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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Are you planning to launch a website? For many of you it might be the first one. The planning process and implementation of a website is tough and easy both, it is easy if you know how to do it right and very tough if you don’t. Do not get dishearten if you are new, with regular updating and sharpening your skills and with “the will power to achieve success”, you can surely become successful in making money online.

Today we will discuss some points about a new website from planning to implementation phase.

Know your audience

First of all know your audience, try to get a feel of the audience and do brainstorming about the problems and need of the niche you are going to enter. For this purpose visit various blogs related to your subject, visit different forums and try to find out what kind of questions people are asking and what the topics of hot discussion on the forums are. Visit yahoo answers and find out the questions related to your topic. In this way you will get and idea about the potential of the niche as well as you will know the topics to concentrate on while preparing the content.

Niche Research and Arranging for content:

I am a strong supporter of ezinearticles. There is a reason behind it, after doing initial research, visit ezinearticles.com and find out the articles people are submitting on your topic, then figure out what type of promotions people are doing. It is very easy to find just click the link in the author’s bio section. There are two possibilities, a lot of ezine marketers just do a simple domain redirect to the merchant’s sales page and others try to attract visitors to their own landing page with preselling content and then funnel them through their affiliate links to the merchant’s website. In this way you can find out either there is potential in the market or not. If there are many authors promoting articles on your topic then the niche must be profitable. An another way to find out the profitability of a niche is, to find out different Adwords ads in Google search results and ads in search result pages of Yahoo, if there are many advertisers, it is a strong signal of the profitability of the niche.

Now back to ezinearticles, find out the keywords on which the writers are publishing their articles, just see the page source and you can easily find out the keywords. Just pick up one author and find all the keywords on which the author is publishing the content, in this way you will get lot of keywords to start with your website.

Organizing content:

Organize content in a way that the flow of the information seems natural, the best way to do this is to arrange the content in a silo structure (a detailed discussion on this topic in coming posts).

The organization of the content must be in a logical way, avoid clumsy language and try to keep it simple, which can be understood by an average reader.

Prepare content in such a way that it interacts with the audience, try to find out that after reading an article what would be the mindset of the reader , whether they need some more information or they just want to buy services or products you are offering. In this way you can easily generate interesting content which not only provide value to the readers but also fetch more rewards for you.

For more information on this topic read testing and dominating a niche using SEO and PPC

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What is a market or niche?

According to wikipedia “A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing on; Therefore the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact.”

In short a niche can be defined as a smaller segment of a market which is super targeted around a specific topic.

For an example in the health industry or market “acne” or “anxiety” is niche markets.

There is a lot of confusion when it comes to the definition of niche. Everyone has own understanding and definition.

But I like to call an area as “market” and a specific area in the market as niche.

Niche and micro niche

A niche is a specific are of a market on which product or services are focused, as defined above and micro niche is an another focused area in the specified niche.

For an example “health” is a market and “weight loss” is a niche. Now more specific areas in the niche weight loss is “weight loss using pills”, “weight loss using exercise”, “weight loss using yoga” and more are micro niches.

Hope this would clear the difference.

Finding a Market and Niche

For finding a market for affiliate marketing there are some very good places from where you can collect ideas. Think about your hobbies and problems you or any of your known people has and try to research on the topic. Like someone has problem of “weeds in his lawn” or “pest control” etc.

There are many resources on the internet where you can find different ideas for you niche website.

Dmoz.org

Dmoz is the largest open directory project on the internet, apart from serving as a directory it can also be used for niche research. Delve deeper into the categories and you will find many.

Just open Dmoz and start your research, I am sure you will find several niches; some of them may be even untouched.

Shopping.com

Shopping.com is one of the largest shopping websites over internet. You can just surf it and find the hot keyword ideas.

Amazon
The largest seller of books and nearly every physical item on the internet. This is a very good resource for finding a niche, just browse the best sellers section and you can find gold

Ebay

I think nearly everyone is familiar with ebay.com, you can find out the hottest selling stuff at eBay by visiting pulse.ebay.com

EzineArticles

EzineArticles is the largest article directory on internet, you can use it for your bum marketing campaigns, for finding ideas related to a topic. More than that you can find out different niches using it and in most cases the niches would be profitable because internet marketers and others are already using it for their campaigns

Google Trends and Google Insight Search

Google hot trends and Google insight search are very great places where you can find trends over time and if done properly finding good keywords for CPA and affiliate campaigns is not tough. Just use your mind

Testing a Market and Keyword Research

Before you jump to any conclusion and finalize your keywords, just try to find out the need of your targeted audience. Visit different forums related to your niche, read articles and blogs to delve deeper in your niche. For reading more about this topic, visit my previous posts about keyword research here:

Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path

Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path Part 2

Using PPC to Test a Market

After you have finalized your keywords and ready to shoot your campaigns, build your landing pages and try to test a market using PPC. In this way you will find out whether the market has the potential. Do keywords level tracking and you will find out the keywords which trigger sales. After you have found sales keywords or gold keywords, build more pages; invest in SEO for long term profits.

