One Affiliate's Journey

Selling Tigerdirect Products from your Blog

2009-09-01T06:51:00.000-07:00

Just like eBay, Tigerdirect has an affiliate program. TigerDirect is a very popular online computer/electronics retailer. I regularly shop for my computer needs on their site. Their prices are unbeatable, the selection is huge and you can even use your paypal account in the checkout process.

So how can you tap into TigerDirect’s success? Easy, become an affiliate!

Step 1: Visit the LinkShare website and sign-up as an affiliate Click here to become a LinkShare Affiliate!

Step 2: Log into your LinkShare account and click on the “Join Programs” button at the top of the website

Step 3: Search for “TigerDirect” and put a checkmark in the check boxes below TigerDirect’s program details and then at the bottom press the “Apply to all checked programs”

That’s it! Once your application is approved you should receive a welcome e-mail. The next thing you want to do is to start promoting TigerDirect’s website and try to get some sales going. To get the banner code and other such promotional items just click on “Create Links” at the top of your LinkShare members page and select the “TigerDirect” option. From there on everything is pretty much self-explanatory.

Here is the commission rates TigerDirect offers:

Monthly Total Sales Commission Rate

$0-2,499 2%

$2500-9,999 4%

$10,000-24,999 5%

$25,000-49,999 5.5%

$50,000+ 6%

So how do you incorporate this into your blog? Easy - Start writing mini-reviews of Tigerdirect products and embed the links you create at linkshare into your blog post. Take a look at this Tigerdirect Sales Blog.

How to Add eBay Listings to Your Blog

2009-08-31T10:34:00.000-07:00

Looking to make money easily using eBay and a blog? The secret is to use the eBay Editor Kit, which will produce some Javascript you can insert into your template or post. Here’s the description of the Editor Kit from eBay:

The eBay Editor Kit (EK) is one of the most innovative and effective affiliate tools available. With the EK, affiliates can add relevant, real-time eBay listings to their Web sites in just seconds. Best of all, the EK produces click-through rates two times greater than traditional banners!

Whatever your Web site’s content or user demographic, eBay’s Editor Kit will dynamically list pertinent eBay auctions and listing details, including product information, gallery images, bidding prices, and ending times. Each specification is completely customizable.

Editor Kit is designed to show auction results. The Editor Kit allows you to enter search terms that dictate which ads to show on your site. So how can you use it? Easy! Write a blog post about something ... a movie, a toy - anything that you know about that people buy. Set up an editors kit at the eBay affiliates site and post the code in your blog post. Instant up to date eBay auction listings relevant to your blog topic!

NOTE: You must be an eBay member to use the Editor Kit! (

Become an EBay Member

)

It doesn't get any easier than that folks ... check it out (EBay Deals) ...

What Types of Blogs can you Keep?

2009-08-27T10:03:00.001-07:00

When you hear of a blog these days you think of people making money. Even though it is mainly used for that reason you can actually just have a blog for other fun things. Having a blog does not limit you at all you can use it for whatever reason you chose. Many people use blogs for telling a story about themselves, their family or just sharing information on anything that they are interested in. Below I will share with you some of the ways you can incorporate fun into your blogs.

Blogging to Stay in Touch with Friends

Family and friends can sometimes move away and having a blog can help you stay in touch with them. You can add events on your blog to let them keep up with what you are doing. You can add photos of your different trips that you have recently been on. You may have a new dress that you would like them to see you in and you can add it to your blog. Yes we do have phones and emails but having a blog is so much more fun. You have the site up so they can go back and check it out whenever they feel fit.

Having a blog also gives you the advantage to introduce other family members you're your family have never met before. The internet is such a great place isn't it? Blogs also have a great feature which is the comment section. Your family members can post comments on each post that you write. You also have the option to answer back with a comment. Having a blog also allows you to make even more friends. I say this because your blog is there and you are sharing it with your friends and family but also your friends and family could also refer others to check it out and then wow you are getting to know new people.

Blogging To Promote Your Talents

Stick Man Comics!

Some bloggers begin blogging to promote themselves. A friend of mine just recently sent me a link to his new blog and it was basically his resume. He is in the Technology field and he just post topics on various projects that he has been involved with. I have a sixteen year old son who loves writing poetry, he is great at writing and he uses a blog to express himself. People would come to read and get inspiration. He also He is also into drawing and he just draws and post his drawings for others to see. Think about the potential if a company who is looking for someone with these talents come across you blog you could get hired to do something you are naturally good at. You may be thinking oh my gosh I don't want everybody viewing my blog, well you can make it private. This is an option where you only allow the people you wish to view your blog. Think of this as online journal instead of writing in a book you can do so on the blog.

