Internet marketing in simple sense is the process of selling goods or services online using the medium of internet. Affiliate marketer is the middleman between the vendor of the services and the buyer.

So what do you think an affiliate marketer does in the whole process and what are the basic points to adhere in the process?

User or Buyer mindset: Have you ever thought what is in a buyer’s mind when he searches for any information online.

Basically a user search solutions for his problem. The problem ranges from “buying an engagement rings” for his loved one, buying a car insurance to finding solutions for his snoring. As there are many problems and needs hence the solution. This very phenomenon has given birth to number of info products and services marketed online.

So as an affiliate marketer, your first and the very important role is to find out the mindset of the people in your niche. If you have gained insight then half the battle is won.

From my experience I am presenting some points which must be followed irrespective of niche and the product you are selling (for which you are an affiliate)

Provide correct information: Always try to provide correct, accurate and to the point information to your users without bluffing. Do not mislead them as it will harm your authority over subject and you will loose them forever. If you are presenting any contradictory fact, you must provide the proof for the same. For an example we all know that AIDS is incurable, if you make any contradictory statement on this, you must give them proof from any authority over the subject. Users are generally a little aware on the topics they are searching about and if you present them wrong information, it will give a bad impression about you.

Always avoid sub-standard content and present them with high quality content. Do not always stick to textual content. Create content in a form (like video, audio, slide show etc) which is easy understandable and accessible to your niche users. It is better to create a 5 minute high quality video that creating a 50 page textual content.

Solving problems and Preselling: Basically people need solution for their problems, and your duty as an affiliate marketer is to solve them by presenting them with high quality relevant information and products. You have to instill confidence in them that their problem is solvable, when you have done this the next step is to present them the product and make them believe that it is the best solution available

As an affiliate marketer you are not doing any direct sale instead you do preselling, that is to warm up the visitor for purchasing your affiliate product and preselling can be done only by following the steps above.

Instill confidence, solve problems, Presell

Never Hardsell: Never try to hardsell because people like to choose and not to be forced in their buying decisions. So Presell and not hard sell. If you become successful in gaining confidence of your users you will never need to do it. If they are convinced that their problems can be solved and the product you are referring is the best one for the purpose you will ultimately make a sale.

So friends these are the points which are applicable for every niche and you must modify your mindset in the way to play a long game in affiliate marketing.

What are other points in your opinion which must be followed? Post here for all of us to know.

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Hello all my fellow SEOs, internet and affiliate marketers today I am going to discuss a very important and not only important but the basic idea after why we became or want to become internet marketers. This post seems to be little off topic but these are the basic points which makes a way for affiliate marketing.

But before we start on the topic let us have a look on a story of a young man named Joe. The fact which makes the story even more interesting is that Joe belongs to a middle class average Indian family and lives in a metropolitan city, say Delhi. His family is educated, and belongs to service class who are dedicated slaves of 9 to 6 rat race.

As Joe grows up in an environment where there is stiff competition and to overtake everyone in life is the only aim whether it is study or games.

His parents have a very high expectation from him that he will excel in studies and sports as well.

He has been brought up in an environment, where he watch his parents working 9 to 6 everyday and do not have any time for each other neither for him.

And as time passes some facts and points make a permanent room in his mind and soul. Some bulging points would be:

1. The life of an average person is very tough and you have to fight everyday to survive.
2. The work for a middle class family born boy is to grow up with good education and then find a good job to maintain social and financial status.
3. Work for full life until the age of retirement and then spend your life doing meditation and Pooja & Bhajans (service of lord)

Sounds familiar? Now who is Joe? I am Joe and you are Joe and every common man is Joe.

The story of an average American or anyone in developed countries might be slightly different but not much. The basics though which we all have is to study and do a full time job to gain social and financial stability.

So what are your reasons to start with internet marketing? Crossing all these barriers, find a new person in you; discover a new world through new vision.

There might be many reasons, from independence to flexibility of work or making more money or aiding your existing one, and I would love if you will share it with us.

Now comes the point what were the reasons behind my entry in the fascinating cyber world and internet marketing.

