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…

Popularity: 7% [?]

Building a good, professional looking and user friendly website is a tough task and attracting visitors to it is tougher. This is a common thinking in the community engaged in web design, development and promotion. But if some simple core points regarding re usability and presentation are kept in mind you can make the work very simple. We have discussed some points in our previous posts; today we will look into press release distribution, its benefits and some simple techniques to make it effective.

What is a press release?

Generally a press release or news release is a written or recorded statement aimed for news media, announcing some news from a company. The statement has some “news value” like launch of a new product, changes in policy, appointment of a renowned person in key position, merger and acquisition etc. This is an official statement to be published in news media online and offline.

Arranging press conference by companies or government departments is a very good offline example of press release distribution. In these events the company announces some statement which has a value to become news; later those statements are published in news papers or magazines for common person.

Large companies have their own news letters which they print and distribute on monthly or quarterly basis to their customers.

Big companies also have a press release or news section on their corporate websites. They do not distribute their news release through offline media and other press release distribution websites because they have a large user base that can access it easily.

But if we talk about small businesses, distributing press release through different PR directories can be a very good tool for traffic, SEO and brand building.

In a nutshell if you are an owner of a small business and website, press release submission can prove to be very effective for your online campaigns.

How to write an effective press release?

The profit of a press release distribution depends on the value of the news posted and the way it’s being presented. Always keep in mind; people do not take interest in bogus news and offers. So creating a buzz is necessary for proper exposure of your news release.

While writing a press release pick up a long tail, low competition keyword and write an interesting title around it. In this way you will also get SEO value, as the press release is likely to be picked by news search engines, thus giving you lot of traffic.

In addition press release websites themselves attract a lot of traffic and can refer a lot of visitors to your website.

If you are announcing any product or special offer clearly specify the timeline for it. Clearly state the time period for which the offer will remain valid.

Clearly write your contact information, the contact person, phone, mobile and fax number, email and website. Provide as many ways as you can, so that the prospective users can contact you easily.

Frequency of press release submission:

The frequency on which the press release should be distributed depends on your industry and market. Suppose you are in travel industry, you can distribute one or two press release per week in off season days and 4 to 5 press releases in holiday season. If you are in jewelry or gift related industry, you can increase you press release frequency during festive days (like Christmas, thanks giving, valentine’s day etc.)

List of Press release submission websites:

There are millions of press release distribution websites both free and paid. Below is a list of few of them. Use them in your press release distribution and reap the benefits.

betanews

directionsmag

prleap

news.thomasnet

nanotech-now

npr.org

prlog.org

bizeurope

free-press-release

clickpress

downloadjunction

newswiretoday

openpr

pressbox

filecluster

digitalmediaonlineinc

sbwire

1888pressrelease

afreego

sanepr

theopenpress

free-press-release-center

prfree

ukprwire

pressreleasespider

Popularity: 13% [?]

Introduction: There are several ways to build one way and reciprocal links for your website, some of the methods we have discussed earlier. You can read the related post by visiting the links at the end of this post. The methods discussed are conventional methods of link building which SEO’s and link builders are using from a very long time.

For making good money online through pay per click programs or affiliate marketing you need traffic and you need a lot of it because without traffic no is going to click your ads or affiliate links. For attracting traffic either you have to spend money on paid traffic like Google AdWords or you can get free traffic from search engines by using search engine optimization.

The free traffic from the search engines is the best form as you do not need to spend money on it (though you have to spend considerable amount of time for bringing free traffic and time is money). Here comes the concept of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Ranking higher on a search engine especially Google can bring you a lot of quality traffic and it’s free.

For ranking higher for your keywords you need lot of links with relevant websites. Today we will discuss about the concept of link wheel or link loop.

What is a link wheel?

Link wheel is a collection of several web2.0 properties, ranging from 5 to 18, interlinked together and your website, just as shown in the figure.

Here you can see 5 web2.0 properties namely squidoo, weebly, quizilla, wordpress and blogger used to make a link wheel.

How to develop link wheel:

Choose 5 or 6 web2.0 sites to make a link wheel. Here is a list of some of them.

http://squidoo.com

http://wordpress.com

http://livejournal.com

http://blog.com

http://blog.co.uk

http://jimdo.com

http://blogger.com

http://weebly.com

http://blinkweb.com

http://blogsome.com

http://freewebs.com

Take articles of 400 to 500 words and related to your keywords. Start from blogger (or any other) starts posting your article. Make two links one linking to your neighbor (quizilla in this case) and another to your main website. Using two links is just an example and more links can be used as the situation demands.

In the last you can either close the loop or leave it open.

