time with irrelevant articles and sites. Subscribe to 3 extremely awesome blogs and stay active in no more than 2 forums.

When in doubt, don’t forget: few issues remain unsolved after a burger and a beer.

To your success,
Cha.

So, you just built your shiny new affiliate site and are wondering how to promote it. You may have heard a lot of different opinions about directory submissions – some people claim they are a waste of time while others swear by them and credit their sites’ rankings to directory links. Where’s the truth?

Indeed, directory submissions are a good way to start getting links for a site. You may not want to risk doing reciprocal link exchanges that are frowned upon by Google and may not have the resources for 3-way or more advanced link exchnage schemes. You may not have the time to submit your site to all the social bookmarking services, of which there are a few hundred new ones appearing every day. You may not like writing articles to build links through article submissions. But directory submissions are one of the fast and easy ways to get the links you site needs to rank well.

However, a directory submission campaign can make or break your site’s rankings. It seems easy and trivial but there are tricks to know that make a whole lot of difference. Here are a few quick tips that will help you avoid possible mistakes and make the most out of directory linkbuilding:

1. Choose the best directories. Treat the time you spend on directory submissions as an investment. Think carefully whether each directory you submit to is worth your while. Give preference to authority directories.

2. Watch your competition. Check in Yahoo! the backlinks of other sites ranking in your market niche. Yahoo! sorts a site’s backlinks by the value it sees in them. Use the directories you see in your competitors’ first 100-200 backlinks. Do not stop at just the directories your competitors are using but having them in your backlinks should definitely help.

3. Look for topical niche directories related to your market – Google holds them in higher regard than an average run-of-the-mill general directory. To find such directories, use directories of directories or search Google for your keyword plus typical directory “footprints” such as “submit your URL”, “add a site” and the like.

4. If you are targeting any kind of regional / local market, use as many local / regional directories as you can find. They will help you rank locally as Google will use your backlinks from them to identify your local affinity.

5. Do not use the same anchor texts in all your directory links – vary them around a few keywords you are targeting. This is a universal rule for any kind of linkbuilding but I just have to stress it once more. When submitting to a directory, pay attention to what element of your provided information will be used as the anchor text of a link. In most cases it will be the title you indicate for your site in the submission form. Make sure you vary it across different directories – but stick to the same topical niche unless you are submitting different pages related to different products.

Regarding the varied anchor texts of directory links, you may have difficulty achieving this if you use some kinds of automated submission tools. These tools will speed up your submissions a lot – but they have their own drawbacks such as this one. In my ebook titled “Directory Marketing Reborn” I review several such tools, and some of them actually have an option to provide several different variants of titles / anchor texts which are then iterated through by the tool. If, however, the tool you use does not do it, you have two options: either make part of your submissions manually or run the tool several times, each time for only a portion of the directory list it submits to, and change the site details every time.

About the Author

IrishWonder is a SEO consultant and Internet marketer. He has just released an updated edition of his Directory Marketing Reborn ebook - a detailed guide to directory marketing featuring the most recent and largest directory list.

As the title explains – in this post we will talk how to find free traffic. So if you’re starting out and have little or no budget, these methods will be most suitable for you.

Starting a blog – there are many ways to start a blog. The most recommended way is to get a domain name and hosting and install a WordPress blog there. While the blog and hosting would cost you a couple of dollars per month, the traffic generated trough blog will be 100% free. Submit your blog to various directories and feed sites to gain extra exposure and links. Communicate with other bloggers in the field, comment on their posts.

Submitting articles – is one of oldest free marketing methods. The principle is simple – you write an article and submit it to multiple article directories, like ezinearticles.com. At the bottom of each article you can include short author’s biography or little ad taking the article reader to your affiliate offer. Article directories are well visited so people will read your article and will follow the links you provided.

Being a guest blogger – is another option if you are comfortable with writing. The key idea here is to find relevant blog that suits your offer, e.g. weight loss blog if you are promoting Proactol. Contact the blog owner and offer to write a great article for him. In return ask for a chance to have few lines promoting your site or offer. Using this approach you instantly will be seen as authority as well will have opportunity to tap into readership of that blog.

