Author: Shawn C. Mason

More and More people are lured into affiliate marketing and you might be one of them. Indeed, affiliate marketing is one of the most effective means of generating a full-time income through the Internet. It’s a fair deal between the merchandiser and his affiliates as both benefit from each sale materialized.

Like in other kinds of business, a great deal of the profits in affiliate marketing depends on the affiliate’s advertising, promoting and selling strategies. Everyday, as affiliate marketing industry expands, competition heightens as well so an affiliate marketer must be creative enough to employ unique and effective ways to convince potential buyers to purchase or avail of the products and services offered.

Compared to traditional advertising practices, affiliate programs are more effective, risk-free and cost-efficient. But why do many people still fail in affiliate marketing? There are a lot of reasons and a lot of areas in the program to look into. The most critical aspect in the affiliate program is advertising.

Many affiliate marketers fail in this aspect because they lack hard work, which is the most important thing in affiliate marketing and in all other kinds of business as well. Although it pays to be lucky, you cannot merely rely on it.

Affiliate marketing isn’t as simple as directing customers to the business site. If you want to earn big, of course, you have to invest time and great amount of hard work in promoting the products. As earlier mentioned, the competition is very high and customers nowadays are very wise, too. After all, who doesn’t want to get the best purchase—that is, to pay less and get more in terms of quantity and quality.

Lack of preparation is also a reason why one fails in affiliate marketing, whether he is a merchandiser or an affiliate. Part of the preparation is researching. On the part of the merchant, he has to be highly selective in choosing the right affiliate websites for his affiliate program.

In order to be sure he has the best choices, he must have exhausted his means in looking for highly interested affiliates whose sites are sure fit to his products and services. The affiliate site’s visitors must match his targeted customers. On the other hand, the affiliate marketer must likewise research on the good-paying merchandisers before he signs up for an affiliate program.

He must ensure that the merchants’ products and services match his interests so he can give his full attention and dedication to the program. He can get valuable information by joining affiliate forums, comparing different affiliate programs and reading articles on affiliate marketing where he can get tips from experienced affiliate marketers on how to choose the best merchants and products with high conversion rate.

Above all, an affiliate marketer must be willing to learn more. Certainly, there are still a lot of things to learn and so an affiliate marketer must continue to educate himself so he can improve his marketing strategies. Many fail because they don’t grow in the business and they are merely concerned about earning big quickly. If you want long-term and highly satisfactory results, take time to learn the ins and outs of the business. Continue to improve your knowledge especially with the basics in affiliate marketing ranging from advertising to programming, web page development, and search engine optimization techniques. Likewise, study the needs and wants of your site users and how different merchandisers compete with each other.

Keep on trying; don’t get disappointed if your first attempts did not pay off. Thousands are attracted by the possibility of generating skyrocketing incomes through affiliate marketing and so they sign up in any affiliate program without carefully understanding every aspect of the business. When they don’t get instant results, they quit and sign up for another program and repeat the process of just copying links and referring them to others. When you sign up for an affiliate program, don’t expect to get rich in an instant. Work on your advertising strategies and be patient. You’ll never know how much you can get if you don’t persevere.

About the Author:

Shawn C Mason is writer, website developer and internet marketer
With over 7 years of experience online. To learn the exact system
he uses to start from scratch you need to check out the internet
intelligence report. InternetIntelligenceReport.com/report/

For More Articles Check My Blog Blog.ShawnCMason.com

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – Why So Many People Fail In Affiliate Marketing

Google often changes the rules of their own game. One week, your AdWords campaigns are flying along, generating nice profits. The next week, you log in only to find traffic has been cut in half. Before the day is over, traffic comes to a screeching halt, and it leaves you scratching your head.

What in the world happened?

Well, sorry, but you just got SLAPPED! Don’t worry,it happens, and it’s fixable.

This step-by-step guide is an accurate, up-to-date “slap-prevention” tool designed to:

• Bring your slapped campaigns back to life or
• Create slap-proof campaigns from the beginning

6 Steps to a Slap-Proof Campaign

We have tested these steps ourselves across numerous campaigns, and so far, Google has had no issues with them. If things change, or if Google tightens their grip, as they tend to do once or twice a year, we’ll do our best to stay on top of it and update you here on this page.

The real challenge with a Google Slap is that Google changes their standards from time to time and usually does not announce when or what changes will happen. So we’re all left scrambling, trying to plug up the holes in our sinking campaigns.

