Very new ideas for the old internet

Working With Online Bookmakers As An Affiliate Marketer

Thousands of people each and every day attempt to raid the online bookmakers’ pockets, placing bets on a wide variety of sporting events. Unfortunately for the majority of these the percentages back the bookmaker and therefore some will win but some will inevitably lose. It seems like an impossible situation, barring a radically successful betting technique, which is improbable to the point of being impossible, or becoming an online bookmaker yourself, ways in which to beat the system seem slightly limited. However if, rather than trying to fight against the sports betting sites, you decide to take a step back and join them you may well be on the right tracks to turning losses into profits in no time.

Without having to spend a penny or lock horns with the gambling fraternity, an Internet user of any skill can earn money from the sports betting industry. They can do so by joining one of the many affiliate-marketing programs available within the industry. It may sound a little speculative or even downright crazy, but affiliate marketing is actually one of the most successful ways for the common man and the big industries to profit from the Internet.

It works by simply rewarding persons who choose to host advertisements on their site, with a cash reward or a percentage of the profits from each player who clicks on them. Website owners can sign up to these affiliate programs for free and even receive all the advertising and marketing paraphernalia that is required as a part of the bundle. There are no hidden catches or risks involved, all that a sports betting site requires is a small area on the site in which to place an advertisement.

In exchange for this free enterprise advertising opportunity a sports betting affiliate has the potential to tap into one of the most unique online affiliate programs. Rather than offering a small percentage of a sale or an up front fee, the affiliates can choose to earn as a sports betting site earns it’s money. To explain, each time a player loses money a sports betting site gains that money. However if that player has joined via the links of one of the many affiliate links on the Internet, that affiliate will receive a percentage of each lost bet. These percentages can range anywhere between 15 and 35%, depending on the level of the affiliate and a number of intricacies within the affiliate program. So each an every time a player bets an affiliate can earn up to 35% of that bet if it is lost.

However as it is gambling, players often win as well as lose, therefore some may question whether they are liable to lose cash should a player go on a rampant winning streak. The answer to this is a simple ‘no’. Most affiliate programs offer their members a sort of protection, as they pay at monthly or bi-weekly intervals, they have the opportunity to tot up the overall revenue. This process takes into account all of the wins and the losses encountered by all of the players that each affiliate represents. If this is a minus figure, the affiliate will not be held liable. The sports betting site foots the bill and the affiliate has to simply settle for receiving no money in that period. However the more players playing for an affiliate, the less likely this is to occur. Therefore the onus is on them to bring in more customers, which in turn benefits both them and the sports betting site.

How To Drive Free Traffic To Your Site With Articles

Tools to drive visitors to your website are many but the main one that should be employed is the use of articles. The popularity of article writing and exchange has emerged as a convenient way for people to promote and get fresh content for their sites. The popular search engines want new, creative material and content for their users who are very demanding. Most internet users consider the internet to be one huge database and the search engines also see it as a giant source of information. It is a good idea to understand what it is the search engines are looking for, so rewriting an article automatically makes it something the search engines want, unique content.

However, you may be of a mind to start writing articles from scratch and discard the idea of rewriting existing articles and if that is the case there are a few things you will need to consider. Once you have determined a topic to write on you need to do some research and this is easily done online by entering a search phrase for your topic into your favorite search engine. The importance of making the article flow correctly must not be underestimated so ensure that you have a beginning, middle and an end which should hopefully round up the article nicely. The conclusion is a winding up of all the information you have just written and doesn’t need to be more than about four sentences with most articles approximately twenty sentences long. Remember to split the article up into about three or four paragraphs for easier reading and once you have written the article, you need to include a resource box containing your information and any links.

Article writing is a great way to make money online whether it’s through advertising and promotion for your website or for writing articles for other peoples’ websites. It’s the first article that can be difficult to write so how do you start? Article ideas can easily come from real life, for example, if you have a long and happy marriage, then write articles which help people with their relationships. You could also, get some ideas for niche markets and the articles would at least give you a starting point for writing.