As a blogger, you also have to be careful when expressing yourself because you do have some people out there that will invade your life and turn it into a living hell. So be very careful when posting your deepest expressions. Remember your blog will be online for the world to if you chose to so make sure you post topics you are comfortable with.

Blogging to Keep a Record of Events

Blogging can also be use d to record events in your life. Some examples of important events can be vacations, pregnancy, sporting events, weddings, graduation and so much more. As I stated earlier, you can make the blog private but you can use it as a tool to keep track of important things that you can always refer back to and can shear with your family members at a reunion. Think of it as a scrapbook of your life. Wouldn't it be great to have a scrap book of your pregnancy? Later on in life your child could go back and look at the events that leads up to his or her existence. The sky is the limit as to what you can do with a blog, these are just some ideas on how you can use a blog to have fun.

Totally Fake Celebrity News

by Denise A Sinclair

How to Earn money as an EBay Affiliate (with no selling)

2009-08-27T09:32:00.000-07:00

eBay is one of the most visited websites on the Internet. Did you know you can make some good money with their affiliate program? There are several ways to do this and this article will look at some of those today. The one thing that many people like about their program over others is they are always changing it. The company is always trying to make it better. In fact, it has some different things than most programs do to make you money. Take a look at it right now.

Once you sign up as an affiliate, you will get different links to use to get others to sign up. It is in your best interest to get others to sign up from your link for a couple different reasons. eBay has switched their affiliate program to what is now called the "eBay Partner Network" and this change is for the better. As an affiliate, you can earn a lot more money. You earn money two different ways with their new program. One way is that when people visit your website, they click on an eBay ad and sign up for an account. The second way is through bidding.If they win the bid, you earn money. Every person who now signs up is labeled as an "ACDU" and earns a base amount from 1.00-50.00. More money can be earned through successful purchases on eBay.

NOTE: You must be an eBay member to use creatives like the editors kit (

Become an EBay Member

)

The key to getting this program moving in order to make good money is getting your links out there. All the tools you will ever need is on the website and they help you generate sales with the free tools you get. It is still up to you though to advertise your site and links if you want to see sales. You can generate reports on the website to see how you are doing and payments are made by PayPal monthly. Now, how do you get those sales to get that check from PayPal?

Advertise and advertise your links even more. You can also start a website and put up auctions on it. A good idea is to incorporate them with article information and the click through rates will be much higher. The key with this program is you will need to see what is working for you and what is not. Tracking is something that you will want to keep track of to be sure you are doing well. This way you can see what is working and what is not. The key to this programs success is getting traffic to your links so they will be clicked on. There are many different ways including using blogs, article marketing, websites, and linking with others to just name a few.

This program can make you big money because the eBay name is behind it and it is reorganized by many so the chances of people clicking through is high. In fact, it is rated much higher than it would be if it was another company. Take your time and promote this and you will make some good money. Remember, it takes some time to get this one going, but well worth it in the end.

by Dustin Heath

Optimizing for Google

2009-05-06T09:31:00.000-07:00

In today’s online world search engine rankings can make your business succeed, and while rankings in Yahoo and MSN are very valuable, their combined market value is still less than that of Google. This makes achieving top rankings in Google that much more important.

Website optimization.

THE RIGHT KEYWORDS
This article is not about keyword research so I will not spend too much time on this topic, however, I felt it was important to at least brush on this slightly.

Make sure that your targets are achievable. If you select the wrong keywords it can make your entire optimization experience essentially a waste. Choose keywords that are attainable but yet still offer a reasonable search frequency for your industry. Your phrase selection should also be targeted to bring qualified traffic to your site.

Using the hotel industry as an example, targeting the word “hotel” would make very little sense but by narrowing it down to “Victoria BC hotel” you now have less competition, and a more qualified audience. Keep your targets in perspective and go after the obtainable rankings.

WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION
There are many on-site factors that play a role in your search engine rankings. Here are a number of those factors and what you can do to increase your chances of success.

Title Tag
The title tag plays one of the most important roles in search results at Google, and is almost always the heading Google chooses for each of its listings. Placement of your target phrase is best used near the start of the tag and repeated again in the middle or near the end. Three uses of your target phrase may be helpful in some instances, as long as it is not too overwhelming. For best results each page on your site should have a totally unique title tag.