Freedom: The first and foremost reason for my entry into internet marketing is freedom. Freedom from whom – freedom from the mentality of 9 to 5 slavery. When I think what my life in real is. I wake up in the morning and start preparing to go office, whole day I work for someone else who pays me salary, in other words I am trading my time for money. I have 9 hour job, adding the time of commuting around 2 hours and the time to prepare myself physically and mentally before and after office around 3 hours. In total I spend around 14 to 15 hours a day for making a living from my full time job. I am not including the emotional stress and wear out I face in commuting, specially on the roads of New Delhi, where you will get a red light at every kilometer and jams every second one.

So I need to free my self from this time trading and rat race and I want to spend my time in a more meaningful manner.

More Free time: This is the thing which I need more badly than money. Not only I but I am confident that every human being and those who knows that a day only has 24 hours and a year only 365 days, need more free time to spend with his family or with their hobby. But if we want to achieve it with the traditional way of making a living (that is a full time job of 9 to 6) it seems an impossible task. I do not remember whether I took a week long vacation with my family in the last 3 years. So you need any other way (legally) and internet marketing is the best opinion, where you can do everything and all you need is a computer and internet connection.

More Money: I never thought that I can earn more money investing same time online (we all know time is money ) than in my regular job until I started myself in online marketing. The average salary of a highly skilled person with an experience of more than 5 years is around Rs. 2500 per day for a 14 hour job(with lot of tension: 14 hours = 9 hours job+ 2 hours in commuting+ 3 hours in other stuff related to my job). That barely converts to rupees 2500/14= 178 per hour (means merely $4 per hour, much less the money a pizza delivery boy in the US earns per hour)

So if done right, internet marketing can pay you 1000 times more than this average earning and without any hassle and pain which you face every day in your regular jobs.

So my second concern was more money, I do not want to open a SWISS bank account but I need more…. ( Yeh Dil Maange More… aaha … )

Lavish lifestyle: Just think of a life when you wake up in the morning after taking your full sleep and fresh eyes and no red lines in your eyes as you always did. After doing all usual stuff take your breakfast and then enter your home office which only takes a minute or two to reach. You chose your working hours and you never need anyone’s agreement on this. There is no one to complain that you are late and ask that you need to change your habits of regularity. You are your own boss and you can decide your working hours.

Just think of it and you will get immense pleasure, just thinking about it and if it becomes reality and what will happen if it becomes reality

Residual Income: Have you ever though how long can you trade your time for money, up to the age of 50, 60 or more …. OK Good and what after that. Some intelligent and money savers, save a large part of their income in various investment schemes for their retirement.

But a very simple question, if you spend Rs. 20k today to maintain your life style, keeping the present inflation and other factors in mind you will need at least Rs. 200k a month for maintaining the same lifestyle after 30 years.

So the fact is that we can never work in the same way forever. I do not have such physical, mental and spiritual strength to work for such as long time and I do not know about yours? Do you have it?

So what we need – residual income, means autopilot income, where you invest you time, money and intelligence one time and encash it for a long time and sometimes forever.

And internet marketing is the only way by which you can get residual income.

So friends these were the reasons why I chose internet marketing and I am confident that I will achieve all the points which I need for a happy life with the help of the very internet marketing…

I hope you all would like this post.

What are your reasons to join the internet marketing world? Post here and it will become an inspiration for others…

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This is third and final part of the series 5 Tools you need for Effective Affiliate Marketing. if you are new here and missed previous posts, you can read it here at: 5 Tools you need for Effective Affiliate Marketing-1, 5 Tools you need for Effective Affiliate Marketing-2

Verified and Opted Email List: it is a popular saying in the internet marketing world “The money is in the list”, and it is quite true. If you are not building your list then you are loosing a lot of money, as well as targeted buyers forever.

Why list building is Essential: It is an evident truth that the chance of sale in the first visit is very low and mostly people buy in their third or fourth visit, so if you have to remain in internet business for long, you surely need a list. If you build an opted and verified list, you know for sure the requirement of the person on the list.

Suppose you are selling some dog training ebook and gradually you also build your list, you can sell related products to them later, like some dog training videos or some equipment. The conversion rate is always higher with these lists because you know their requirement before hand.