In order to excel at article writing, do not forget that it’s imperative you use good writing methods. Writing on a daily basis will help achieve this because you will come across the same problems faced by every other regular article writer but it will help you to improve. This method works well and that’s the reason why I believe you should remember that the more writing you do, the more effortless and productive it will become. I wish that these guidelines were like the Holy Grail of writing but they’re not although they have worked for many writers including myself, only you can decide whether it’s this system or another that best suits you, however, whatever method you choose, stick with it.

Tags: article directory, articles, free content, unique content

Great free opportunity for website traffic increase

You got your website done and it’s up. But no visitors even if you have the nicest website possible and you spent a lot of money to have it done as you wanted. Everything is in place …your website can be seen in Google, Yahoo and other search engines. You also paid an internet advertising campaign, told all your mates about your website, but still got only few visitors and other sites related to your business are placed much better in search results. Why? Your website is much better and nice looking than others but they still got a lot of visitors every day and their business is growing, company gets a lot of money and they are all very pleased. If you encountered all these problems, here is the right place where you may find answers to solve your problems.

If you didn’t hear about SEO, or you heard but you don’t know anything about it let me start telling you that SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. Is there such thing? …you may ask. Yes, and that’s why other websites are better placed in search engines than your website.

There are many rumors about the search engines and their algorithm which make the calculations for website positioning in the search results, but no one knows for sure the importance (in percentage) for every optimization you do. One thing is for sure: Google and other search engines are looking for your importance and fame in the internet. So, if your website name and link for it doesn’t appear in other websites it means that you have a very low fame and you’ll be given a rank 0 from maximum 10. Ok, maybe you’re right, but how can I have links to my website in other websites? I don’t know anybody who has a website to ask him (if it likes) to have my link in his webpage. Or it may cost a lot of money. There is an answer for this. You can do it free and can have thousands of links to your page in only few days. How? Submitting your website to Web Directories and Article Directories. There are thousands of  directories in the internet and also a lot of tools for submitting your website automatically. Write an article about your business and submit it in the article directories and don’t forget to mention your website there.

Tags: article submission, Internet Marketing, seo, Website Promotion, website traffic increase

Which Affiliate Marketing Mentor

Affiliate marketing  been in the Internet industry for rather sometime now and it’s one of the most popular tools around employed by several online entrepreneurs nowadays. It’s a capital pick for those who would like to put up an online business quick and inexpensively. Even so, there’s still a large amount of the population who acknowledges a little or still zero about it. And most of the people who have barely discovered this business typically assume that they can well make big money out of it. Well, they are definitely wrong.

To be successful in affiliate marketing business is not an leisurely project and it will never occur overnight. It’s simply like an in progress assignment where you want to check and try several advertising strategies and tactics. This could even call for you to sign-up with various affiliate programs just to find which merchants performs all right.

Some other misconception that expect to gain a lot if they place all but 20 affiliated banners on exactly one niche. Well it won’t actually work the way you believe it would since once your site is overflowing with too several banners, it will appear like a link farm and visitors will not be curious and won’t even bother clicking on any of those banners. So if you actually prefer to promote several affiliate programs in your website, make sure that they swing with the theme and subject from the rest of the articles on your niche. Keep in mind that three to four affiliated links in your site are decent, depending on the size of the web page.

There is as well some who consider that if they add affiliate materials to their site, they can get sales at once. Possibly they simply don’t know that affiliate marketing is totally about advertising. Whenever there’s no traffic hitting your site, how could you expect to acquire any sales? Recall that the to a greater extent you advertise your affiliate link or the site where the affiliate links are placed, the more clickthru’s these links are likely to receive.

If you would like to be involved with or you’ve already joined an affiliate program, but you have the above misconceptions regarding affiliate marketing, then, you might need a mentor to help you work where to start out and what to do ready to succeed.