The following 6 steps will either help get you out of a slapped situation or help prevent one from happening in the first place:

Step 1
Create mini-sites. Mini-sites have proven to be more resistant to slaps than single landing pages. A mini-site consists of no less than 5-8 pages and should contain the following:

• About us
• Privacy policy
• Terms and conditions
• Contact us (including address, phone number and email)
• Sitemap (for a free Google-compliant sitemap generator, visit: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com)

Step 2
Make your mini-site navigable. Make links to all of the pages from each page on the site. Bottom line here: Google wants your site to be legit. As a result, you will build visitor loyalty and create a compelling visitor experience, thereby improving the advertising model altogether.If your visitors are happy, Google is happy!

Step 3
Make your mini-site transparent. What does transparency have to do with affiliate marketing? A lot! Always state your site’s mission clearly and up front so your visitors know exactly why they are there. Don’t try to trick them or force them into signing up or clicking something that will turn them away forever. These tactics add little value to building long-term customer loyalty.

Step 4
Use well-formed HTML. By well-formed, we mean code that checks out well when put through a webpage validator. Google doesn’t read webpages like humans do. They have automated webbots to do that for them. If the webbot comes to a page that doesn’t check out well, it will basically say, no thanks. This page, and your whole site, could be dinged! (Visit this validator: http://validator.w3.org.)

Step 5
Pay attention to SEO. This will ensure that Google finds your pages relevant to your campaigns. Always use the same keywords from your ads in your landing pages. Use them in the title, meta description, meta keywords, and H1, H2, and H3 headings. Then scatter them about the content. But be careful not to overdo it! Google’s bots are programmed to spot keyword-stuffing, which results in–you guessed it–a ding!

Step 6
This final step is a list of good practices every advertiser should follow. Coming up short on just one of these may not be enough to get the slap, but failing to deliver well on a few of these may be!

• Write good ad copy
• Use keywords in the headline, copy, and display url
• Use domain names with your keywords whenever possible
• Break large groups of keywords into smaller adgroups
• Create “tight” adgroups by not going too “wide” with keywords
• Don’t use different destination urls in the same adgroup
• Check keyword density for your main keywords. Is it high? Good!
• Use Google’s webmaster tools to upload your sitemap and monitor 404s
• Pay attention to Google’s suggestions for improving your Quality Score

Final Word

If you get enough dings on your site, you may be slapped. Using this guide will help you steer clear of problems and help with conversions. So, it pays to play by the rules.

PS. If you feel you have been slapped for no legitimate reason, you are welcome to call the AdWords department toll-free: 1-866-2-GOOGLE.

Good luck!

Article Marketing Made Easy

1. Choosing A Niche

But before you grab your tools, have you decided what you want to grow? This can be tricky, and you can probably bet you’ll make some mistakes or take the long way around at least once or twice. So don’t be overly concerned with making mistakes. Your best bet is to follow one simple rule: follow your passion.

You’ve heard that a million times. And it really applies here. After all, you’re going to be writing terrific, unique content from scratch. Then you’ll promote it all over the web. Finally, you’ll monitor, tweak, add, and subtract. In some cases, you’ll start all over with fresh ideas and a new plan. The point is, if you’re excited about the topic, all this work will be that much more fun!

Not to mention your readers will also dig your articles if they sense your passion. So, do yourself a favor and stop to think about what moves you. For many people this is an easy task; for others it is more challenging. Sooner or later, it will hit you, and when it does you had better go grab a pen!

A final tip for choosing a niche: take time to read articles already out there. You’ll get a sense of effective writing styles, and it will foster more ideas. You might also learn a few things you didn’t already know.

2. Putting Pen To Paper

Well, you probably will not use a pen at all. (Or maybe you will!) Regardless, this is where most people get stuck.

Do you know how professional writers do it? I’m talking about the Agatha Christies, the Stephen Kings and the John Grishams, to name just a few of my favorites. They write every day, religiously. They have a routine, and they stick to it. They may not have a productive go at it on a given day, but that is all part of the process. Other days will be great! And it will be like this for you, too.

General guidelines for effective article writing are:

- Start each paragraph with a topic sentence

- Follow with a supporting sentence

- End with a concluding sentence

If you use a computer to write it will be easy to copy and paste your articles right onto the web, literally. Just make sure you read and re-read the web version because some software tools, like Microsoft Word, leave little “gremlins” embedded in the code. These aren’t harmful in any way. They’re just character mismatches that wreak havoc on apostrophes, quotation marks, and dashes.