Now I know for sure that a question started buzzing in your mind. Why will anyone voluntarily provide me his name and email? Your question is right.

As there are NO Free Lunches in the World, you need to offer them something for free and it must be compelling and according to the need of your audience.

For an example if you are selling a dog training related product, you can offer five or six parts mini course for free like “ 5 Parts Mini Course on How to stop your dog from barking”. Free mini series is also an affective tool for promoting your paid product. During your course of sending emails, try to promote your affiliate product in a manner that it doesn’t seems a hard sell, but a value addition to your mini series.

You may feel problem doing the things right, but with time you will find it easy and effective. So start building your list today.

Now for effective responding, you need an effective Autoresponder.

Autoresponder Software: An Autoresponder is software used for sending automated replies and periodic emails.

For an example if someone signs up for your mini series, the Autoresponder will send a verification mail to the given address for confirming the email address, once verified it will then send a welcome email and your series, as configured by you. You can send emails periodically with its help.

There are many Autoresponder available in the market with different pricing structure and depends on the size of your list, but my personal choice is Aweber.

Mini Series for Follow Up: After the users have signed up for your mini email series, now you need content to follow up with them.

Where to arrange content- you can write the content for your mini series your self. If you are unable to do so for whatever reason, you can hire a content writer for the same.

But please make sure the content must be of very high quality.

In your follow up content do not try to become very elaborative, instead provide them information in such a manner that it increases their curiosity for having more. In other words the mini series will warm up the visitor to purchase your affiliate product. So prepare your content in the same manner.

Tracking Tools: Last but not the least you need very efficient tracking for all activity in your affiliate project.

Which data you need to know about your affiliate project?

1. From where is the traffic coming from?
2. Which content is attracting most of the visitors?
3. What is the bounce rate?
4. How much time users are spending on your website.
5. Top exit pages
6. If you are getting organic traffic, which keywords are bringing most of the traffic?

There are lots of more point you need to know, but the above points are very necessary for tweaking your campaign either it is optimizing your website or changing header or images.

If you are bringing in paid traffic by various PPC engines, you need to track your activity at keyword level. Which keywords are bringing in most of the traffic and which keywords are generating sales, so that you can dump your non performing keywords and boost your sales keywords? You also need to test your ads and landing pages for optimum performance

There are lots of tracking tools available in market both paid and free. But Google Analytics is best in my opinion. First of all it is free and you can get very in depth data about your visitors and website. In addition you can create different filters for more.

Hope this information will help in your affiliate marketing endeavor. What do you think, do you need to read more on some specific topics. Please post here.

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This is the second part of series 5 Tools you need for Effective Affiliate Marketing, if you are new here, you can read the first part here at: 5 Tools you need for Effective Affiliate Marketing-1

Cloaking: you should know the importance of clocking… oh …oh… oh, sorry I thought you know about everything.

Let’s know what is cloaking? Cloaking is the word first used in the world of search engine optimization. It is a black hat SEO practice in which search engine bots and real world visitors are presented with different copies of a same website or webpage. The reason behind this was to betray search engines to gain higher rankings for some related keywords.

Now the question arises why that was done. Actually in olden days (not so old, just like 3, 4 years ago) search engines doesn’t had very sophisticated algorithms and which can be easily re-engineered to gain undeserved profit by some black hat marketers.

Some of the factors were keyword density, use of the specific keyword in the title tags, h1 tags etc. At that time there were fewer variables which were considered for ranking of a webpage. But as time passed search engines became smarter (black hat marketers too) and now these techniques doesn’t work. (And it should not because it was being happily appreciating wrong doers.) And the search engine algorithm has become much smarter and advance evaluating hundreds of factors while ranking any webpage.

Now when we talk about cloaking in affiliate marketing or affiliate links clocking, it is not related with search engines and something other than betraying however the reason behind is the same.

Actually the affiliate links are something like carrying a lot of variables, thus making it a mess. It does not give clear information where it is going to lead the clicker.