But be cautious if you are new to the PPC market, because a little mistake can ruin your pockets.

Using SEO for Growth and Long Term Business

You cannot solely depend on PPC on a long term, so invest in SEO for long term profits. Build more pages using your gold keywords, use variations and always try to test new keywords. Rinse and repeat your action and you can have long term profits.

What do you all think in this regard. Have i missed something, please provide your feedback.

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This post is the second part of my post related to keyword research, you can read the first post here at: Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path

When it comes to keyword research and selection, there are numerous points which should always be kept in mind during the process because keyword research is the most important part of developing an online business and choosing wrong keywords might ruin all your efforts. So always invest reasonable amount of time for finding the right keywords to start with. 

Long Tail Vs Short Tail Keywords:

Short tail keywords are those keywords, which represent a niche (If you are new to internet marketing, read as “market” for the sake of simplicity). While long tails are those which specify a little deeper in the concerned niche or market. For an example, if we talk about digital camera niche then keyword like “Digital camera” is a broad keyword (read as short tail) and “Kodak digital camera 9 MP” or “Cannon digital camera DX665” are long tail keywords.

Hope you got it.

If we consider commerciability in our research there are two types of keywords.

1. Research Keywords
2. Buying keywords or Money Keywords

For an example, if someone is searching for “digital camera”, might be the surfer is doing some research on digital cameras and not in buying mood, so the probability of sales is low, on the other hand if someone searches for “Cannon digital camera 9 MP DXS-635”, as we can see, this search is for a particular product and the probability of sale is much higher than the previous one. So knowing about right keywords is must because optimizing or doing PPC for wrong keywords will not return anything. Keeping track of your campaigns is also necessary both for SEO and PPC.

But this doesn’t conclude that one should not target broad keywords. Actually the whole game depends upon the budget and goals. If you have a handsome budget you can easily go for keywords like “credit cards”, but if you do not have much to spend , start with long tails(like “HSBC bank credit card London”) and then as time passes , invest more to gain results for short tails

Wide Vs Deep Keywords

Wide keywords refer to all the keywords related to a niche just like, if we talk about “dog training”, keywords like:

dogs training
dog training course
dog obedience training
dog training courses
dog training schools
dog training classes
dog training equipment
dog training class
dog training information
dog training collars
dog training collar
dog agility training

are called as wide keywords as it specifies the keywords related to dog training..

Now for finding deep keywords we need to do some brainstorming. Not only in dog training niche, this is true for all niches, just find different characteristics of the situation or problem. For our dog training example, just try to find out the problems your dog has for which you want to get it trained.

Some common problems are biting, excessive jumping and barking, digging. Apart from this we can also find out different dog breeds like Doberman, Alsatian, German shepherd, pug etc and then prepare our deep keyword list.

Stop dog digging
Stop dog jumping
Stop dog biting
Stop my dog from biting

————————————

Stop Doberman from digging
Stop German shepherd from biting

————————————

German shepherd agility training
Doberman obedience training

————————————

And many more.

Are Keyword Tools Helpful?

The answer is YES and NO. They are indeed helpful if you really know how to use them properly and extract the most from it. If you don’t know to use them properly, you might end up with a wrong keyword list. In my opinion Google keyword research tool and search based keyword tool are best. In addition you can also use Traffic Travis (It has both free and paid versions, but free version is capable enough to extract optimum results).

OK OK I got it all, now tell me, Where to start?

Good now you are ready to find your keywords and start your online business.

Ok I am just opening Google keyword tool, I have extracted my keywords…..

Hey Wait… Again you are missing something…

Before you start your keyword research with Keyword Tool External, Traffic Travis or some other tool, I have a suggestion for you.

Visit different forums and blogs in your niche and try to find out what people are talking and searching about and what are the basic problems of the audience you are going to face and attend ?. I think you got the point.

Always keep in mind if you have the solution of a problem and if you can present it to your niche properly then you are going to sustain in the business. So just spy your market and try to find out the problems and the solutions available and then decide to do things in a different way and you will be the boss of the niche.

Using Forums and Yahoo Answers

Just fireup Google and type “your main keyword” forums.

Like “dog training” forums

You now have a list of several forums, just enter them and try to find out the topics which the members are talking about and in this way you will have an idea of the problems related to the niche. After you have noted down all these things, you are ready to prepare your keyword list.

There is one more effective way, use Yahoo Answers. This is a very good platform to know about your niche. I myself use Yahoo Answers extensively for finding keywords for niche I wish to enter and know nothing about.

Yahoo Answers

Using Google Wonder wheel and suggest for finding right keywords

You might have noticed Google’s new tool, wonderwheel. It’s a very good tool for conducting keyword research and SILOING. I would try to post about silo, its effect on SEO and how to SILO a website in coming days. Google is doing a very good job by providing more effective tools for us webmasters. You now have options to search forums, images, timeline which relates to trends (they provide timeline data from 1800 AD, I do not know whether Larry Page or Sergey Brin were there back in 1800 AD   ), shopping results , videos etc at one place.

In my opinion this is the right process from doing keyword research to finally establishing a successful online business

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