In the dictionary, the word mentor is defined as a wise and trusted instructor or counselor. Generally, these individuals are experts in the subject area they are into. They can give skillful advice and direction as well as supervision to another individual. So when we say affiliate marketing mentors, they are experienced counselors that have made affiliate marketing their specialty. Affiliate marketing mentors can be those persons that have already been successful in affiliate marketing and are always willing to share their experienced-based knowledge from the viewpoint of both the affiliates and the web merchants. And that’s the reason why we come up with this page. It is aimed to give you the stuffs that affiliate mentors should possess and follow and why do they need these things.

Of course, it’s beneficial for an affiliate marketing mentor to live and utilize many theories and generalities regarding your business but there’s nothing more helpful and effective than telling the client what works today and what are the things that could probably work in the future and if the trend changes. As a mentor, you should be one of the sources of knowledge for your client and the first one to teach them on how to generate more affiliate income. You too, need to be knowledgeable and equipped with the keys to success for affiliate marketers as well as for merchants. And you should guide your clients as they try to do the things that can help boost their profit because once they do well in that business, it can be counted as one of your great achievements. This also makes you a successful mentor.

There are some articles on affiliate marketing that says, in order to be triumphant in affiliate marketing business, you need to encompass and develop these traits: persistence, patience and thirst for knowledge. And as a mentor, it is your job to help your clients take in these traits within themselves. Once they’ve already developed the abovementioned character, it’ll be very easy for you to explain to them that attaining success in affiliate marketing requires sweat, blood and of course, hefty time commitment. These traits will also teach them not to give up.

Furthermore, before you coach your client to be expert in SEO, link exchanges, email marketing, newsletter marketing, reciprocal exchanges and advertising in forums, you should first become expert on these fields. They’ll sure find it hard to learn these things alone and without supervision from the one who knows best. So be sure that you are knowledgeable on these things before you accept any invitation to be a mentor. Yes, being a mentor is way harder than succeeding in affiliate marketing but this task is very rewarding especially if your client become victorious. The failure of your client is your failure too so you must do your very best to be able to bring your client on tour to success. Again, it is never an easy task and there’s nothing you’ll be able to do about it. After all, that’s what affiliate marketing mentors are for.

Tags: affiliate marketer, Affiliate Marketing, affiliate marketing business, affiliate programs, business opportunities, home base business, online business, online internet, small business

The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

When planning a marketing strategy for you business it is important to consider the growing online market. The internet is so commonplace now that it is only natural to market your company on it. Online marketing is now a necessity to grow and thrive as a business. One such form of online marketing is affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a system where an affiliate is rewarded for every customer/visitor they bring to the buyer of seller. So an example of this would be a potential customer browsing another website and seeing and clicking a link that would bring them to your business’s website. As a result you more potential customers and the website that is linking the customers to you gets a payment by you in return.

The three most common forms of affiliate marketing are cost per action, contextual advertising, and revenue sharing. Cost per action is a system where the affiliates are paid depending on the specific actions of the customer. For example, a company may pay the affiliates for customers that buy something from their site.

Contextual advertising is a system where the ads seen by consumers on an affiliate’s website are chosen by an automated system to cater towards the consumer. This way the ads are more relevant to what the consumer is looking for and as a result has a higher chance of being clicked. The final system is revenue sharing which is the sharing of a certain amount of profits with your affiliate company.

The general advantage of affiliate marketing is that it is very low risk. Because it is a pay for performance system, you will not be stuck paying for advertising that has not done anything. You will only pay an affiliate if you are receiving traffic from their website. So it is safe to have several affiliates at once because you are still only paying for the amount of customers they bring in. the websites that bring in little to no traffic will in turn receive little to no pay from you.

The potential downside of affiliate marketing is that your company may be mistaken as a spam website. Because of companies that have abused online advertising through email spamming, pop-ups, and ad-ware company links on sights carry a bit of a negative connotation. Also there have been issues with scaling when it comes to affiliate advertising.

These are small issues considering the amount of good affiliate marketing can bring a company. It is a smart and effective way to get your companies name out into the world.

Tags: affiliate, Benefits, marketing

Google Page Rank Is Dead – Or Is It?

For a long time now, marketing gurus all over the world have been talking about google page ranking. Page ranking is simply Google’s way of measuring your pages accordingly.