Example of affiliate links:

http://www.somewebsite.com/index.php?someid=some-numerical-value?sid=some-alphanumeric-value?trackid=some-numerical-value

For an example like an affiliate link of ClickBank:

http://AFFILIATE.VENDOR.hop.clickbank.net

It lefts the visitor in an illusion so as where are they going after clicking that link, and in this way the click through rate (in an easy word the chances the link will be clicked) becomes very less.

So we cloak the link to something meaningful, at least in the eyes of the visitors. Like

http://www.yourwebsite.com/go/xyzproduct.html
http://www.yourwebsite.com/go/xyzproduct.php
http://www.yourwebsite.com/recommends/xyzproduct.html
http://www.yourwebsite.com/recommends/xyzproduct.php
http://www.yourwebsite.com/xyzproduct.html
http://www.yourwebsite.com/xyzproduct.php

So it was the first reason which was user connected. Now there is second reason and that is affiliate commission theft.

Some users, who visit the affiliate website, eventually are also the affiliates of the network of which the website owner is, so they can change the affiliate link to have the commission themselves for the product they are purchasing, that leads to affiliate commission theft.

So cloaking is essential for a successful affiliate marketing campaign.

There are several ways by which cloaking can be done. There are several tools and websites available using which cloaking can be done. But the easiest and most effective way is using redirecting script on your own webserver.

You can use HTML, PHP or JavaScript for redirecting visitors to your affiliate links

Redirection with meta refresh tag

Make a page with a name relevant to the product, for an example xyz.html And use the following code in between <head> and </head> tag

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0; url=http://youraffiliatelink”>

Now upload the page to any folder or root of your domain and link your affiliate link to the same.

Like:

http://www.yourdomain.com/xyz.html

and when clicked it will redirect the visitor to the affiliate link. In this way you can hide your affiliate links.

Redirection with JavaScript.

<HEAD>
<SCRIPT language=”JavaScript”>
<!–
window.location=”your affiliate link here”;
//–>
</SCRIPT>
</HEAD>

There is an other way to hide your affiliate link visually:

<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/xyz.html”
onmouseover=”window.status=http://www.yourdomain.com/‘; return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=”; return true;”>Click Here</a>

If you use this code and when the website visitor hover mouse over the link it will not show the affiliate link instead it will show the url which you set in the window status.

This techniques can hide the link visually, means if any one wants to see the actual link, they can do this by viewing page source.

The only problem is if the user has turned off the JavaScript, this code may not work properly.

Redirection with PHP

<?
header(”Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/xyz.html“);
?>

How to add and use the redirect code:

Make a simple html or PHP page and name it related to the product you are promoting.

Like if your are redirecting the clicker to a product named Dreams Come True. Make a page and name it dreamscometrue.html, and upload it to your root folder, so that it makes a url like.

http://www.yourwebsite.com/dreamcomestrue.html

Now use the appropriate redirection code in the dreamscometrue.html page. I personally use and prefer JavaScript redirection. So I will write something like:

<HEAD>

<SCRIPT>

<!–

window.location=”your affiliate link here”;

//–>

</SCRIPT>

</HEAD>

Save the page and upload it to the root folder, now wherever you have to insert your affiliate link, use the link http://www.yourwebsite.com/dreamcomestrue.html, and whenever user will click on it, they will be redirected to your affiliate page.

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Affiliate marketing is a very effective and easy way to make money online, if done right and using correct tools. There are many things which should be kept in mind while starting in affiliate marketing. Starting from the beginning choosing right market, choosing right keywords is very essential for establishing and running an effective and profitable campaign.

But the real life condition is over 99% of the marketer starting in affiliate marketing always fail and only gradual step of learning and hit and miss campaigns teach them to run a profitable campaign.

I have also passed the time of frustration and lost a lot of bucks before I learned how to do affiliate marketing effectively and earn profit. My first six campaigns were huge failures and cost me around my two months salary.

But once I passed the learning curve and after learning all the basic steps, now I am in a position of running and earning profit from affiliate campaigns. However I do not consider myself a pro, even now, because you always need to learn from your evens and odds throughout your life.

Now before you step in affiliate marketing business, collect some most important arrows for your affiliate arsenal.