Finally, pay attention to the word count of your articles. You will want to keep articles in chunks of around 250-300 words. This improves readability and maximizes your effectiveness. If you’ve already got some articles written but they’re much longer than 300 words, try splitting them into separate articles.

3. Keying In on Keywords

Simply getting 300 or so words down on paper is not the end-game necessarily. The words themselves are extremely important, hence the name “Keywords.”

For a given article, jot down the 10 most popular topics or sub-topics. Then head over to a free keyword tool (see below), plug in your keywords, and carefully look over the results.

What words are most popular this month? Which ones have the highest competition? What new keywords come up that you hadn’t thought of? From this you might easily spot opportunities for new articles.

There are positives and negatives for using the most popular keywords. The positive: your chances of reaching millions of people are better. The negative: getting close to page one of Google’s search results page is going to be very tough!

Keyword research is a never-ending cycle. Make sure each article has one primary keyword that appears more than any other keyword. Support that with a secondary keywords and tertiary keywords. Use them in your page titles and descriptions (called meta tags in html), h1, h2, and h3 headings, and in your resource box. A well-written article is only as effective as its use of keywords.

Here are some free keyword tools to help you get started with your keywords:

- https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

- http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

- http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

- http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

- http://www.wordpot.com/

4. Outsourcing Writers

If this all sounds a bit too daunting, or perhaps you KNOW you just don’t have time to write, there are plenty of freelance copywriters willing to help. These folks work for you. They may even be better writers than you! (In some cases, they will not be.) But before you enter into an agreement, make sure you’ve read enough of their portfolio to make an educated guess.

How do you find good ghostwriters? Luckily there are websites devoted to connecting you with freelance talent. Most sites take a small fee after all is said and done, but is usually reasonable.

How much will writers charge? It depends on their experience. But in these desperate economic times, you will probably find a good writer for around $10-$30 per article.

Below are just a few freelance connection sites that cater to writers:

- www.elance.com

- www.odesk.com

- www.worldwidefreelance.com

- www.guru.com

- www.bintro.com

5. Putting Seeds In The Bank

OK, so you’ve got a few articles under your belt. Congrats! Now what?

This is where you methodically distribute your seeds, and then… wait, watch, and grow.

There are a bunch of sites that will take your articles and distribute them to all kinds of organizations for non-exclusive rights to reprint. These sites are known as Article Banks.

Here’s how they work: you submit an article to a distribution site, it goes under technical and semantic review, and once it checks out okay your article is made available to webmasters, ezine publishers, newsletter publishers, and offline publications.

Some sites charge a monthly fee, some a per-posting fee, while others are free. New services are popping up all over the place, so head over to Google and search for “article bank”.

Below are 13 Article Banks that will be of tremendous help to you. But before you go signing up anywhere, be sure to read the next section (Leave A Mark In Each Seed) as it plays an important role in your overall marketing plan.

- www.amazines.com

- www.articlealley.com

- www.articlecity.com

- www.articledashboard.com

- www.articledepot.co.uk

- www.articlefinders.com

- www.certificate.net

- www.ezinearticles.com

- www.freesticky.com

- www.ideamarketers.com

- www.prweb.com (paid PR service)

- www.i-newswire.com (free PR service)

- www.pr.com (free PR service)

[A note about the PR services listed above: This is a great way to get in the press release game without paying big PR bucks! If your company did something newsworthy--took on a big client, relocated, or reorganized in some way--let the world know about it!]

6. Leave A Mark In Each Seed

This section is extremely important. Arguably, this is the sole reason you’re writing articles in the first place.

You want to monetize these articles, right? Right! Well each article marketing site or Article Bank recognizes this by allowing you an opportunity or two to take advantage of this mass distribution of your articles.

What do they do? They provide a “resource box” in the signature of every article you submit. The resource box is where you will provide a URL link back to your site (appropriately called a “backlink”). It might look something like this:

http://Your-Company-Name.com/

or

http://Your-Company-Name.com/niche/article.html

This helps you in at least three ways:

a. You receive a backlink from each site where your article lives, thereby boosting your organic search engine rankings.

b. You gain targeted traffic which you can monetize in endless ways, thereby improving your bottom line.

c. Readers may see you as a credible expert in your field, thereby enhancing your reputation cloud and attracting more business.

As you can see, articles are not only sources of news and information. They’re also vehicles for monetization. It’s their job to bring people to you. It is your job to turn this traffic into money. But that’s a whole different topic about which many books have been written!

Follow us on Twitter.

Check out Facebook notes for helpful hints and top affiliate sales (from affiliate newsletters).

