Affiliate Marketing And What It Is

Affiliate Marketing: What It Is

 Affiliate marketing is different things to different people, but essentially, affiliate marketing is the act of marketing someone else’s products or services for a portion, or commission, of each sale that you make.

Some people do affiliate marketing as their full time jobs. That’s it. That’s all they do – they market other people’s products or services, collect their commissions, and live their lives as they wish. They do not have to deal with customer service, shipping orders, or anything else. All they do is promote other people’s products or services, everyday.

Other people use affiliate programs in conjunction with their own products or services, using affiliate programs as front end products, upsells, and back end products. For example, if you had an information product about weight loss, you might want to market exercise equipment, exercise clothing, vitamins, or other items or services that are related to weight loss along with your weight loss information product – to increase your revenue.

Obviously you would not want to create these items, so you would find these related products or services, and sign up for the affiliate programs, allowing you to promote them. Some people even low cost information products, such as ebooks, in order to sell high ticket affiliate products or services. Alternately, some people just use inexpensive affiliate products to enhance their own high ticket products or continuity programs, such as membership sites.

Some people are confused about what affiliate marketing actually is. For instance, many people who have products and offer affiliate programs for those products might say that they sell their product through affiliate marketing. What they mean is that they have affiliates who sell the product for them, but they are actually merchants or affiliate managers, in affiliate marketing terms.

But basically, affiliate marketing is selling someone else’s products or services through various means, for various reasons – either to earn an income, to enhance a product, or even to sell an additional product. In fact, many people use low end affiliate products as lead ins, or entry level products, for higher end affiliate products – never actually creating or promoting a product or service of their own.

Is money being made? You better believe there is! If you include all products and services that are sold through affiliates, affiliate marketing is essentially a billion dollar industry, even though it isn’t technically considered an industry in its own right.  Many people don’t even consider it a career, but they are mistaken.

Right now, at this very moment, there are thousands of affiliate marketers that you have never even heard of quietly promoting affiliate products and collecting huge commission checks every month. Why haven’t you heard of them? You haven’t heard of them because they are not in the Internet Marketing products market. They are in other ‘consumer’ niches, such as weight loss, healthcare, sports, gambling, education, financial products, etc.

Now, if you have an active interest in those things, or any other conceivable thing, you have probably searched for information or products related to your interest on the Internet. If this is the case, you have most likely come into contact with an affiliate marketer, without even being aware of it. You may have even purchased a product through an affiliate marketer without ever knowing it.

Even Google has an affiliate program. That’s what Google AdSense is all about. It’s an affiliate program, but it isn’t technically called that. EBay has an affiliate program, as does Microsoft. There is an affiliate program available for just about any product that you can imagine, but not all ‘brands’ have affiliate programs – which of course is their mistake.

Affiliate marketing presents a win-win-win situation. The owner or maker of the product being sold is making money. The affiliate marketer is making money, and the customer is getting what they want or need. Everybody wins. Affiliate marketing has been around longer than you think it has as well.

Many people think that affiliate marketing started sometime after the Internet came into existence. This is wrong. Amway, Avon, Mary Kay – all of these are essentially affiliate programs, but the people who were actually doing the affiliate marketing were called distributors or representatives – and they are still called distributors or representatives to this day.

Affiliate marketing can even entail network marketing. Affiliate marketing is the act of selling a product for a commission. Network marketing also involves selling a product for a commission, but also focuses on bringing other resellers (or affiliate marketers, distributors or representatives) into the program as well. Sometimes, however, affiliate marketing also allows and encourages you to bring other affiliate marketers into the program.

Again, affiliate marketing is different things to different people, but the goal is the same – to make money. Affiliate marketing offers you the opportunity and ability to make money without creating a product of your own.

Getting More From Google Adsense

Getting more out of Adsense as you establish yourself

So you want to increase your Adsense income? Log into your Adsense account, and look at your last month's stats. There are three key areas that contribute to your earnings: Impressions, Clickthroughs and Effective CPM. Improving your stats in any, or preferably, all of these three key areas will increase your Adsense earnings.

