According to comScore Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, Google is the leader in US search market. In a search release it states that Americans conducted 14.5 billion core searches in February 2010, with Google Sites accounting for 65.5 percent search market share.

The share of top 5 search engines is as follows: (Total US searches performed in home, work and university locations)

• Google Sites – 65.5%
• Yahoo! Sites – 16.8%
• Microsoft Sites – 11.5%
• Ask Network – 3.7%
• AOL LLC – 2.5%

Popularity: 4% [?]

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…

Popularity: 6% [?]

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.

Popularity: 7% [?]

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.

Popularity: 7% [?]

This post is in continuation with my previous posts on off page search engine optimization. If you are new here you can read those posts here at: Off Page Elements: Increasing your Web Visibility and Reach Part 1, Off Page Elements: Using Articles and Blogs

Today in this post we will talk about benefits of link building, blog comments and the various ways to accomplish the task.

First we shall have a little discussion about various types of links we can have for our website and easy tips and tricks, both manual and automated to build them.

Types of Links:

Basically links are categorized on the basis how they propagate link juice to a web page in consideration. Links or backlinks are mainly of three types one way, two way or reciprocal and three way links.

One way Link:

One way link, commonly known as backlinks is a link which is pointed to web page with out the page linking back to it. For an example if there are two web pages A and B, and if A links to webpage B but it does not links back to it. These types of links are known as one way link. These links are most powerful and beneficial for boosting search engine rankings and page rank.

Two Way or Reciprocal Links:

When two web pages link each other mutually, these types of links are called two way or reciprocal backlinks and the process is known as link exchange. There are many automated ways by which this process can be done but the quality of the link they provide are of very less importance. High quality two way links can be made by finding useful websites related to your website topic and calling or emailing the webmasters for mutual link exchange.

Three way Backlinks:

Many a times when we contact any webmaster for link exchange, they give us a proposal of three way link exchange in reply. Suppose we have two websites one related to jewelry and second to mobile phones and the webmaster in consideration also has the same situation, he has one related to diamonds and other with electronic gadgets. So he links us from his diamond website to our jewelry website and we link from our mobile phones website to his electronic gadget website or vice versa, in this way making a triangular linking pattern. This way of links is known as three way linking. If the websites involved in the link exchange are hosted on different IP addresses, the links are treated as one way links in the eyes in the eyes of search engines, thus giving ranking boost in the search engine result pages.

Contacting Webmasters for Link exchanges:

The right way of doing link exchange starts with doing emails to the webmasters of relevant websites. For finding relevant websites you can use Google. Just type “your keywords” add your link, “your keywords” add your url. In this way you can find relevant web pages for doing link exchanges.

How to write emails:

Start with a right salutation and write a personalized note. While finding the contact details, try to find out the names, so that you can personalize the note to them. Explain them the reason of contacting them, many of them do not know the profit of doing link exchange, so explain them a little about the profits of doing link exchange not only regarding search engine but also in reference of the website visitors. Explain to them how their visitors will be benefited by visiting your website. In this way, you will increase your chances of positive response and successful link exchange.

Spying your competitors:

Find the backlinks your competitors have. Google does not show all the backlinks of a website. So use yahoo for this purpose.

Try to find out all the websites which are linking to your competitors and find ways to get links from same website. Just do the same they are doing but do better than them. If they are getting good rankings, it shows that they are doing the things right, so copy their strategy and you will get good return on your investment, in the form of good rankings and traffic.

Using Blog Commenting:

Blog commenting is an easy and effective way of building one way backlinks to your website. Find relevant blogs using Google either using Google blog search or doing the following query:

“your keywords” inurl:blog

Find relevant blogs and contribute valuable comments, but keep in mind DO NOT SPAM. Read the post and collect some idea to write comment, most of the people just write “great post” and similar garbage. Please do not use such things, contribute value to the post. This will not only help in adding value to the post but also increase the chances of your post to be published.

Some more posts about off page optimization in coming posts. See you soon. Until then implement the strategies taught in this blog and you will see good rankings for your keywords in the search engines.

Popularity: 14% [?]