It is also important to remember that because Google will use this title as the main heading for your listing, you will want to keep it attractive to potential searchers. Try to also add a call to action, or other wording to help make your listing appear attractive to searchers.

To help illustrate the fact Google takes this tag into consideration, simply do a search for your target phrase and take a look at the titles of the top 10. I tried a search for a rather broad term “hotel” and saw that all 10/10 listings had it in the title tag, and 6/10 had it as the very first word. A quick scan showed that the entire top 30 either had the word hotel, or hotels in their title tags.

If you do only one thing to your website, make sure that all your title tags are relevant, unique, and contain your target phrase for each page.

Meta Description Tag
The Meta Description tag is still occasionally used by Google as the description which appears in the search results themselves. While this used to be a more common practice Google tends to use it most often on sites with very limited content, or those which are flash based. I have seen it still used for content rich sites, however this is less common.

The Meta Description tag still has an impact on search rankings. Your best bet when using this tag is to keep it short and sweet with your target phrase close to the start and never repeated more than 3 times. Like the title tag, each page on you site should have its own unique description tag.

Meta Keyword Tag
When it comes to Google this tag is useless, and won’t influence your rankings. There is some speculation as to whether a spammy keyword tag can however, have a negative effect on Google rankings. As a result, if you do utilize a keyword Meta tag for the smaller engines, it is best to keep it clean and play it safe.

Density
Keyword density plays a role in overall rankings; however, it is not as cut and dry as it once was. Once upon a time there was a magic number that when used could almost guarantee top rankings.

This is no longer the case. Today the ideal density varies from industry to industry, phrase to phrase. To find out what density you should aim for, take the top 10 or 20 search results and see what percentage those sites are using. In most cases you will find that the majority of these sites have a very similar density to one another, and this average density is a good estimation of what you should aim for.

Body Text and Keyword Placement
The location of relevant text on your site will help establish the overall importance of your target phrase. While you do not want to overwhelm the engines and site visitors with a bombardment of target phrases at the top of the page, try to sprinkle in some instances as close to the top of the page as possible.

Synonyms
Be sure to include various synonyms for your target phrases within your body text on your site. Google will use these synonyms to tie in the overall relevance of the page for your main target phrases, which in turn can improve your odds.

To find possible synonyms you can use a thesaurus, but the best way is to search Google itself and see exactly what they consider to be similar. Simply search in Google for your target phrase preceded with a tilde, such as “~hotels”. Next scan through the search results for any text Google has bolded. These are all words that Google considers to be related. Using the “~hotels” example Google brings up phrases such as ‘travel’, ‘tourism’, ‘accommodation’, as well as various hotel chain names such as ‘Hilton Hotels’.

Keywords in Domain
There is still some speculation if having a target phrase as part of your top level domain (TLD) is of use to search rankings. From my experience, yes, there is value here, although, nothing like it was several years ago.

If you are starting off in the online world and are contemplating which domain to go for, consider one that uses your target phrase, assuming that it is both relevant to your business name, and uses no more than a single hyphen. While multiple hyphens in a domain can be successful, they are very common with highly spammy websites, so it is best to not take that route if possible.

While having a keyword located within your domain can offer some ranking juice, I would not suggest heading out and doing a domain swap. In most cases you would be better off working on your existing site than starting from scratch with a new domain.

Keywords in page specific URL
Using keywords for specific page URL’s can also help add a little bit of value to your site, providing you use them responsibly. Consider using a keyword as a directory name and as part of a file name where it naturally makes sense to do so. If you have a website that focuses on tourism and includes local hotel listings, you may want to consider the following structure for your page on the Hilton:

MyTourismSite.com/Victoria/Accommodations/Hotels/Hilton.html

Heading Tags
Placement of target phrases within heading tags helps to establish the importance of those given phrases. That said do not over do it, or abuse it. Only place target phrases within a heading tag if it makes sense to do so, and don’t flood a page with numerous tags. Heading tags are not as critical as they once were, but still a good contribution to a well optimized page.

Link Anchor text
This is the actual text you click on as part of a link. When full or partial target phrases are used within your text links they help pass on some value to the linked page for those phrases. This is also true when considering surrounding text. When the content around the link is also relevant, the link holds slightly more value.

While a link that simply states “click here” or “www.domainname.com” does have its place, they provide considerably less value than a link that would use “discount hotels” as its anchor.

Image Alt Text
While image alt text still plays a minor role, its biggest part is within the use of image based navigation. If you have an image linked to another page, the alt text will be attributed much the same way as standard link anchor text is.