But there is a problem…

More and more we tend to see NO consistency with page ranking at all. Please don’t confuse the difference between “page ranking” & “search engine ranking”. The two are completely different.

With this method of measurement, we could quickly see how much or how little a person has put into promoting their website. A high rank of 6,7,8,9,10 is sometimes held as something honerable to have for your site but does it really matter?

In some aspects it does and in some it doesn’t.

As I mentioned above, page ranking has nothing to do with your search engine success. It (did) have everthing to do with “importance”. The only problem is (like so many marketing ventures online), this measurement method is dying off with the rest of them. People online are very intuitive about these sort of things and tend to over saturate ways to beat them and/or improve on them quickly.

People all over the world are even still wondering how to increase their page rank. Now why would they do this???

Simple, it’s all about prestige. Eventhough marketing experts like myself weigh absolutely no importance on page ranking anymore, there are still literally 1000’s of business people out there that consider a high rank a good thing.

So how do you benefit from increasing your rank?

- You will attract better quality websites to yours
- People will think your website has lasting power
- People will want to mimic what you do
- People will even think highly of you

Even now, many browsing people look for high ranking websites to exchange links with.

So does trying to increase your website page ranking help you? Not really. What you ultimately want to do is promote your website as much as you can in as many “RELATED _ RELATED” places that you can and let search engines do their own thing.

Playing into search engines hands won’t help your company. Building a great web marketing foundation will attract exactly what you’ve been after….. MORE EXPOSURE!

Please take this seriously and always be on the look-out for other ways to promote your business, let Google’s page rank go and look at the future beyond PR ratings

Tags: google pr, search engine strategy

Six Tips For Successful Affiliates Marketing

Affiliate marketing has become increasingly popular in recent years. Affiliate programs offer merchants the opportunity to employ vast armies of sales people who only get paid for the results they achieve. Many beginners to affiliate marketing can also enjoy the fact that they can start an internet business even if they only have a shoestring budget.
Just about every affiliate program I have been involved with and researched comes complete with a website all ready set up to take orders. They even come with sales letters and ads that you can use.

The rewards for affiliates are high also, and the skilled affiliate marketer can earn many thousands of dollars a month. This win-win situation has led to an explosion in the number of affiliate programs that are available to the would-be marketer. With this increase of opportunities has come many questions; how do you go about choosing the right opportunity for you? What qualities should you look for in a program and which gives you a good chance of making a sustainable income?

Below are some tips that will help you to evaluate merchants and their programs, and help you to avoid wasting time and money.

1. How Much Commission Does The Merchant Pay?
This may seem obvious, but it is very important that you know how much you can expect to earn from a sale. There is no point in spending time and money promoting a product that doesn’t pay well. You could end up spending more on marketing than you are likely to make on sales. It is probably best to stick with marketing products with a high commission value, unless you have found a niche market where you can sell vast quantities of product, and make substantial commissions on your volume of sales.
I recommend sticking with programs that offer at least a 50% commission. Anything less and you’ll be spending more on advertising than what you’ll make

2. How Much Traffic is the Merchant’s Website Getting?
Try to discover the amount of traffic the merchant’s website is already receiving. Alexa.com could be a useful tool for doing this research. If the website is ranked in the top 100,000, the merchant is getting a good volume of traffic, and there may already be too many affiliates. If it is ranked below 500,000 it is either no good or it could just be a golden opportunity to make some real money! Always research a merchant’s product if their website has a low traffic ranking. It may be a good idea to buy the product yourself if you can afford to. Otherwise you could do a search to find out if there are any adverse comments about it on the internet. If all is well and the product is good, you may have found a gold mine!

3. How Often Are Commissions Paid?
Some merchants pay commissions every week; some once a month, others only pay every quarter. It is important that you know how often you can expect a pay check if you are going to have financial control over your business. Do you have the financial resources to continue to market a product if you have to wait a long time before you get paid?

It would also be wise to find out the minimum commission that you have to earn before you get paid. Some affiliates don’t send your money until you accumulate a certain amount. What I like are the affiliates that pay as soon as a sale is made. They are the only programs I promote and recommend. I don’t like to wait for my money.

