Bill McRea

Online affiliate marketing began as a natural outgrowth of the popularity of “linking” to other sites. To put it simply, online affiliate marketing is a time tested strategy for making money online. It it is a network of online partners who refer business to your website.

It does not matter whether you have a website that sells a product or a website that has nothing to sell. But by adding online affiliate programs, you can not only add value to your website, but also maximize potential revenue.

Affiliate Programs, they say are the ideal way to make your website profitable.

Online affiliate programs began in the mid-1990,s and are currently a popular way to earn money online. In fact, research shows that affiliate marketing is the most cost-effective way to generate online sales. The concept of revenue sharing paying commission for referred business, predates affiliate marketing and the Internet. The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream e-commerce happened almost four years after the origination of the World Wide Web in November 1994.

The simplest way is to just introduce your visitors to the business opportunities, products and services that they need, and, “make money online” based on commissions from these sales. In fact, online affiliate marketing is a great work from home business available to anyone with a computer and a desire to run their own affiliate business.

However, there is a catch to “affiliate-marketing”. That is to say over 80% of affiliates never get a check over $100, the 15% get the occasional check and it is the remaining 5% who really get monthly checks of any real size from affiliate programs.

To get started in affiliate marketing, you must know the fundamentals. For which you’re going to need an “affiliate marketing guide” to teach you the basics. Once you’ve studied the basics and grasped the “idea”, I don’t think there is any looking back.

Now, there are dozens of books advertised on various websites, making claims of massive earnings that can be achieved easily. Most of these guides are resell rights of other peoples’ ideas which are marketed under the marketers’ name. Now, there will be a time you may be doing the same thing what they are doing now. This is a natural phase most people go through and isn’t that what affiliate marketing is all about!

I am not saying those books are bad. But there are better ones out there. There is The Affiliate Marketers Handbook and the Super Affiliate Handbook. Recently, another book that is drawing much attention, purely because of the number of sales it has generated in such a short time is the Rich Jerk. The name justifies his character. But his ideas seem to work and the book seems to be on top of the charts. Now what more can you say, but to commend on his niche idea.

You can also look for more such good product(s) and which are in high demand from the ClickBank Mall. Just type “affiliate marketing” or affilate marketing guides and you would get instant access to loads to such products. Provide them your credit card details and voila! you can instantly download the book of your choice.

Although most aaffiliate marketing books are good in their own way, what boils down is to how you implement the knowhow you gained from it PRACTICALLY. Although this may take up some some time, it is to be noted that no books nor any marketing courses can come anywhere close to pure practical experience. Some good affiliate guides are given below in the resources section.

Learning to market on the internet as an affiliate is only step one. If you’re serious about online affiliate marketing, then you have to plan and set up a basic affiliate campaign. This is a start to finish campaign to getting started in affiliate marketing. It explains keyword research, finding profitable partners and markets, information on affiliate networks, guides and resources to making money online.

There is relatively an easy way to make a parallel income during the early stages of your online afiliate marketing home business. It can also help you avoid the common mistakes most of us make during that period. I am quoting this from personal experience.

Try and get hold of a FREE Web Page, containing a few successful affiliate programs. You can use it and learn how to run an affiliate campaign, at the same time learning the ropes of affiliate marketing. If you market this well, the chances are you will make money. Your main and only job would be to advertise your FREE website, by submitting it to search engines, e-mail it to friends, colleagues and others. Within a month or so, you shall see some income trickling in.

You also get familiar with search engine marketing, affiliate networks and affiliate directories, and other areas of online affiliate marketing.

Keyword Density means the number of times a keyword exists in a webpage compared to the total number of words in that webpage. From the SEO perspective, keyword density determines whether a webpage is related to a particular keyword or not.

Once you have conducted a proper keyword research and narrowed down your keyword list to those keywords that have strong relevance to your website, high search volume, and relatively less competition, the next step would be to find out what would be the best keyword density before placing text on your webpage.

The concept of an ideal keyword density is debatable and has led to an extensive discussion among SEO experts and webmasters on what the recommended density should be to achieve a good search engine ranking. There is no fixed keyword density percentage that needs to be maintained for a webpage; however, you must make sure that your website keyword density is neither too low (which will not bring in optimal gain) nor too high (which will be considered as spamming and can lead to you site getting penalized).

Maintaining an ideal keyword density will help search engines to use the information to understand a website’s theme and decide which keywords the site is related to. It will also help you get a higher search engine ranking. However, when trying to achieve this, it is important to avoid overloading your webpage with too many of these keywords because search engines consider this practice as keyword stuffing and this can lead to your site getting banned.

Finding Out The Best Keyword Density
There are several tools available online that help SEO’s and webmasters attain an ideal keyword density for a set of keywords. All you have to do is enter your URL in them and these tools will analyze the webpage and check the density of your keywords and keyword phrases contained in your text. Usually these tools indicate the number of times a keyword appears in the content on your webpage and also the percentage.

It is essentially important to know how many people are visiting ones site and where these visitors’ starts from, If he/she owns one or more websites. For every webmaster who wishes to improve their website traffic over time, analyzing website statistics should become a regular practice one can see how visitors find their site in the search engines and even are able to test and track the popularity of their updated site content.

Did anyone know that some of the best website statistic programs are already coming free with most web hosting plans? Although there are many web statistics programs on the market, each one unique in price and features.

Today Cpanel is the most popular control panel for web hosting accounts. One probably have a whole bunch of web statistic programs built in, If he/she have a hosting account for ones website that includes cpanel. For regular website administration, it is extremely easy to learn and use.

Analog, Webalizer and Awstats are generally 3 different types of statistics one will find inside cpanel.