Impressions

Impressions are the number of times your webpages with Adsense ads have been viewed. You can increase Impressions by increasing traffic (preferably targeted traffic) to your webpages. Some of the best ways to increase targeted traffic to your webpages include:

-create more webpages, with relevant, focused content
-create more links to your webpages
-list your website/s under relevant categories in more directories
-set up a directory of relevant sites on your website and accept relevant reciprocal links
-write relevant articles, with your site information in the 'resource box' at the end of each article, and submit them to article directories

Clickthroughs

Clickthroughs are the percentage of viewers who click on your Adsense ads. You can increase Clickthroughs by increasing the relevance of Adsense ads on your site, and by tweaking the format and placing of your ads.

Although you can't dictat which Adsense ads show on your site, you can influence the relevance of the ads by maintaining a tightly focused website. If every page on your site focuses tightly on the site topic, its more likely that the Adsense ads will too. For example, if every page of your site is about fishing, and the word 'fishing' appears several times on every page, its likely that your Adsense ads will relate to fishing.

The best way to tweak your ad format and placement is to invest in an Adsense Tracker, and test, test, test! People who have done this tend to suggest that the best format is the large rectangle, with background and border the same color as the page behind it, so that the ad blends into the page. The best placement is towards the center or top left of the first screen of the page. Try these suggestions first, and then track and test, to be sure of what works best for your pages.

Effective CPM

Effective CPM is a measure of your average earnings, per thousand clicks. You can increase your Effective CPM by selecting topics that attract high bids from Adsense advertisers, and building pages and whole websites on higher paying topics.

Although Google doesn't release information on Adsense bids, you can get a good idea of the top paying topics by looking at information on Adwords bids, or, for that matter, bids on pay-per-click search engines like Overture. There are a number of keyword research tools available, both free and paid, that can help you find high paying topics.

Things To Avoid When Doing SEO

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION: THINGS YOU SHOULD AVOID

Search engine optimization can be done in many ways, but some of these are considered unethical. If used, this may result in a ban on your website or can even invite several other penalties from the search engine authorities. More than helping you to raise the rank for your website in search engines, some such strategies can spell plain disaster instead. So it is important to know what to avoid while optimizing your website for search engine rankings.

Text in graphics

Text inside images and graphics cannot be tracked by search engines. So even if you use significant keywords and relevant texts within the graphics, it fails to contribute to search engine positioning in any way. Information, words and texts should be placed in a way such that the search engines can easily identify them and thereby give your website a better rank for those search results. More the text in graphics in a webpage, lesser its chances of being noticed and getting good rank in search engines. Failing to identify graphic texts, the search engines often deduce these as blank web-pages. Homepages are classic examples of this, they being graphic intensive and incorporating texts in images.

Moving a page having a PR

Moving a webpage means making it lose its Page Rank (PR) until Google indexes it next. So if you are to shift the page, redirect its original URL to the new page, mentioning whether the translocation is temporary or for good.

Dead ends

Every webpage must have a link exit, a way out of that page. No webpage should be a closed road.

Artificially increase a page's keyword density

Stuffing a webpage with unnecessary words in order to heighten its keyword density is a major unethical attempt, which leads to severe penalizations at times. When ALT tags are stuffed with keywords, users do not get to view it and that is precisely what is held as a wrong strategy towards search engine optimization. So fend it off.

Using hidden text or links

Hiding texts and links from the users’ view is yet another significant red-flag point for search engine optimizers. Only those texts and links that are clearly viewable should be used.

Links from link farms and non-relevant sites

When you are using other related links in your webpage, it is best to ensure that they are of relevant sites and not of FFA sites or link farms. One simple way is to use links from pages that do not have many other links, from websites having the same theme and content as yours or from those that complement yours.

Unnatural links

Natural links always have an edge over unnatural links when it comes to positions in search engines, because the latter prefer linking to be ‘natural’—to appear spontaneous, as if they are natural results of a business deal. To do away with unnatural linking, avoid too many links at a time, avoid links all coming from link pages, avoid all reciprocal links and all links having a high PR 95 or above). This way you can save throwing an impression that you bought the links.

Using the same text in all incoming links

If every website that links back to you bears the same text on the link description, it is considered unnatural. More natural is to allow some percent of the site’s name in the text and the rest a wide range of description. This link text description plays a crucial role in determining the site/page rank. So it is surely advisable to carry this in mind while you fix your preferred link text description in your website.