Image Alt text should always be short and to the point and should accurately describe either the image itself, or the page the image is linking to. Do not use alt tags as a place to stuff keywords.

Inline Links
These are links that are found mid sentence or mid paragraph as opposed to a simple listing of links as found in a menu or possibly on a sitemap. Links found mid paragraph tend to pass on a little more value from the surrounding text and can offer more relevance to the linked page.

Site Navigation
It is absolutely imperative that your website be fully spiderable by the search engines. This may seem obvious, but often webmasters overlook Google’s ability to crawl a website. Google has become very advanced in what links it can follow and how it can spider a website, but there are still some things that can cause significant roadblocks.

- Flash: One of the most commonly made mistakes is the use of flash. If flash is used as a sole means of site navigation then you can count on Google not viewing your internal pages, and having a significant disadvantage in terms of site rankings.

- Java Script / DHTML: These days most Java Script and even DHTML menus can be spidered by Google, however, this is not always the case. If your site utilizes any kind of fancy navigation and you are wondering why Google has not indexed your internal pages, check out Google’s Cached Text version of your page. If you do not see any text links, then your navigation may be invisible to Google.

- Images: Image based navigation has been safe for many years now, but if your site uses this form of navigation it is essential to have brief, relevant alt text on all your buttons. This alt text will act much like standard anchor text for text based links. This is not only for the purpose of search ranking value, but take a look at Google’s cached text version of your page. If you have image based links that do not have alt text, those links do not appear. This doesn’t mean Google won’t follow them, but for anyone viewing your site on a text based browser, your links will be invisible to them.

URL Structure
Avoid long elaborate URL’s with extraneous characters. While Google has reached a point where they can index massive URL strings, it is best to avoid them if at all possible. For dynamic sites consider utilizing mod rewrites to significantly clean up the URL to not only make it more search engine friendly, but more user friendly as well.

MyTourismSite.com/?locid=”victoria”&catid=”accommodations”
&type=”hotel”&comp=”hilton”

stands a better chance if cleaned up to read:

MyTourismSite.com/victoria/accommodations/hotels/hilton.htm

SUMMARY
Basic website optimization is a critical component for successful placement in Google but is only part of the overall picture.

Incoming links as well as using Google Webmaster Tools.

LINKS
Links are very important in today’s Google rankings, but just how many links you need will depend on both the competitiveness of your target phrases, and the quality of the incoming links themselves.

Essentially the number one rule of links is to keep it relevant! Topical relevance is very important in order for inbound links to give your site the most value. If the page that links to you is relevant that is good, if the entire site linking to you is relevant, that is better.

First to get an idea of how many links you may need, take a look at the top 10 ranking sites in Google and record how many links Yahoo is noting for each site. (This is because Google does not display anywhere near all the links they have noted). The average of this count is often a good indication of how many links your site may need.

There are many different ways to get links to your site including the age old reciprocal link trade, directory links, article based links, and links from press releases.

Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal linking has seen its value drop considerably over the past few years, however, if the site you are trading with is relevant you can still receive value from these links.

Paid Links
Google frowns on paid links, however that is not to say that they don’t work. Often you can find highly reputable and relevant websites which are offering paid advertising spots. If these links are coded to link directly to your website without passing through any tracking redirects, you will in many cases see value in the form of both direct traffic and increased link densities and rankings.

Articles
Writing and distributing industry specific articles is a great way to help increase both your link counts and site traffic; for examples of such content see StepForth’s SEO Blog News articles. Consider writing articles on a regular basis and submitting them to some of the more popular services such as EzineArticles. Be sure to include a link to your site from somewhere within the article, or at the very lest within your bio. Try to use a target phrase as part of the anchor text for additional value.

Press Releases
If something of importance has happened to your company such as a new product launch, or other notable achievement - essentially anything news worthy, put out a press release. Submit this press release through services such as PRWeb or PRNewsWire. Again, be sure to include a target phrase as part of the anchor text.

There are also a number of places you can get links that have basically turned south, and are not generally recommended. These include signatures in form posts, guest books, and other typically free links.

Forum Posts
Forum posts can help to marginally increase your link counts; however, with this one you must be careful. Only add a link to your site in your signature if both the forum allows it, and you are a respected member of the forum. If you are a solid contributor and your posts have depth and meaning, and the forum is highly relevant to your site, then having a link in your signature may give your site some juice. Posting wildly to random forms will in most cases get yourself banned, and will be both a waste of time and potentially make you and your site look bad.

