Bill McRea

The Amazon Associates program is Amazon’s affiliate program that offers you the opportunity to make money by sending some of your website visitors to their website. When your visitor clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase at Amazon.com, you get paid advertising fees, which is a percentage of the purchase price. These advertising fees are pretty low by industry standards, but there are many people who have been able to generate plenty of income with the Amazon Associates program. The trick is that you have to be willing to put in the time and effort to learn the program and then stick with it until you create the results you are looking for.

There are many common mistakes that people make when it comes to trying to make money with Amazon associates. These are three of the more common mistakes that people make, and how to avoid them.

1. Not offering product reviews

Offering honest, straightforward product reviews adds an incredible amount of value to your visitors life. They are on your blog because they are looking for something specific, and if you can answer their questions and provide the value that they are searching for, they will be happy to follow a link from your site to the resource that you are pointing them to because they trust you.

Write book reviews on books that you have read and enjoyed, but even for those that you did not like as much as you thought you would. Both your positive and not-so-positive feedback will be helpful to your visitors.

2. Not using several tracking IDs’s

In order to see which campaigns are more effective you can set up several Tracking ID’s within you Amazon associates account. Go to the ‘account settings’ link at the top of the page, then in the ‘Account Information’ section, click on, ‘Manage your tracking IDs.’ You will see a button, ‘Add Tracking ID,’ which will return a field where you can give your new tracking ID a name. You might give it the name of the campaign, or the website. If you are in North America, this your IDs will always end with ‘-20.’

Once your tracking IDs are in place and you have made a few sales, you can run a report to see how each one is performing. Click on, ‘reports,’ and then, ‘Tracking ID Summary Report’ form the dropdown menu. Select the date ranges for the report and you will be able to see how each channel is doing and where your clicks and sales are coming from.

It’s been said that you can’t improve what you don’t measure, so track your clicks and sales and focus on improving the campaigns that are falling behind.

3. Choosing low priced products

With referral fees as low as 4% in some cases, it makes sense to focus on higher ticket items with the Amazon associates program. If you are going to put in the effort to get the traffic required to get clicks on your ads, you might as well offer products that you will gain higher advertising fees for.

There are lots of other ways that you can make money online with niche affiliate marketing. Check out, http://www.passivenicheprofits.com, to discover how you can generate passive income online today.

The basic goal of keyword research is to find the best keywords that will attract visitors who are searching for what you have to offer. Search engines whether you are talking about Google or the others all work based on keywords. Your goal is to learn just enough about SEO to optimize your site to provide the best resource for the searchers who are looking for your primary keywords.
Google ranks websites based on their keywords, so you create your blog or website’s content with a focus on those primary keywords that will attract the users that will be interested in what you have to offer.

The goal of keyword research
Your goal is to find keywords that get a sufficient enough amount of traffic, but do not have so much competition that you can’t get a foothold in that niche. Sounds simple enough, right? When you take into consideration the fact that all of this is constantly changing based on the time of year, season, holidays, fads and fashion you begin to see how complex all of this can become. Next we will take a look at keyword research tools, which can help you make sense of all of this data that is constantly shifting and changing.

Keyword research tools
When it comes to keyword research tools, you will find both free tools and premium tools. Some of the premium tools are very powerful and can give you a dizzying array of data about your keyword lists, but they can also be very complex, difficult to learn and so you don’t get the results you are looking for.

With free tools, you get what you pay for. Free keyword research tools can give you one part of the picture, but to get the best results you want to find a good, premium keyword research tool that will help you to uncover those keywords and niches that you might not have otherwise found, and help you to find those powerful, long tail keywords that help you sort out your traffic to attract the most targeted visitors.

Choosing a domain name
Competitive keyword research is also useful in finding the right domain name for your websites. A domain name should contain the primary keyword that you are trying to rank for with your website, but it should also be as short as possible, be easy to say, and spell. Clarity always trumps cleverness when it comes to domain names because search engines really don’t get puns or plays on words in the same way that the human brain does.
If you are going to get serious about your online business, then keyword research is something that you are going to need to get really good at. Having a good keyword research tool at your disposal is the first step in getting the most accurate and timely data available so that your sites can have the best SEO, attract the most targeted traffic and have the best conversions.

Are you ready to discover how to do keyword research quickly and effectively with the world’s most powerful, new niche finding software? Visit, http://mcreasite.com/NicheFinder, to start uncovering those hidden niches today.

