Bill McRea

SEO or search engine optimization is crucial for any affiliate marketing website that wants to attract organic search engine traffic. Everyone knows that this is the best kind of traffic not only because it is free, but because it is highly targeted traffic, which makes it far easier to convert visitors to buyers when they have found a site that matches the keyword query that they typed into the search engine. When it comes down to it, more traffic equals more money for you.

Let’s take a look at five SEO tools that can help your niche affiliate marketing website or blog achieve better SEO, improve its search engine rankings and attract the most organic search engine traffic possible.

1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool

All of your SEO efforts will begin with selecting the right keywords to work at ranking for. It would be great to rank number one in Google, and that will most certainly drive a ton of traffic to your website, but is that keyword sending the most qualified people to your site? Occupying the top spot will not do you a lot of good if you do not have exactly what your visitors are searching for.

Keyword research helps you to find the best keywords that will provide the best opportunity for you to both rank high in the SERPS, and attract the traffic that is looking for what you have to offer.

2. Google Analytics

This is such an amazingly robust tool and you get access to all of the deep insights into your website’s traffic sources, visitor behavior, bounce rate, and what keywords they are using to find you all for free. You can track ROI for paid ads, conversion rates and how effective your marketing efforts have been. It is easy to use, and there is even a free plugin for your WordPress blog.

3. Alexa

Called, “The Web Information Company,” Alexa.com, which is an Amazon company, provides a ton of free global web metrics. You’ll find the rankings of the most successful websites by keyword, category or country. They offer a free toolbar that you can create and download to your web browser.

You’ll want to claim your site on Alexa.com and update your site’s listing. after awhile you’ll be able to get your site’s Alexa ranking (the lower the number the better) and make use of the Alexa developer tools for ranking sites based on their Alexa traffic rank. You can get information on how you rank in comparison to your competitors, and the, “What’s Hot?” page will give you a live listing of the trending topics and keywords on the web right now.

4. Market Samurai

This premium SEO Keyword software helps you attract targeted traffic, and get more visitors to your website with less effort. You will learn how to target the right keywords to attract the right traffic and defeat your competition.

5. SEO Toolbar

The SEO Toolbar uses a ton of marketing data points in order to provide you with a holistic view of how your competition is doing right there in the SERPS. You will need to sign up for a free account at seobook.com, but when you do you’ll be able to get the toolbar and other tools for free.

SEO is an integral part of your success or failure at affiliate marketing. Take the time to learn this skill and use these tools to help keep your website at the top of the SERPs.

For more information about SEO and other ways that you can grow your affiliate marketing income online visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today.

You spend countless hours on your WordPress blog choosing the perfect theme and customizing it for your needs, creating lots of content for it and driving traffic. What if one day your blog just disappeared?

Yes, your blog can just disappear because it happened to me once because of a hacker and another time because I had updated a plugin that was incompatible with the current version of WordPress that I was running. I got an inbox message on Facebook from a client telling me that my blog was down. I quickly typed in the URL and sure enough what appeared was a long, elaborate error message where my blog should have appeared. Because I have my blog set to automatically backup, it took just a minute or two to restore it, but if I had not been backing it up this could have been a catastrophe.

Backing up your WordPress Database Manually

You’ll find click by click instructions for several methods for backing up your database manually using cpanel, PhPMYAdmin, or MySQL on the WordPress Codex page. The only problem with using these methods is that they rely on your remembering to do them on a consistent basis.

codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database

Backing up your entire blog

The previous recommendations will back up your database meaning that if your blog crashes you can restore the content, but you’ll be left with a basic theme without all of your customizations.

The only real solution to backing up your entire blog is to go with a premium WordPress Backup Plugin. Here are a few that you might look into:

• Automatic WordPress Backup Plugin

• BackupBuddy

• BlogVault

• XCloner

These premium backup solutions backup your entire blog–both the database and the site itself, can be configured to run automatically on a schedule, and they backup your data remotely, so if the server that your site is on goes down, your backups are safe somewhere else.

Take a look at these various solutions and see which ones suite your needs, but then be sure to choose one and set up your backup schedule. This is not an area you should be neglecting because losing your blog is something that you have no control over.

If the unthinkable should happen and your blog crashes, you will only lose any data or changes you’ve made since the last time it was backed up. Your blog will quickly be restored with no worries.

In addition to performing automatic backups on a regular basis, make sure that you have security plugins installed to protect your blog from hackers, you should change your password regularly, use a strong password and a username other than, ‘admin,’ and password protect the ‘WP-Admin’ folder on your server.

The WordPress CMS makes setting up and managing your blog simple and easy, but you’ve got to be sure that you’ve got a reliable and automated way to backup both your database and your blog.

If you are running a WordPress affiliate marketing blog, you should visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you will discover lots of tips for growing your online business today.

How can you tell if you need a virtual assistant (VA)? As an online business owner do you ever find yourself hunched over your computer late into the night working more hours than you thought you’d have to? Does your family often beg you to step away from the computer and spend time with them? If you are an online business owner and you find that you need more balance in your life, then it might be time to consider hiring a virtual assistant.

On a practical level, how do you value your time? If you bill your time at $75. per hour, for example, for the next few days, keep a running list of every single task that you complete in your business and how long it took for you to complete those tasks. Then ask yourself if all of those items were worth $75. per hour. That exercise alone should help you decide when it’s time to consider hiring a VA. Let’s take a look at who a virtual assistant is and what they do.

What is a virtual assistant?

A virtual assistant is a contract employee who works remotely using their own computer and Internet connection. They can be located in your town or on the other side of the globe. You assign specific tasks that you need to get done and they complete them and send the project back to you.

What do VA’s do?

Virtual assistants can do a ton of different tasks related to running an Internet based business. If you are considering hiring a VA, you should make a list of all of the tasks that must be completed on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis for your business. Next go down that list and check off the ones you can delegate. Knowing the kinds of tasks that you need done will help you to choose the best virtual assistant. Here are some typical tasks that you might delegate to a VA:

• Scheduling & managing your calendar
• Research
• Pay bills
• Online shopping
• Travel planning
• Event planning
• Traffic generation tasks
• Screen incoming calls
• Manage your email
• Moderate blog comments
• Data entry

Where do you find virtual assistants?

There are countless online job boards where you can find and hire VA’s such as elance.com, odesk.com. If you want to hire someone from your local area and in a hurry, you can place an ad on craigslist.com.

If you are feeling nervous or tentative about letting go of some of your tasks, ease into it by hiring some of the folks at fiverr.com to handle one task at a time for you. At five bucks a pop, you can definitely afford it and when you see that the work gets done and you are free to do more of what you are passionate about you’ll begin to see that hiring a virtual assistant might be just what your business needs to move up to the next level.

When you are ready to discover more tips and strategies for growing your online business, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you will find more information about all aspects of Internet marketing today.

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