Optimizing for search engines – is one of best methods to get lots of free targeted traffic. Huge percentage of all internet users uses Google and other search engines to find information and if you can optimize page for popular keywords that describes what you are promoting, e.g. “weight loss pills”, then visitors who lands on your site will be likely interested in your site and % of them will purchase trough you. While SEO might seem a bit complicated, over longer term the returns can be tremendous.

Classified ads – again this is popular method between beginners and also seasoned marketers. There are many tactics and tips, but basic idea is to find classified sites like craiglist.com and post your ads following their guidelines. Some sites will allow posting your link, if they don’t – ask people to email you in so once you have the email, you can respond with detailed reply including your affiliate link.

Submitting videos – is another way to generate traffic. Principle is simple – create or edit existing vides (e.g. ones provided by Proactol), put on them link to your site where you promote Proactol and distribute to various video sites. Quick tip: make sure you use unique text description for each video submitted even if its same video just to different sites. Also ensure that in the description you include many keywords as this can attract traffic not only from the video service users itself but also from the search engines.

Create a viral campaign – viral in a term as something others would like to pass over. For example a funny video, useful tips, or crazy story, joke packed power point presentation about certain problem. Just make sure you include a link at the end of the video or presentation pointing to your site.

Make sure you read MoreNiche guides located in your affiliate area

Not an affiliate? Sign up for free now!

One of the biggest errors that most people do when they get into affiliate marketing is they either create a blog or web site and totally make it into a super huge affiliate product shopping mall. No matter where a visitor clicks he is getting pitched. It shouldn’t be that way. A better way to run a blog or a web site is to offer diverse amount of information.

Not only should their be affiliate products available for sale on the site, but there should also be multiple sections that provide useful information to the customer. Some things that come to mind would be a support forum, an open community blog where customers are able to voice their opinion in comments, a reference library and even a FAQ section.

I understand that the strategy is to create pitch pages (landing pages) towards capturing sales. And that is fine… I think landing pages are an amazing way to close a sale. However, what happens next is what can cause the decrease in sales. After the sale is made and if you have not provided your customer with supportive resources, that customer is very unlikely to purchase from you again.

One of the key elements towards finding success with affiliate marketing and keeping your sales numbers high are selling to existing customers. When you have a customer sign up for your mailing list, he is very valuable. Your goal should to always keep that customer satisfied and keep him trusting you. If a customer trusts you after he makes a purchase, then it will be very likely that he will purchase from you again.

Another thing to consider is that affiliate marketing is a business. Unfortunately though, not many people treat is with this level of seriousness. One of the hottest elements with increasing affiliate sales is working your mailing list. Your mailing list can either be a very pure resources or one that has been exhausted, much like farm land. If you don’t’ tend to your mailing list and take care of it, it will no longer produce for you.

Some of the best ways to keep a healthy mailing list is to treat your subscribers like actual people. I subscribe to a lot of Aweber mailing lists – mainly for the purpose of observing how list owners run their list – and it amazes me how I am treated. I am never thanked or told that I am appreciated. Also, I am always spoken to as if I should know what is going on.

A better way to run your mailing list would be to address your subscribers in a more individual and personal manner. Ask your subscribers how their week is going? Ask them if there is anything that you can do to help them. Remind them that at any time they can simply click the reply button and send you an email back.

Use your mailing list as a pipeline to communicate with your subscribers. Engage with them and do things that encourage them to react with you. Doing these things keeps your mailing list alive and thriving and most importantly… clicking. When it comes time for you to recommend a product, you will have a much greater success selling to your active list compared to selling to a dead list.

There are quite a few ways to increase your success with affiliate marketing. One of the best ways that I want to talk to you about in this article is with getting to know the owner of the products and services that you promote. There are multiple reasons why it is important to take the time to introduce yourself personally to the owners of the products and services you sell.

One of the main reasons is simply because it naturally adds to your own self ownership of the items you sell. When you interact with affiliate product owners you in return get a more personalized feel for the products being sold. Over time through multiple conversations, you can learn the reasons behind why the products were created. Having that information gives you an edge over other affiliates who promote the same products or services.