Onpage SEO Techniques

ON-PAGE TECHNIQUES FOR SEO’ING YOUR WEBSITE

Here’s the thing, you spend good money and time putting up a neat piece of a website on the net for one reason and one reason only; to be viewed. If your website doesn’t get visitors then it is, in one word, worthless. But how do you make the people flock to your website like you want them to? Simple - by getting a high ranking with the search engines. How do you do that? You do that by means of easy user-friendly methods like the SEO (search engine optimization).

 When you search for a certain something on a search engine hundreds of pages are thrown open to you, but out of these you check not more than the first three. The websites listed on the few hundred other pages which follow therefore go unnoticed and accordingly remain unvisited in spite of being listed by the engine. The left out websites can better there chances of earning a better ranking and getting visited by more users than they can honestly dream of by using SEO, read on to see how you can make it work for you.

Search Engine optimization is an advantageous method by means of which your URL can get the kind of spotlight which will earn it hundreds and thousands of visitors every single day! There are a number of ways of taking advantage of search engine optimization. Consider this; your website consists of a number of pages, what if I say that each of these pages may, individually, be maximized for search engine optimization? Putting to use your search engine technique on every one of your web pages will help you notch up your ranking on the search engines and increase your web traffic manifolds.

Follow the tips below to make SEO work for you. 

• Internal Links

Now, search engines have this particular liking for sites with a lot of links on its pages, so make sure you include loads of them on all your pages. Keep the links internal, that is let them link one part of the website to another or one end of the page to the other end and so on. The basic reason for this is to keep your visitor occupied with the site, once they are at it. There is no plausible reason as to why you should encourage your visitors to leave your site by providing external links, keep it in the home front and yet optimize your site for the search engines.

• External Links

Like we just discussed external links in your site is a bad distraction which tends to steal away your visitors and sweep them off to other destinations. As a site owner, therefore, external links can seem a particularly unwelcome topic. But hold on, here is the catch, search engine’s offer higher rankings to sites which have both, external and internal links. Therefore there is no avoiding it, put up a few external links on your site, push them off into the margins of the page or right at the bottom of it, only make sure that you do put it, there’s no getting away from its obvious power.

• Keywords

Optimize all the pages on your site for keywords. Technically your keywords should be present more than thrice on all the pages. For this reason an abundance of content is a good idea, sprinkle your keywords abundantly (but meaningfully and sensibly) within the written body of the site cause, search engine’s, though they cannot read, can and do scan text. If you have optimized each page right then every time a search engine scans your site’s text then your keywords will get detected and you will in turn achieve a higher ranking with it.

A beginners guide to keyword research

A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO KEYWORD RESEARCH

Keyword Research is numero uno in the process of optimizing your web site and pay-per-click campaign. This step involves choosing the most apt keywords your target group requires to improve its ranking in search engines.

In a layman’s parlance, keywords are nothing but words and / or phrases which people may use to locate your services, products, information or brands via search engines.

Step 1: Keyword Identification

The first activity in the keyword research process is the identification of keywords. Keyword identification means locating the keywords which are used by your target group. You look for related keywords. First, you identify the industry and then zoom into the specific field. For example, if you own this pet shop, you should take up keywords like: "cat food" and "dog food".

Step 2: Locate Your Keywords

The second activity in the keyword research process is a more informed and technical search. It involves finding keywords that people actually use and organizing them by their popularity.

To locate keywords and find out their popularities, you can make use of the Aleksika keyword search box to know more about the search behavior of your target audience. Learn what they call things, the way they identify subjects, how broad or how precise their search generally is. These parameters become essential in looking for the right keywords.

You may also access relevant and useful ideas for keywords from the collection of top keywords containing the top one hundred keywords of the last year or maybe a keyword directory that offers keywords organized by subject. Wordtracker is one such program that allows you to look for relevant keywords.

Step 3: Choose Keywords

The method of deciding on the right keywords involves the following steps. Copy all relevant phrases and counts onto a spreadsheet. After you have made an examination of all individual words and phrases that might apply to your website, you will have every single important phrase on your spreadsheet.

Instead of making your search more vague and inaccurate, (which generally happens when you try to choose one-word keywords), it is suggested that you focus your concentration on only those keywords that can be easily managed. And that would typically mean phrasal keywords.