Tested Landing Page: The landing page is a tool to convert your visitor into paying buyers, so it must be tried and tested in both cases whether you are doing PPC or attracting natural traffic from search engine optimization. A landing can change the overall conversion and hence the return on investment (ROI) of a campaign.

There are many factors like images, punch lines, graphics which are tested on the landing pages to get a perfect converting model for a particular campaign.

It is very interesting to note that something working in a particular campaign in a niche may not work in other and only testing can prove which is best landing page for a particular affiliate campaign.

A good landing page is one which can convey your message to your website visitors conveniently and in an effective manner and can convince that they will find the solution of the specific problem for which they have visited your website. The landing page should have specific call to action which specifically advise and guide the visitors to take step.

More in coming post…

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Are you just starting in the internet business world and just going to start your first website or blog?

You have already decided your niche, market and audience and now you need to research keywords for topics to include in your website?

Sounds familiar?

If the answer of the above question is YES, then you must be in the confusion about choosing keywords for starting your new web project.

Most Common Mistakes an IM Newbie Makes:

The most common mistakes which the beginners make while starting their very first project is choosing a highly competitive niche, whose main keywords are very hard to rank. Let’s move forward in the discussion of choosing niches and keywords and what to consider while doing research.

While choosing a niche you should keep the below points in mind

1. Are there good affiliate programs in the niche? the more the better
2. Average payout of the affiliate programs
3. Are there good number of paid results in Google Search ( there must be good number of AdWords advertiser, you can also check Yahoo and Bing Results also)
4. Use Google Trends to analyze about the trends of the main keywords of the niche, Is it stable (is it getting almost similar number of searches for whole year, or is it seasonal)

If you get positive result for all of the above points, it confirms the niche has potential for making good money.

Do not get afraid about the competitiveness of the niche at this point of time. We will discuss about that after a short while.

While doing niche research, the only aim in you mind should be about the profitability of the niche and not about competition, because if any niche is highly profitable, then it will surely have a lot of micro niches, where the competition will not be much higher and can be easily dominated.

For an example “Weight loss” is a very competitive niche and highly profitable too. Now as we know this niche is very profitable (using all the four points we discussed above), we will try to find out smaller niches in this broad niche. If we do a little research there are several smaller niches, like

Weight loss using exercises
Weight loss using yoga
Weight loss using green tea
Weight loss using hypnosis
Weight loss with walking
Weight loss with dieting

And lots more…..

Now find a smaller niche for you and start to delve deeper in it.

Use keyword tools to find more keywords related to your main keyword.

Now visit different forums (you can find them easily by using Google typing “your keyword” forums), Yahoo Answers, AnswerBag etc and try to find out different topics people are discussion.

Now do some more brain storming and try to find out some more relevant keywords.

Hope you got the point

A simple trick to gather more keywords for you niche:

Visit ArticlesBase, for those who are new in internet marketing, it is one of the best article directory which receives a lot of traffic and there are millions of publisher who submit and publish their content daily.

Now search for articles related to the main keyword you decided for your new website and open articles and see the author’s bio box where you will find links which will lead you to the author’s website for which they are doing promotion.

Try to find out which type of promotion they are doing on their website, affiliate marketing, Adsense or something else.

Now come back to the article and see the article tags section and you will find numerous keywords related to that article. Repeat this step for 10 to 15 articles and you will get a bunch of keywords to start with.

After gathering keywords, again use keyword tool to find more.

The key here is, if the person is promoting any affiliate product, they must have done a lot of keyword research in the niche and we can use it for our advantage.

For some persons this trick would seem wrong and unethical, but one point to remember is that we are not stealing anything and these article tags are publicly visible.

So now you got the way to find out some micro niches in highly competitive and profitable niches.

So how many keywords we need to start:

In my opinion you should start with around 50 keywords and further add 30 more in the period of every six months.

As the time will pass, you will have ample content on your website and with proper off page promotion you will gain authority status on the micro niche and completely dominate it.

So start finding your niche keywords today. If you have any question or comment, then please post it here.