Guest Books
In nearly all cases, do not post your link to guest books. If you happen to stumble upon a guestbook that is highly relevant to your site, the other comments are relevant to your site, and you have something useful (and again relevant) to say, then perhaps consider it, but typically focusing on links from guest books is considered SPAM and is best avoided all together.

Blog Comments
Having a link from your blog comments is not necessarily a bad thing. If you find a relevant blog post of use, and have something relevant and constructive to say, don’t be afraid to enter your link into the “URL” field of the form, but don’t try stuffing links into the comment itself.

Link Farms & Bad Neighborhoods
These are sites that allow you to simply post your link no strings attached. They are mostly long scrolling pages with countless links. Stay away from them. If you see one, run in the other direction. These links are bad, will not help with your rankings, and in some cases can actually damage your rankings.

Stay away from sites that cross link with obvious spammers. These networks of SPAM sites are not ones you would want your site associated with, and if you achieve links from enough of these sites it can adversely impact your rankings. Even more important, NEVER link to any of these sites - as that will certainly tie in your connection to them and give Google reason to discount your rankings.

DMOZ, Yahoo and Other Directories
Directory based links can be of significant help, especially if they are from highly reputable directories, the two biggest being DMOZ.org and the Yahoo Directory.

Getting a site into DMOZ is like Gold. Google loves links from DMOZ and your site will reap the benefits. The big catch however is actually getting your site into the directory in the first place. Find the perfect category for your site and check to see if it has an editor. If you see a link “Volunteer to edit this category” try and find another relevant location. Pages without active editors take much longer to get listed into. Once you find the perfect directory submit your site every 4-6 months until listed. If you are lucky you will get in eventually.

Yahoo Directory is seen as an authority in the eyes of Google, and getting your site in will help your link reputation. This link does come at a price of $299 per year, but will play a role in helping your website achieve top rankings.

There are a number of other valuable directories out there that can help you with your search rankings. Before submitting to any directory the key is a combination of relevance and authority. If the directory is relevant and active it may be worth considering.

GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS
Google Webmaster Tools can be very useful for your optimization efforts. It may not directly help you obtain higher rankings, but can help you trouble shoot if you are experiencing problems. It will also allow you to remove URL’s that you don’t want indexed and set various preferences such as your domain, crawl rate, and geographic target.

XML Sitemaps
This is the most common reason people use Google Webmaster Tools - the submission of their XML sitemap. While you can use your robots.txt to have Google find your XML sitemap, by submitting it directly to Google you can check up on the spidering status.

Error checking
Webmaster Tools is also quite useful for checking on various error URL’s that Google may know about. Under the Diagnostics > Web Crawl you can view any errors that Google has to report on your site. By cleaning up any errors you can help increase your chances of rankings.

Links
From inside Google Webmaster Tools you can get a much clearer look at what sites Google is noting as having links to you, and give you a better indication of the need, if any, to increase your link counts.

WWW Preference
Be sure to select your domain preference under Tools > Set Preferred Domain. In nearly all cases you will want to select the version including the “www”

SUMMARY

Inbound links play a significant role in successful Google rankings. By focusing on relevant links, as well as by diversifying where you get those links from, you can build a solid foundation for your search rankings today and into the future.

Completing Optimization: Other Considerations

Redirects
If you need to use redirects on your site it is very important to use the correct one. If a page is moving to a new location, or being removed all together, it is very important to have this page redirected to either the new location or the next closest page using a Permanent 301 Redirect.

While rare, if a page is being moved to a new location for a short term, with the intent of it returning to the original location, then and only then, will you want to use a Temporary 302 redirect. For more information please see Redirects: Permanent 301 vs. Temporary 302

Non WWW Redirects
To help eliminate page rank split, and provide your site with a little extra value, implement a non-www redirect. What this redirect will do is change the URL to include the "www" whenever a URL is accessed that does not include it. This can help to consolidate links to the correct page and give your site some additional strength. For more help on Non WWW redirects please see: How to 301 Redirect Non-WWW to WWW URL's

HTTP Headers
Check your page headers! If you have implemented any form of redirect on your site including mod rewrites, check your HTTP headers. You may be surprised at what you find. Some forms of redirects may use a 302 code where you really want a 301. By checking your headers you can ensure all is well, and troubleshoot problems. On our website we have added our own HTTP Header Checker for your convenience.