A second reason why it is important to meet the owners of affiliate products is because doing so illustrates your level of sincerity towards being an affiliate marketer. Product owners and service provides want to increase sales. Naturally, they will latch on to their most effective affiliates or ones that show the most interest. When you contact affiliate product owners and service providers and establish a business relationship with them, often they will provide you with special incentives to sell. They may offer special bonuses or even increase your payout percentage.

The third reason why it is important to meet the owners of various affiliate products and services you promote is because you can use that publicly to your advantage. What I mean to say by that is simple. If you have a blog and start writing content that informs your readers and subscribers that you are on talking terms with affiliate product owners, it adds to your reputation and gives you more credit.

First impressions have a huge influence on sales. When you speak to your customers and tell them that you personally know the owner of the product being sold, that goes a long way and builds an excellent first impression. Also, if you play your cards right, you can even leverage your relationship with the owner. A great way to do that is by working special deals with the product owner and extend the offer to your subscriber and customer base. If you can make an effort towards working a deal with the product owner, people will soon discover that you are offering the best deal on the product being offered.

In reality, getting started in affiliate marketing is much easier than you think – and it’s possible to do it without even having a site of your own. You do not really have to spend the money on domains and hosting to get started and achieve your first sales. If your funds are limited, or you are unsure about the outcome of your new affiliate activity, investing money into it can wait until you see you are making money off it.

You see, there are two types of affiliates. First type relies on paid advertising (PPC) such as Google AdWords, second type relies on organic traffic – that is, the search engine visitors searching for the corresponding products. The PPC affiliates often drive the visitors directly to their affiliate URL as opposed to a standalone site (although Google has made it more difficult recently). But doing PPC requires an initial investment. The second type of affiliates rely on organic traffic from the search engines – and here’s where the opportunity lies for you. Just like for PPC affiliates, it is not absolutely necessary for an affiliate working with organic traffic to get a site of their own right away.

Here’s where the opportunity lies for you. Instead of registering a domain and buying a hosting account, go to Squidoo.com and register an account there. Then create a page about the product you want to promote. You do not need to know HTML, or anything else about building sites. Just fill out the forms you see there, add your banners, product pictures and – most important – your affiliate link, and you’re done!

Is it really that easy, you may ask? Well, you might want to research the topic you’re writing about, as creating a really good and interesting page (or lens, as Squidoo calls them) pays off – the better your lens is the more traffic it gets. Also, an added benefit of Squidoo is in it being an authority site – the one that Google likes. It makes ranking your page easier.

Of course, you still have to put some effort into promoting your page. Unlike with your own site on your own domain, you are a bit limited in ways you can use for promoting your page: you cannot submit it into directories, for example. But you can still bookmark it, place a link to it into your forum signatures, submit articles to article directories with links to your page, and so on.

Squidoo is not the only place that can get you started – you can also try Tripod, or Yahoo! Geocities, or Hubpages, or WetPaint. All these places give you a free account and web space, and do not require any HTML knowledge. Or maybe you fancy a blog over a static page? OK! Head over to Blogger.com and register yourself an account – setting up a blog there as easy as setting up a page in all the places I’ve mentioned previously.

OK, as an added bonus to this article, here comes my favorite technique: suppose you have created pages at all of the places referred to above. Now, to get the most benefit from setting them all up, link them all to each other. This way, promoting each one of them will benefit them all.

In the beginning, this may seem like a lot of work and a lot of time. But once you start seeing the traffic coming in through your affiliate links, it will be really rewarding! And when the sales start happening, you can invest into your own domain and host. Back when I was just starting out making money online, I did the same way – and now I have a bunch of my own sites making me money.

And don’t worry if things appear difficult or beyond your knowledge about the web – MoreNiche has many guides for people just like you in which you can find answers to all your questions, from putting up your affiliate links to promoting your sites.

About the author

IrishWonder is well known internet marketer within SEO circles.
He is also an author of the brand new Directory Marketing guide.

This post will be addressing a few common issues with newbie’s who want to make money online but find themselves failing.

Even worse, they are getting the wrong impression of internet marketing and often associate online marketing with scams and pyramid type schemes.

They are of course wrong and there are several reasons why this happens.

HYIP (High Yield Investment Projects)

This looks so lucrative on the outside but in essence it is more of a scam and only part of the members ever get results. There projects are very short-lived and works on the fact that they need more and more paying members so the first ones can get their payouts.

