“Understanding Affiliate Marketing: Who is an Affiliate Marketer?
Introduction
According to The World’s Glossary of Internet Terms, “Affiliate Marketer is defined as: “A business relationship with a merchant or other service provider who allows you to link to that business. When a visitor clicks on the link at your site and subsequently makes a purchase from the merchant, you receive a commission based on the amount of the sale, a referral fee or a pay-for-click fee.”
This is a simple, straight-forward agreement between a merchant and an affiliate. Budding affiliate marketers run into a problem when they try to reverse the success process. Instead of starting at the beginning, they try to start at the end.
Making money is the end of the process. The beginning of the process is education and there are several steps in between. Too many people, who are just getting started in affiliate marketing, fail to take the steps necessary to get to the end of the process and actually make money.
Step #1:
Educate yourself. This is the key, opening the door of opportunity. It’s also the common thread connecting successful affiliate marketers. Education lays the foundation – the building blocks to success. Start by gathering the best information you can find about affiliate marketing and absorbing it.
Step #2:
Turn that information into usable knowledge. Even the best information remains kind of worthless, however, until after you discover how to use it – how to make it serve your purpose.
Step #3:
Start applying the knowledge … take action …start building your affiliate business. Will you make mistakes, even though you’ve invested all that time educating yourself? Yes, you most likely will make mistakes.
Step #4:
Test and tweak, test and tweak. This one never ends. And it’s often the dividing line between succeeding and failing. Attention to small details often returns big rewards.
Following these steps will define you as a successful affiliate marketer.
Effective Marketing Tips For An Online Business
Within this article on creating marketing for an online business, we will look at how you can go about successfully marketing your online business.
Each business is different and the type of marketing that it will do online so you want to find some way test enough from their competition. This is a general rule no matter what type of business you are possibly looking into, whether it be retail or online.
One of the great ways that can work in creating marketing for an online business can actually be run from your website. Develop a forum or discussion board on which different topics of importance to your customers are listed. People will want to come back again and again to read what others have to say and this provides you with some great repeat traffic. This can help your natural search engine traffic in getting your page is indexed as well as provide some back link opportunities, which will help in marketing your online business. Within your forum, you are able to create marketing of some sort because it is your website. When these customers are ready to buy, they will think of buying from you first because of the connection between your website and them. Within this way, you have created a win-win situation for both parties. You will have developed a stable base of customers while also giving yourself the opportunity to grow your business due to the opportunities listed such as back links, search engine traffic, and being more heavily indexed.
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Another good way to help in creating marketing for an online business is to give away free products. You can advertise your free giveaways in many of the freebie forums that can be found around the Internet. There is great traffic to these websites and if you are able to divert some of this to your website, you will be much the better for it. If you are using free giveaways, make sure that you are receiving something in return such as the person’s e-mail address because they have signed up for your newsletter. When you are using giveaways as a form of advertising, you’ll want to make sure that you are able to get some sort of return on your investment so keep this in mind when posting to the freebie forums.
The final way in which we’ll look at creating marketing for an online business is to write good sales copy. This is going to be one of the simplest methods for you will quite possibly the most effective because my improving what is written on your website, you will be able to convert more of your traffic and this will have a direct impact on your bottom line.
Each of these three ways of creating marketing for an online business can be very effective. By taking the time to improve your website, you will find that this will have the greatest impact upon your bottom line of running a website and an Internet business. If your website does not run effectively and draw customers in, then going out and working on bringing traffic in is a lost cause.
If you need any help feel free to contact us!
Basics of Search Engine Optimization
I am writing this white paper for those people who do not have any idea about search engine optimization (SEO). Special the business community of Pakistan who do not have information on SEO and its importance in today’s world. Search Engine Optimization is the only technique to increase your business revenue form internet and global world. Making a website is not enough in this era of technology; million of website are building and uploading daily on the global internet world. Main objective to write this paper is to promote search engine optimization in Pakistan. According to an internet report over 85% of internet users, use search engines to find related websites like yours? Millions of people each day turn to the major search engines to find products, services and information. With over one billion web sites listed with search engines, how will your customers ever find you among the competition? Search Engine Optimization is the solution.