4. Does The Company Use Tracking Cookies?
Many customers do not buy on their first visit to a merchant’s website. It is important therefore that the merchant uses cookies on their site, so that you get credit if the customer returns and buys at a later date. Check out how long the cookies last. The longer the cookies lasts; the better the chance of getting paid! I also like to cloak the URL of my affiliates. This way the link is changed and you  are certain that you won’t lose your commissions.

5. Does The Merchant Pay On Subsequent Sales?
The best time to learn about affiliate marketing is before you’re in the thick of things. Wise readers will keep reading to earn some valuable affiliate marketing experience while it’s still free.

Some merchants will only pay commission on sales that come through customers visiting their site via a direct link from your site. They pay you nothing for any subsequent purchases that the customer makes if they visit the merchants site directly. It is important that you get paid no matter what route the customer returns by if you are to build a sustainable business.

6. What Promotional Resources Does The Merchant Offer?
Look at the type and quality of the promotional material that they provide for there affiliates Do they provide articles or content that you can use to promote them on your site or free guides, special offers or samples? If the promotional resources are good it is likely that the merchant will provide good support for their affiliates. I also like to write my own ads for the affiliates I promote.

Sometimes you will get a better response using your own ads. If the affiliate program you are marketing has been around a long time, it’s likely all the ads that come with the program have been seen over and over again. Fresh ads will have your reader think it’s a new product.

Affiliate marketing can be a very lucrative business and an excellent starting point for anyone new to internet marketing. Finding the right merchant can be a tricky business. The best advice is to do your own research. Use the above questions as an aid to finding a merchant that enables you to reach your financial goals. You never know – You could strike gold!

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, affiliate programs, super affiliates

Google Best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Practices – Part 5

The fifth and last part of this article will concentrate on the internal and analysis areas of the optimization for Google. I will review 3 essential areas. Let’s start:

Why do you need to use Google Sitemaps.
If your site has hundreds of pages, then a compressed version of the file can be created. You are required to create an account with Google in order to take advantage of this feature. Two things to consider before uploading the sitemap file are to verify that your robots.txt allows Google to craw the site for this to work in the first place, and that you check for 404 error pages in your site. Now to why you need this: Google will crawl your site more frequently to verify changes in the sitemap file, and index files that normally it wouldn’t. So keep it up to date with your weekly changes. It saves Google time, since it will only concentrate on updated content, and getting new or updated pages indexed as a benefit.

The importance of Web Analytics.
Keep track of your optimization and log results by understanding your analytics. It is essential that you monitor your visitor paths and exit pages. Make all necessary changes through your pages to make sure you are improving those pages that are top exit ones. One way to achieve this is by creating stronger offerings, guarantees, and calls to action among other things. SiteCatalyst is a very robust solution with a lot of features. SiteCatalyst provides data related to navigation, ecommerce, content, and other detailed visitor information. It also has a pretty flexible dashboard and it is very data intensive. One of the great features that it provides is comparison, which allows you to compare different campaigns and groups to see how they are doing so against each other, so that campaigns can be optimized. If you are looking robust features such as customizable dashboards, then Omniture SiteCatalyst might be right for you.

Staying out of the Supplemental Index.
Sites of any age, size, and rank can end up in the supplemental index. For the first 2 factors, it is related to the update ratio or duplicate content. For the last one, because of missing elements. The number one reason to be listed in this index is the update ratio. So how do you fix this? Update the content of the page. Change the body content mostly. Title changes and Heading tags also helps. Number two reason is that the page is no longer internally linked from home or main category pages. So, the fix? Self explanatory. Last reason, your site is online but less than six months old. If this is your case, please read my 2 part article on “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics” were you will be able to find out what to do to get out much quicker.

Closing Statement about Google Optimization.
To recap… Make sure that your site is compliant, stays true, stays natural, and stays organic. Focus on content, and bringing quality traffic to your site. If people are attracted to your site and buy, Google will be attracted to the site too and the site will naturally rank well. Make it easy on Google, and they will make it easy on you.