Once system can’t recruit new paying members (aka your downline) the project gets shut down and you loose all money invested not to mention any promised interest and future profits.

Fail.

PTC (Paid To Click) and similar schemes

Paid to click sounds again like a very lucrative opportunity – all you need to do is look at ads for x amount of seconds or click on links and money is made. While it is true, money can be made this way – but you need to look at the other side of coin – the actual payouts.

Often one gets paid half a cent per ad view (usually 30 seconds), so at the best one can make 1 cent per minute or 0.60 USD an hour so if you do it 8h a day, you cold end making $4.8/day.

Problem with this is not only small rate per hour but also the fact that no-one can do this 8h a day, because these systems will not give you that many ads to view.

End result – well, you might get $10 here and $5 for a months work but overly you are wasting your time.

Fail.

JUMPING

The jumping syndrome is something that is characteristic to all new internet marketers.

They jump from one opportunity to another without actually giving the first one a proper go.

The thing is – it takes time to master a strategy and then apply it fully, often it requires much deeper research. For example – for many people blogging has made them a nice living and in some cases huge fortunes. But there are 10 times more people who fail.

They failed because they didn’t stick to the system long enough to master the strategy, didn’t produce enough content, didn’t use best practices and didn’t have a plan.

One week later they jumped onto video marketing, then article marketing, then spent $500 on PPC then joined next big MLM company, then decided to earn with contextual ads, then ran to email marketing, then to black hat SEO and so on and so on. Every time scratching just the surface and then running to the next big thing.

We know where it leads.

Fail.

The Solution

The simplest solution for you is to stick with MoreNiche, go trough the free marketing guides and video tutorials, set up a plan, review it with your affiliate manager and then MAKE IT HAPPEN!

Yes, it will take time and efforts but that’s the key to success.

Success.

In the past few weeks I have explained to you about commenting on other blogs and how doing so can greatly impact and increase traffic to your own blog, web site or landing page. The reasons behind this is because other bloggers who visit the blog posts you have commented on will click the links to check you out and see what you’re all about. Commenting on blog posts are so important to the point where I even recommend that you place a focus on being the first person to comment on a newly published blog article.

Within commenting, I also explained the importance of making excellent first impressions when you do leave comments. Commenting on other blog posts gives you the free opportunity to sell yourself to thousands of other people. It gives you the opportunity to plant seeds of interest and to lure these people towards clicking over to view your site. When you do leave comments on other blogs, your comments should be of high quality and they should be well written. Always keep in mind that your comments and interactions with other bloggers are a direct reflection on the perception that these people have of you.

With that said, often I gun for articles that have never received prior comments. The reason I do this is because people often assume that a blog post without comments is a blog post without traffic. And that is far from the truth! Most all blog posts over time receive around a few thousand visits each year. And commonly this traffic come direct from search engines. Search engine traffic is excellent because it is targeted traffic. In the past I explained the importance of commenting on blog articles that have relevance to the products and services you sell. And by commenting on these articles you in return will pick up residual traffic from the traffic being received direct from the search engines on these articles.

Having that said, if you find articles that have no prior comments, then you have no competition created by other people who have commented. Another element of importance here is the fact that most bloggers are very natural people and don’t consider their blogs to be sources of income. Meaning when they write their content it isn’t written in a way to generate a call to action. Being the first person to comment on these type of articles — especially ones without prior comments — gives you the golden opportunity to take a balanced and authoritive roll towards creating your own call to action within the comment itself.

Often when search engine traffic read the article and make it to the bottom of the post, they are left with nothing else to do. And when your comment is in their view, they will naturally read what you write. If your comment is written in a way that plants a seed and creates interest, these people will want to learn more about you and your own blog or web site. And because you are conscious of your writing and because your writing has been carefully written, your newly recruited readers will be yet another added subscriber into your own network that you are slowly building and increasing in size over time.

The point to remember here is that most bloggers aren’t skilled marketers and they usually leave their readers hanging at the bottom of the article. If you are the first to comment and also the only person to comment you have a golden opportunity to create the call to action that the writing author failed to do. 

Best Regards,
Garry Conn
www.GarryConn.com