How to use content: Choose topics which are relevant to your main keyword. Let us have one example. Suppose the main keyword of your website is “India hotels”. And it has separate sections for hotels in all important metro cities in India. Then

Choose six keywords related to your main keyword. You can write articles on following topics for your link wheel

India Hotels – Hotels in New Delhi
India Hotels – Hotels in Mumbai
India Hotels – Hotels in Calcutta
India Hotels – Hotels in Chennai
India Hotels – Hotels in Jaipur
India Hotels – Hotels in Pune

These entire articles must be written around keyword India hotels and secondary keyword like Hotels in New Delhi, Hotels in Mumbai etc.

For best results I would like to suggest you to have article of minimum 500 words (for this example) and create three hyperlinks.

One link must link to the relevant section on your website, second link must be for main website and third one should be to the neighbor web2.0 property of your link wheel.

Like in this example (suppose your main website is www.abc.com with relevant sections like www.abc.com/hotels-new-delhi, www.abc.com/hotels-mumbai etc)

The article title “India Hotels- Hotels in New Delhi” shall have 3 links, first one linking to www.abc.com/hotels-new-delhi with anchor text Hotels in New Delhi, second link to the main website www.abc.com and the third link to its neighbor web2.0 page.

I hope this would have cleared the point.

Double Layer Link wheel or Extended Link wheel: Once your link wheel is ready, you can make a link wheel around every single page you used in your main link wheel, thus giving more link juice and power to the web2.0 pages of the main link wheel and in turn giving more boost to your main website.

IP Diversity: do not use a single web2.0 website (like blogger, wordpress etc) twice in one link loop, so that it maintains a good IP diversity and more ranking power for the link wheel.

Promoting Link Wheel: For promoting your link wheel do some blog comments posting, social bookmarking and RSS submission.

You can do it in this manner:

1. 20 Blog comments for each web2.0 page used in the link wheel
2. 20 bookmarking for each web2.0 page used in the link wheel
3. Take the rss from each one of them and do 20 rss submission of each

You can also mix the rss from all of them by using free service like rssmix.com and then post to several rss directories.

So Apply this link wheel strategy and you will see good rankings for you main keywords in few weeks.

I think you would have enjoyed this post. I might have left some points; I would highly appreciate it if you all post it in comments.

You can also post your comments regarding which topics you all would like to read about and I will try my best to post it in coming days

Related Articles:

Off Page Elements: Link Building and Blog Comments

Off Page Elements: Using Articles and Blogs

Off Page Elements: Increasing your Web Visibility and Reach Part 1

Off Page Elements: Alternative ways of link building

Popularity: 26% [?]

If you are new here, you would like to read previous posts on link building here at: Off Page Elements: Increasing your Web Visibility and Reach Part 1,Off Page Elements: Using Articles and Blogs,Off Page Elements: Link Building and Blog Comments

We have discussed several traditional methods of link building, today we will continue with some more discussion on link building and increasing link popularity.

A note about Nofollow: if you are not aware about Nofollow attribute, let us have a little outlook in the background of Nofollow. Google allows you to make any link (both internal and external) un crawlable by using a special tag rel=”Nofollow”.

This tag is used for primarily three purposes.

1. Avoid leaking of link juice to less important pages. Web pages like contact us, privacy statement, shipping and order, cancellation policy have less value in terms of SEO, so Nofollow tags can be used for these pages to avoid leaking of link juice , which in turn will help you to achieve higher page rank for main pages.

2. To stop theme ambiguity. Nofollow tags are very useful in building a theme of a website, in other words its very useful in proper SILOING( discussion in coming posts) of a website. For an example if you are building a website related to wooden furniture and want to base all your keywords on it, you may want to Nofollow all the pages related to basic knowledge of the wooden furniture and all the pages related to fiber and steel furniture.

In this way you can establish a solid theme for your website. A special point to note here is Nofollow tags are only for search engines and not for human visitors these links are still clickable and can funnel traffic.

3. While linking to websites for whom you are not sure about the correctness and authenticity of their information and authority.

What does No follow tags inform to search engines and are they counted in backlinks?

The answers is yes , the links having Nofollow attribute are still crawled by search engines and help in increasing link popularity.

The Nofollow attribute only tells the search engines that the reference, in which the link is used, is not sure. This means if any webpage is linking to another webpage with reference green bags and uses Nofollow attribute, then it marks the search engines that although I am linking this webpage about green bags but I am not sure about the content and authority of the webpage. In other it can be taken as voting a webpage whose authority is not confirmed.

So do not be over concerned about no follow tags in various web2.0 websites and forums. They might not transfer as much link juice but they will help you in increasing your web visibility which will gradually establish your authority in your area.

Popularity: 17% [?]

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: 37% [?]