It seems that infolinks really wants to expand their business and for the purpose they are luring more publishers to join them along with their existing publishers with offering several incentives.

Some times ago they lowered their minimum payout to $50 from $100 for all form of payments, they offered their publishers with Payoneer prepaid card.

Now they have introduced WordPress plugin for their publishers, which will make it easier to integrate infolinks code in WordPress powered blog. WordPress is the most popular CMS used today by bloggers.  However even today it is not hard to implement their ad code but this will make it a lot easier for the persons who are not accustomed to HTML or PHP and find it hard to edit codes.

This plugin works as any other WP plugin, just upload, activate and configure and that’s all.

If you are infolinks publisher, you can download this plugin from here and befit from this new initiative.

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Are you a Kontera Publisher? Yes Right the very network which pays pennies for per click. In other words you can say Kontera is a PPC Network. You got it right, but here PPC doesn’t mean Pay Per Click, it means Pennies Per Click, which it pays to its publishers.

Never mind, there is very good news for all Kontera Publishers, the company has reduced the minimum payout threshold to $50 from $100.

I remember my first payment from Kontera; it took me around 8 months to get the first check from them. Now it can be done in few months

Now back to their announcement, from May 3^rd 2010, they have lowered their minimum payment threshold to $50 and it will be applicable across all payment methods including Paypal, wire Transfer or ACH and Check payments.

There is no change in payment terms, it is still net 30, means if you reach the threshold limit in May you will get your payment on June 1^st.

How to change the minimum payout:

1. Log in to your Publisher Center (as a reminder, your username is your email address)

2. Choose the “My Account” Tab

3. Choose the “Payment Method” page from the top navigation bar

4. Select your Payment Type from the drop-down menu

5. Type “50″ into the entry field for Minimum Payout

6. Hit “Submit”

But keep in mind to change the minimum payment amount details before 15^th of the month otherwise it would be changed in the next payment cycle.

Hope you all will be benefited with this news, and happy Kontera Publishing.

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Spying and intruding into other’s privacy is a very bad habit and punishable by law in many states… but it is vital as well as necessary for your online business.

What does it mean by spying your competitors?

As we all know that to reach at the top there are two ways. First one is to follow the basics, input your hard work and wait for the time when you come at the top. Second way is to spy on those who are already at the top, find out their strategy and implement the same for your business but using better tactics.

Hard work and persistence is no doubt a sure shot way to get success and patience is virtue we all know. But if you ask me which route I will take. I will surely take the second one because life is very short and I cannot give 3, 4 years to visualize my success.

For all of you who are interested in the latter one, today I will discuss some points on how to spy your competitor and reverse engineer their strategy and get to position number one on the organic search( especially Google), overthrowing them out of the game.

Can you think what would be the value of keyword “weight loss” or “car insurance” at the first position of Google?

Let’s check… for the purpose I am using www.semrush.com

Let us take two examples, fist one is “weight loss”, if we check Google the number 1 rank for this keyword goes to website www.webmd.com , now check it in Semrush.

We get the following data. The average CPC for keyword weight loss is $2.63 and the search volume is 450k. Now do the simple math 450k x $2.63. According to Semrush the website is getting search engine traffic worth $15584k.

Our second example is “car insurance”. While I was checking the ranking I got www.progressive.com on number 1, now checking it with Semrush, it is receiving organic traffic worth $24967k.

The data from Semrush may not be perfect, but if we assume only 10% of the figures, you can easily calculate what the worth of being number 1 on Google is.

So I am quite impressed with your argument… now which things I would like to spy on?

Basically you would like to spy on keywords they are ranking organically, keywords they are using for PPC, their daily ads budget, sites which are linking to your competitor,

Organic keywords: find out the keywords for which your competitor is ranking organically and the traffic those keywords attract. After analyzing these keywords you can plan your long time strategy for SEO, starting with the long tail keywords of main phrases and gradually using the short tails.

PPC Keywords: The basic idea behind finding the paid keywords is if they are paying consistently for some keywords to appear on paid result then those keywords must be converting for them. After you compile the list of their paid keywords, view their landing pages. Then plan your strategy using those converting keywords and their long tail phrases. Design your landing page better than them and you will surely hit a jackpot. Also look their daily PPC budget, the more the better.

Backlinks: Find out how many backlinks your competitor have, which sites are linking then and what the anchor texts are used in their backlinks. For this purpose you can use www.backlinkwatch.com and you will know the anchor text of the backlinks, their PR and whether they are follow or Nofollow. You can also use Yahoo Site Explorer for getting the backlinks data for any website. Never depend on the Google backlinks for a website, as Google displays numbers much less than the actual.

Other online tools you can use:

Keyword spy

Spyfu

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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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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.

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