SEO technical definition
SEO is short of Search Engine Optimization. The term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a website to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken.
Why SEO is important today
Today, internet marketing turning point on how popular your site is. Optimizing your site for Search Engine Marketing can result in a large hit rate to your site. This happens only if your site is to show whenever somebody searches for the keywords of your site. If your site is in the top of Search Engine Rankings, you need to take recourse only to search engine promotion. This is the only way you can possibly reach all those people who are really searching for your service or product. Internet Marketing today is dependent only on search engine optimization. It matters little that your website has the most beautiful graphics or the most attractive words.
Internet marketing is now gradually increasing in Pakistan, as we are very late in this field so Pakistani websites are behind in many keywords and in generic keywords. It doesn’t means that we can not reach SEO on generic keywords but it takes a lot of continuous effort to compete the generic keywords. Most important thing in SEO is that how often a website is updated and how much popular website is.
The only way to measure the success of a Natural Search Engine Optimization Campaign is to know where you rank on the Internet’s most important search engines for the keyphrases/ keywords which are relevant to your company, business.
Out of million’s of website on a single keyword (example: trading) only 10 websites comes on the first page of search engine result. 20 percent peoples open second page of the search engine result and 5 percent of the peoples go to the 3rd page, it means that only those websites/pages which are in top 30 results of the search engine will derive traffic to their websites from internet.
Basic Techniques of SEO
Optimizing a website for Search Engines is neither as difficult nor or complicated job as we think. We just need to know what practices to be done and how to do it. You can optimize your own pages yourself and receive excellent ranking in a matter of few months.
As, number of factors are important when optimizing a website, including the content and structure of the website’s copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process.
Below is a list of items which are important in SEO. Each item are factors that search engines look for when crawling your website in my next coming articles I will discuss each item separately to improve your website in terms of each of the following factor:
Your Keywords
• Selecting your keywords
• Prioritize your keywords
Domain name / Filename
• Domain Registration
• Keyword in domain name
• Keyword in filename
• Length of Website Address
Keyword Placement
• Keyword in title tag
• Keyword in Description Meta-tag
• Keyword in Keyword Meta-tag
• Keyword in Content
• H1, H2 and H3 (Heading)
• Keyword Font Styles
Internal Links
• Keyword in links to internal site pages
• Valid internal links
• Efficient linking
External / Outgoing Links
• Quality Links
• Inspecting your Links
• Title and Description
• Limit number of links on a page
Incoming Links (backlinks)
• Quality of Referrer
• Trend of link popularity
• Anchor Text
• Age of Link
• Number of Outgoing Links on Referrer Page
• Position of Link
• Trusted Websites
• JavaScript/Flash Links
On-Page Factors
• Home Page
• Over optimization penalty (OOP)
• Getting Reported
• File Size
• Freshness of Pages
• Frequency of Updates
• Site Age
• Dynamic Pages
• Texts inside Images
• Excess JavaScript
• Inline Frames and Frames
• Hidden links / texts
• Cloaking
• Duplicate content
• Understandable Content
Off-Page Factors
• Traffic Buying / Link Schemes
• A minimum of one backlink
• Buying Links
• Server IP Address
• Links from bad websites
• Server Reliability and Uptime
User Activity
• Search Engine Traffic
• Click through Rate (CTR)
• Time spent on page
• Monitoring Bookmarks
• Leaving the Website
Gathering Links
• Collecting Links
• Unique Content
• Articles
• Press Release
• Forums / Guest books / Blogs
• Sponsoring
• Directories
• Link Exchange
On top of the factors above, I have used a term crawling there. I would like to give a brief introduction to crawling
Crawling, or web crawling is the method search engines use to create an index of the web. Pages are downloaded by an automated service, called a robot or a spider, and processed by the search engine to allow fast centralized searching. When a search engine downloads a page it generally looks at the hyperlinks on that page and processes them based on a set of policies.