Webalizer is a statistic program showing one in a graph, how many visitors have visited his/her site month by month. This is the basic type of statistics, which only takes a quick glance to receive ones web site information. One will probably need to check out the other two statistic programs if he/she wants more information that is detailed.

Different presentation styles are being offered by both Analog and Awstats. Most people have difficulty finding Analog as it is mainly text based and requires close attention. However, all the essential visitor information one probably wishes to see, is listed on Analog only.

Awstats is the favorite web site statistic program on cpanel. Apart from giving plenty of visitor information, from number of hits per day and month, it also tells one where they originate from, how long visitors stayed at their site, the country from which they are viewing their site, what browser they are using and much more. It is quick and easy task to find, the information that one is looking for, because of colored graphs and simple to read layout.

Look into one’s cPanel statistic programs, inside his/her website hosting account, if he/she has a website, and would like to know more about his/her visitors. In analyzing ones site and drawing more traffic, cpanel can be extremely helpful.

Not two weeks ago I had a chat with someone (an SEO) about some online media buying and although the figures made an infinite amount of sense (6 figure monthly page views – prime location banner purchase for less than £90 per month!), he said, “but there is no SEO value from the banner link” (it was JavaScript)! Astonished, I spent the next hour arguing the case for buying the coverage, but it would seem that the majority of SEOs just don’t see the value of applying traditional marketing techniques to the web – they just don’t “fit” into the SEO mindset.

What is really bizarre though is that while the optimisation industry doesn’t see the value in some less search engine focused marketing techniques, they will pay a veritable fortune for paid links. The likes of ReviewMe (http://www.reviewme.com) change up to $250 for a single “review” (which is SEO speak for a plain text link not so subtly hidden in a purpose written article). One text link. One! Not just that, but a single text link on a new page that has no PR (and will maybe only will ever receive minimal PR filtered through from other page links)!

For that $250 (around £150) there are so many different options you could aim for. While a lot won’t have any direct SEO benefit, we still need to consider traffic and branding benefits.

$250 would allow me to buy banner advertising on a niche site / forum / blog for a limited amount of time. Depending on the type of site and its subject area you could be looking at a decent amount of traffic, enquiries and exposure – certainly enough to justify the cost.

An alternative would be to spend the money on a directory listing on a site such as TheBestOf (http://www.thebestof.co.uk) – £10 per month for a year and you get a full page listing (written by your local contact), an audio advert where you can pitch your service, inclusion in a high traffic site and a direct (SEO friendly!) link back to your site. A link AND qualified traffic – that’s like SEO Christmas!

Online marketing professionals do focus on SEO a lot and that isn’t a bad thing – it just isn’t the only thing and you should be looking to spend your budget wisely and spread your marketing scope.

If you wish to be a successful Internet marketer you will want to avoid these 8 mistakes:

1. Failure to prepare properly. Many Internet marketers are simply lazy and will not make the effort to prepare properly. Refrain from being overly anxious as if you’ll miss the boat if you do not market your website immediately. Use however many days it takes to setup all the appropriate advertising accounts and advertisements properly. This will make your administration more efficient and enable you to fly through your schedule tasks effortlessly each day. The net result is that your marketing efforts will be far more productive than if you were to take a haphazard approach.

2. Failure to implement an advertising strategy. You must have a plan with well defined goals if you wish to have positive marketing results. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Do not try to recreate the wheel. Find out what successful people are doing and do the same. Regarding goals, write them down. When you achieve a goal mark it as “completed” and replace it with another. By doing this very simple step you can monitor your effectiveness and progress.

3. Failure to be professional. Some of the ads on the Internet are of embarrassingly poor quality. Be professional in your business approach and in the design of your ads. If you lack the ability to produce professional ads then find a resource that can. The quality of your website and advertisements is a reflection on you. Also, when dealing with customers always be courteous and professional even when they are not. If you are professional you will shine above the rest and earn customer confidence.

4. Failure to implement and adhere to a disciplined schedule. If you don’t have a realistic schedule in place then you will not be disciplined in marketing your ads properly. Consistency not volume is the key to success in marketing on the Internet. A schedule allows you to be consistent and also forces you to be disciplined. The Internet is not a “get rich quick” environment. It takes hours of dedicated and consistent work. You must be committed to putting in the time if you wish to have good marketing results.

5. Failure to utilize the right tools. There are some very innovative tools on the Internet to make the operation of your business more efficient. Many of them are very affordable and they will save you from having great frustration. Some marketers take the approach of being a “penny wise and a pound foolish.” In saving their pennies they are losing out on making the bigger dollars. Don’t ignore the many tools which are available.

6. Failure to build a downline. Your downline is the cornerstone of your business. A downline is your customer list or they can be referrals that join certain advetising programs through you serving as an affiliate. Verious advertising sites offer you some type of compensation for bringing them referrals. Don’t ignore the value of these referrals. Some Internet marketers are so anxious to advertise their product they fail to have an understanding of the bigger picture. A big downline can save you money in your advertising and enbable you to advertise more effectively. When soliciting always get the email address of your customer for future solicitations and sales.

7. Failure to track ads. Much time is wasted on unproductive sites and ads. If you’re not tracking them you will continually work in ignorance. You must have a measure of what is working and what is not. Is the program that you are participating in yielding the desired results? Are your ads well written and effective in drawing customers? You will never have the answers to these important questions unless you track your ads. You can waste a great deal of time on poor advertising programs and bad ads if you never track the results.

8. Failure to understand the advertising medium. You must understand how each type of advertising program works if you’re going to be an effective marketer. Whether you use pay-per-click advertising or membership driven sites like safelists, traffic exchanges and text ad exchanges all have their own personality. Not only do you need to understand the mechanics of each but also the general personality of their membership.