Jan Lemkow Hdpublishinggroup’s Profile

We have one of the most extensive data sets in the people search industry, containing over 2 billion distinct records.

On April 20, 2007, two class action lawsuits were filed against CJ, BeFree, and ValueClick. One was filed by the Affiliates and the other by the Merchants. The lawsuit was filed on terms of a breach of contract, negligence and unfair business practices on CJ, BeFree, and ValueClick’s part by allowing adware affiliates to operate within their Network. The basis of the lawsuit is that these companies are knowingly allowing these adware affiliates to join the network which allows them to commit commission theft and fraudulent transactions through adware applications. Both Plaintiffs in this case are seeking monetary damages along with a change in ValueClick’s corporate policy related to adware and compliance.

For the official information about this lawsuit visit CJclassation.com.

You’re itching to find out who it is. Not just for curiosity’s sake. The safety of your family or the security of your bank account could be at stake. You need a way to discover just whose phone number you have.

There’s good news. You’ve got options. I’m a professional writer and researcher. I’ve discovered four different ways you can find out who’s hiding behind any phone number. You can:

• Call, pretending to be someone else
• Look it up in a published crisscross directory
• Befriend (or trick) someone at the phone company
• Go online and search

Let’s see what’s involved with each approach and discover when they work best…

Call the Number

It’s the simplest thing you can do. Pick up the phone and call. But pretend to be someone else to avoid recognition. When they answer, ask for a person with an unusual name not likely to be there. Say something like… “Hello, is Lilly Becky there? No? Are you absolutely sure? Well, who am I talking to then?” Be a little forceful. Even sound angry, as if you think they’re lying to you. This approach can rattle the other person and make them reveal their identity.

Avoid this one if you’re not comfortable acting. And make sure you don’t call from a number that can be traced back to you!

Look in a Crisscross Directory

Crisscross Directories have been around since the late 1800s. They’re like phone directories. But they organize their listings by phone number, or street address, instead of name. These directories are still available in print form even though most of the information is also now available by computer.

Such cross-references are primarily designed for business use. Usually, sales departments rely on them to conduct direct marketing, build lists of sales leads and gather business intelligence.

The drawback is that they’re expensive – costing in the hundreds of dollars or more. Still, you can usually find copies in your library, especially for the local area you live in. If you’re looking beyond your own town, you probably won’t be able to use the free version in the library.

Get an Inside Connection

Having a buddy on the inside of the phone company was classic approach for TV detectives. If you recall the Rockford Files or Mannix or any other old private eye show, they were forever pulling over to a pay phone and calling their friend, Ginger or Susie or Maggie, at the telephone company. The friend would dutifully give them whatever information the PI needed to pursue the case.

Interestingly, this method actually works – even if it’s a little on the shady side. If you know someone at the phone company, you can probably talk them into helping.

Unfortunately, they probably won’t help you once a week like on the TV shows. At some point your friend’s better judgment will take over. You’ll be left with nothing but numbers again. (Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, just what the detective had that you don’t…)

21^st Century Answers – The Internet Search Solution

When it comes to finding out who’s hiding behind a phone number, the best way I’ve found is online search. Yet, search takes time. And not finding what you want quickly gets very frustrating.

To help, a number of businesses exist to make reverse phone searching quicker and easier. These businesses have already found the best sources for reverse phone searching. They take you directly to the databases that have the information you need. You can find out names, addresses, and much more, starting with just a phone number.

Some of these Reverse Phone Lookup services are free. The better ones cost a little. Quality always does, in my experience.

If, in your case, it’s not that important to get accurate information fast, then give the free services a shot. They’re mostly supported by pay for performance advertising, like Adsense, which doesn’t earn them much. That means the free services rarely have the money to invest either in buying data access or in creating more usable interfaces.

In my case, as a professional, getting quality information quickly is important. I pay the small fee and get reliable information.

But, even if I didn’t write for a living and were just casually looking up phone numbers from time to time, I’d still go with a paid database service. The cost is minimal. Often a small, one-time fee covers one to three years or even longer. If I only looked up a number once or twice a year, it would still be worth it in time saved.

Final Word

As important as it can be, finding out personal information with just a phone number used to be nearly impossible. Today it can be quick and easy. I’ve found four approaches that work, but one proved the simplest and most effective. It’s using a quality, reverse-phone-search service online.

In a future article I’ll talk about some of the reasons reverse phone search can be so important in these times. You might be surprised to hear how it not only can satisfy curiosity, it could even save your life.

- by Ronald Murphy