Tags: search engine optimization blog, search engine optimization firm, seo, seo firm, seo pros

Google Best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Practices – Part 4

The four part of this article will concentrate on the link areas of the off-page optimization for Google. I will review 5 essential link areas.

Reciprocal linking does not have the effect it used to.
If you are asking for links right now, stop sending automated link requests. Instead, focus on getting natural links from related sites by using “link bait”, in other words, content that is worth linking to because of its value. When offered a link from partners, make sure their page doesn’t have more than 100 links already in it, look for 20 links max when possible, and also that their site is related to the theme of yours. At last, check that you are getting traffic from the link, or drop it.

“Article swap” and “article partitioning”.
Engage in “article swap” with link partners, and break articles in parts to create a series of them for your visitors to follow (partitioning). Include comments when applicable in all articles (in a different color to distinguish, hint: blue) since it gives visitors great commented content and overcomes duplicate content penalties.

Your internal linking structure.
You want PageRank to be passed to your traffic pages, so avoid absolute links to “About Us”, “Privacy Policy”, etc. Here the have a good combination of absolute and relative links is a must. Use absolute links within your content areas, not in you navigation. The PageRank score is directly affected by this. The “run of site links” filter includes internal pages now, so keep this in mind. Also make sure you have a relative link to your home page from every page. You should link to directories or portals that are authoritative as far as your external links. Always use your targeted keyword phrase for the anchor text. It is also wise to vary your anchor text when linking to your internal pages, and it always should match your unique phrase.

A few more words on PageRank.
Any PageRank of less than 4 is not counted by the algo. That explains why Google shows much less back links for any domain than other search engines. You need to gain good incoming related links, not just any links. Again, the “less is more” concept could be applied here as well. Few good quality links always out weight lots of low quality unrelated links from other sites. Outgoing links are viewed from a different angle, and are related to “the theme” of your site. There is an optimal ratio between the quality vs. the quantity in links. You need to get as many links from pages with a high PageRank and a low number of total links in them.

Your link campaign goals.
Set yourself some achievable goals when it comes to links. Be realistic, and try to get one link exchange, article swap, directory submission, forum comment, etc. per day. Verify quality of all links, and use the “no follow” link attribute or directly remove all links from any site with 100 or more links on their page that is not an authority site.

Tags: search engine optimization blog, search engine optimization firm, seo blog, seo firm

Google Best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Practices – Part 3

The third part of this article will concentrate on the meta tags area of the optimization for Google. I will mention them in the order they should normally appear in the source code. I will review 5 essential meta areas.

The DTD statement.
This should be the first tag of the head section of your code. The Document Type Definition Statement allows faster and deeper indexing with Google, shortening the time your site will be in the “trustbox” as well. HTML 4.0 or 4.01 should be the standard, and for most cases, the Transitional type should be used.

The title, the most important.
Why? Because there are 3 elements in SEO: the listing (were title is the main element) the click-through (were title is the main reason) and conversion (which is the object of all optimization work) Also, if that is not reason enough (it should) it is the single element that gests indexed and used to list the link text in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). An average of 7 to 8 words length is optimal.

The description.
Used by Google to create a text summary in describing the page if available, so make sure the content of this tag is friendly to the searcher, not the search engine. If you are in a competitive market, this tag is not taken into account, but you should have it for your visitor. An average length of 150 characters is good.

The keywords.
Google actually uses this tag against you, by that meaning it is used as a spam check point for the page content. Also, do not include your niche keywords here, as you will be given your competition tips about your optimization. Put your main keywords across the content instead. Here use an average of 200 characters.
Make sure you are using different sets of keywords per page, in other words, that they are unique to each particular page.

The charset type.
Another element of the head section, this one tells the browser what to do when it encounters certain characters in your pages. Google indexes pages easier with the 8859-1 tag, since it will not do any data encoding, which can take a lot of extra time. The UTF-8 tag involves encoding and it should be used for forms that accept non standard characters, like foreign users from other countries.

Tags: search engine optimization blog, search engine optimization firm, seo blog, seo firm