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What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing as the name suggest is to sell a product of a vendor as an affiliate and receive a percentage of the profit as commission. In a simpler sense you as an affiliate, sell products of others (commonly known as vendor) and receive a commission on every sale. The percentage of the commission varies, depending on the type of goods or services the vendor is selling.

If you are selling any digital product like software, ebooks then the commission will be high ranging from 45% to 75%. The reason of such a generous commission is the digital natural of the product. The seller does not need to ship any product and the buyer can download it to their computer as soon as they make the purchase. As the product does not need any maintenance, it further reduces the overall cost for the seller and they can offer good commissions to their affiliates.

On the other hand in case of physical goods, the commissions are low ranging from 2% to 10%, because of the maintenance, insurance and shipping cost of the product raises the overall price

What is Pay Per Click advertisement?

Do not misunderstand PPC advertising as denoted here to, advertising in search engines.( As people commonly refer advertising in Google AdWords, Yahoo or MSN as PPC) Here we refer it to the advertisement you can put on your website, from any third party for which you are paid per click basis.

For an example we can take the case of Google Adsense, where they allow publishers to add a snippet of code on their website through which they show ads related to the content and theme of the website. The publisher is paid for the number of legitimate clicks on the ads.

In this form of advertising the publisher needs not to worry about the sales or any other specific conditions (like in case of affiliate and CPA marketing).

Which one is more profitable?

These both types of marketing approach is profitable and depends on number of factors like niche, your website traffic, your web content etc.

If you have a very desperate niche and getting a decent amount of traffic you can chose affiliate marketing, because in desperate niches where visitors are in need of solution of a specific problem, the conversion rate is always higher. So in this case affiliate marketing would be the best option.

If you have a general theme website with lot of content pages and traffic you can try various pay per click advertising from Google, Yahoo, Adbrite, BidVertiser etc. but this does not mean you can not do affiliate marketing here, you can try both at the same time.

Special Requirement for Affiliate Marketing:

There are some general and legal factors which you should always keep in mind in case of affiliate marketing which we will discuss in coming posts.

Liked this post? Please post your comments here and let us know.

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What is marketing and Role of Internet in Marketing!

According to wikipedia.com “Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to market, as in shopping, or going to a market to buy or sell goods or services.”

I am in a no way any research scholar in marketing neither I want to explain it in detail. In my opinion a process before the actual sales starts, that includes knowledge propagation, brand building, creating or funneling a user base. Creating an environment, in which actual sales takes place is called marketing.

These lines may seems confusing to a newbie, but you need not worry much about the theory portion, because it is very necessary that you know more about implementing this practically rather than theory, particularly in the arena of internet marketing.

In coming days we will discuss several aspects related with marketing over internet.

Marketing starts with a product or service available for sale. Be it physical products, digital products or information and counseling.

Reach to millions of people

Some years before United States of America, Canada, United Kingdom, Mexico and Australia and some other developed countries of North and South America and Europe were considered the exclusive avenues for internet marketing and ecommerce, because they had the privilege of high speed internet and other ecommerce infrastructure like online payment processing etc.

But as the electronics and communication is developing at a stormy pace. New markets like India, China, Malaysia, Philippines and other South East Asian countries and some countries in South America are emerging as new avenues for online business. Even internet users in China and India will exceed US in coming few years.

So in this age of global economy, every barrier is broken and internet presents a vast geographical market to the prospective provider or seller. This creates a competition for local providers as well and this profits the prospective buyer or user.

Below are some stats of internet users and internet penetration in relation to the population which will makes the situation a little clearer.

(All figures are of March 2009, unless specified otherwise)

Above statistics will make it clear, and the most exciting fact is this user base will almost become doubled in coming 4 to 5 years.

Now a days, the purchasing power of the average population has increased considerably, in turn available free time reduced

Now people have more money and less time, so they want some solution for their daily chores, from paying bills online to shopping they are trying new medium (of course internet to save their time and efforts)

So in a nutshell we can predict that internet will become the medium for almost 50 to 60 percent of all ecommerce transactions in the known world (I cannot predict for the unknown ones)

Role of Internet in Marketing Part 2 ( Coming Soon)

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