Conclusion
In this article I have given an overview of SEO to you, we can achieve top ranking on search engines with continuous efforts and improving our website contents, layout and related material. I have listed all the techniques you can adopt these techniques to optimize your website and getting top ranked. I will describe each topic in detail in my coming articles.
“Mastering PPC: A Comprehensive Guide to SEO Success”
Ranking high in Google’s search results can have a phenomenal impact on the success of your business.
You can either engage the expertise of a Search Engine Optimisation company, or if you have the time, there are some changes you can make to your website yourself.
Step 1: Keyword Research
What keywords do you think your customers would type in to search for your products or services? A keyword can be one word (e.g. “optimisation”), but multiple keywords or keyword phrases are usually preferred, because they are more specific and more likely to be what your customers are looking for (eg. “ Search Engine Optimisation Australia”).
Write down as many as you can think of. Brainstorm with your team. Think of alternative words. Consider geographical phrases if they are important to your customer (e.g. “house cleaning Hornsby”). Also, get some ideas from your competitors’ websites. Try to make a list of 20-30 keyword phrases.
Choose the two keyword phrases you think would be searched for the most. But also remember, the more competition there is for a keyword, the harder it is to achieve top rankings. If you want to rank high in Google for the keyword “insurance”, you have a very long journey ahead. So try your best to select two keyword phrases that are the most relevant to you business but that are not vague nor competitive. It’s a good idea to have 2 or 3 words in each phrase (e.g. “wedding catering services”)
Once you’ve selected your two best keyword phrases the next step shows you how to make some improvements to your home page.
Step 2: Web Copy
Web copy refers to all the words or text on your website. Because content is king in the world of search engines, your keyword phrases need to be placed strategically on your webpage to convince Google that your content is highly relevant to those keywords. The more prominent they are, the better. (Keep in mind that as important as search engines are, customers come first, so make sure your copy also reads well.)
Here’s how you can increase each keyword’s prominence:
• Place your keywords in headings, preferably at the beginning of the heading;
• Include keywords towards the top of the page;
• Bold or italicise keywords where appropriate;
• Instead of having a link to another page that says “Click here to read more “, reword it to include your keywords, e.g. “Read more about our seo copywriting Services“.
An important tip is to also include these keywords in your HTML “title tag”. Use your content management system to make these changes yourself, or perhaps ask your web developer to do it if you’re unsure how.
Once you have fine-tuned your home page, consider adding new content, such as detailed descriptions of what you offer, FAQs and informative articles about your products and services. (If you don’t want to write these yourself, they can be located for free on the internet – do a search for “articles directory”).
It’s also good to bear in mind that search engines can only read text, not pictures. Often web developers embed words in images to look better for website visitors or use Flash for animation, but this is a major impediment to search engines.
Step 3: Linking
Each link from another website to your website (not from your website) is considered by search engines as a vote of popularity for your business and will improve your rankings.
But it is the quality, not quantity, of the links that is crucial. The other websites should be relevant to your industry, and preferably highly regarded themselves. Ten quality links count far more than 500 links from arbitrary websites. In the same way your personal business network can have a significant impact on the success of your business, so too the online network you build on the internet.
Brainstorm all the relevant websites that could link to you, such as non-competing companies, and industry bodies and organisations. Write a friendly email to each describing the benefit their visitors would get in knowing about your business, and request them to create a link to your website. Most people will not respond first time round, so a follow-up phone call is usually required.
How do I monitor my results?
Monitor your rankings in Google over the next few months by typing your chosen keywords into the search box, and recording your ranking. Also look at your hosting reports to understand what search terms your visitors are using to find your website.
The above process can be also be repeated for each page of your website. Remember to keep updating your content, and continually increase the number of links to your website.
As you see your rankings climb you should see a corresponding increase in web traffic and a substantial increase in sales enquiries. Be sure to record the source of your customer enquiries, so you can measure the success of your marketing efforts.
Remember, if you measure it, you can improve it.
Summary:
Ranking high in Google’s search results can have a phenomenal impact on the success of your business.
You can either engage the expertise of a Search Engine Optimisation company, or if you have the time, there are some changes you can make to your website yourself.