Flipping blogs can be a fun way to make some extra money or even create a business, but there are a few common mistakes that newbies often make that can easily be avoided with the correct information. Let’s take a look at those three common errors and what you can do to avoid making them yourself, thus increasing your chances for making more money flipping blogs.

1.       Your blog is in the wrong niche

The popularity of certain niches ebbs and flows. Some niches can be strictly seasonal. Some may be based on a product or a topic that was once hot, but no one is really talking about them anymore. Regardless of the reason, if there are no buyers searching for the content of your niche. Then your blog is in the wrong niche and it will be challenging, if not impossible to sell such a blog for decent profit.

Make sure that when you are flipping blogs the niche and the topic are in demand with buyers searching for that topic. If you find that the popularity of your blogs niche has waned. You can make some revisions and change the primary keywords, and maybe some of the graphics before you try to flip that blog.

2.       The presentation is lacking

Another mistake that people make when flipping blogs is that they don’t pay attention to how the blog looks. First impressions are important both with buyers and with visitors. When flipping blogs you want the blog to look its best. Does the blog have a run-of-the-mill, free theme? Consider hiring a graphic artist to tweak a theme for you, create a nice, new, custom header image and buttons, or better yet, create a whole new, unique theme that is suited to that niche and topic. Go in and make sure that there are no broken links, out of date offers, or anything else that might detract from the site’s ‘curb appeal.’

3. Insufficient proof of the blogs statistics.

When a buyer is interested in purchasing your blog they are interested in learning about the blog statistics right away, so it helps for you to provide lots of clear documentation of the sites Alexa ranking Google page rank. Traffic statistics, and how much income the site produces monthly. If you have Google analytics installed or any other analytics package, you can supply screen shots to illustrate how much traffic the site receives now.

These are just three of the common mistakes that those who are new to blog flipping might make in the process of trying to sell a blog. As you become more experienced you will learn more about what makes a blog more appealing to buyers, and what kind of amenities you can add to increase the value and appeal of the blogs you are selling.

Another way to find out about what blog buyers are looking for is to research the ‘Just Sold,’ pages on Flippa.com. Look at the blogs that have sold recently. Look at the topic, what extras were included, etc. to get ideas to help enhance your blog flipping efforts.

When you are ready for even more tips and strategies for blog flipping, visit, http://www.nicheprofitblogs.com, to get more information about how to get started with niche profit blogging today.

If it is done properly, you can really make some nice cash when you buy and flip blogs.  Once you have gained just a little bit of experience selling online you know the characteristics of blogs that will sell and ones that are duds. In this article, we are going to take a look at how you can buy underperforming websites with potential and resell them for quick profit.

One of the first things that you want to look at when you are considering buying a website is the niche. What is the topic of the site? Is it a hot niche? Is it related to a topic or product that people are currently searching for? These are all important questions. To answer them you want to do a bit of research.

If you found a blog that you think might be a good candidate visit the Google keyword tool and type the URL for the site into this tool and see what keywords. The site is based on. Click on the button that says ‘Columns’ and then tick the ‘Estimated AVG CPC,’ box and click, ‘Apply.’ You will see the value of the keywords related to this site.

Content

Next, take a look at the blog’s content. What kind of content do you see? Is there a lot of quality content there? Content is really the most important aspect of the blog and it will determine all of the other important metrics such as traffic and monetization. So you want to choose a blog that has a basic foundation of quality content.

Traffic

Where is the blog’s traffic coming from? How much traffic? Are they currently getting? You’ll want to take a look at this blog’s alexa rank, and Google page rank. These are all important foundational questions that you’ll need to answer in order to determine if this site is worth investing in.

Monetization

How is the website monetized now? Do you see adsense ads or other advertising on the blog?

Appearance

When you are buying a blog with an eye towards fixing it up and reselling it, its current appearance really doesn’t matter that much. That can easily be changed. If the site has good page rank, and is getting good traffic, it’s fine if it’s ugly now.

So, now let’s say you found a blog that has some potential. It has decent page rank. It’s getting traffic, and it has the potential to generate some income. Here are some things that you can do to spruce it up and flip it for a quick profit.

Sprucing up a blog for resale

With actual real estate, kitchens, bathrooms and backyards are what sell homes. With virtual real estate the focus is more on content traffic and income generation.

You want to buy a blog that looks like a dud now, but with a bit of work. You can transform it into a superstar. Just by adding some AdSense or other ad network, offering a product for sale, creating an e-mail subscriber list, and doing some basic SEO can raise the value of a blog significantly.

To get even more tips and strategies for flipping blogs, visit, http://www.nicheprofitblogs.com, where you will discover lots of resources for blogging for profit today.