Home Page URL
Never have more than one URL for your home page. If your home page is available and displays on more than one URL, then utilize 301 redirects on all but the main URL you want to focus on - in most cases "http://www.xyzname.com/". All your links pointing to the home page should direct to the exact same URL otherwise you will split the value of your home page into multiple duplicate URL's.

Google sees "http://www.xyzname.com" and "http://www.xyzname.com/index.shtml" as different pages, but displaying the same content. This splits the overall value of your home page, and can decrease the chances of rankings. By keeping it consistent with a single URL, you eliminate this split and retain more of the strength.

In theory having your home page split like this could bring with it duplicate content penalties, however, I have yet to see this actually happen - that said, it is best to avoid the risk all together.

XML Sitemap
XML Sitemaps are great for ensuring that Google and the other engines are able to spider your entire site. While an XML sitemap will not directly impact your search rankings it can help as Google is more likely to see any SEO based changes more quickly, which in turn can have an impact.

Robots.txt
This is the first file all search engines look for every time they visit your site. While placing a blank robots.txt file in your root folder will not help with search rankings, it will help reduce 404 errors appearing in your log files.

It is also highly recommended that if your site utilizes an XML sitemap, to include a call to this sitemap within the Robots.txt file. Simply add the following line to ensure that the major engines (including Google) can find your sitemap:

Sitemap: http://www.xyzname.com/sitemap.xml

Potential Blockages
If you are finding that your site is simply not being indexed, it is possible that you are blocking the spiders in one way or another.

Start with checking your main site navigation, if you are using Flash or some other fancy form of navigation that could be your problem right there. Next check your HTTP headers to ensure that your home page is returning a 2xx code which indicates that the clients' request was successfully received. Finally take a look at your Google Webmaster Tools for any noted errors. If you are blocking Google, chances are you will be able to uncover the issue with these steps.

Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can be quite damaging to your rankings. Ensure that all content on your site is unique. Don't steal or "borrow" content from another site, and don't cut and paste large portions of text from one page of your site to the next. By keeping all pages of your site entirely original you stand the best chances of getting a thumbs up from Google.

Fresh Content / Regular Updates
Update your content. In highly competitive markets, sites with old static content can often slip away. Keep your content fresh and updated to keep bringing Google back to your site. If they find new pages and updated pages with every visit, they will come back more often.

Site Age
The age of your site can also have an effect on search engine rankings. While there is little you can do (short of keeping the same domain) to help on this matter, remember that the longer your site is online, the better its chances for success. It pays to select the perfect domain right from the start and not to change domains mid-stream. Older sites that stand the test of time add a level of authority in Google's eyes. New sites seldom see rankings for competitive terms in their first year.

Note: Site Age is determined not by the date the domain was originally registered but rather by the date Google first discovered content on your site.

Load Time
Load time can have an impact in your Google AdWords Quality Score but it is unknown for sure if it can also impact your organic search rankings. It is best to keep your load time to as little as possible. If it is not already a part of the Google Algorithm, it likely will be soon. Besides, it is also best in order to give your site visitors the best experience possible.

Server Up Time
This can be a rather significant issue. If you find that your web hosting company has a history of down time, change hosts. If Google comes to visit your site once and it is down, not to worry, they will come back, but if Google visits your site often only to find that it is unavailable, you can find yourself with drastically depleted rankings.

Google Local
If you have a traditional brick and mortar store, consider submitting to Google Local. While this will not directly impact your regular organic rankings, you may find your site ranking above the organic results with a "local business results" map listing. This tends to be most common when your business is near the geographic center of a city, and when the search phrase uses a geographic modifier.

By Scott Van Achte

Become an Affiliate Marketer with No Cash investment

2008-08-22T09:21:00.000-07:00

Ok, what you are about to read is about the closest thing to a “How to make money with no money” affiliate marketing guide as you will find (for free) on the internet. If you are wondering why I am offering this information for free when others are charging $50 and even up to $499 for it, well, first of all I believe there is enough room for all of us to make some affiliate money. Second, I am not going to reveal my personal niche in the article, and third it is not a “get rich quick” method, so most of you will just give up anyways.

So what is this affiliate marketing method? Well, you can call it the “article method” or the “workhorse method” or “review method”. Basically what it is all about is writing article reviews on various products and then posting them on the web with a link to buy. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Well, don’t kid yourself, it’s not. But with hard work and some luck you can easily make $50 to $500 a day with this method within 2 to 3 months.

So how do you do it?

1. Find an product to promote and become an affiliate
This can be an electronic product from Clickbank.com, or a real physical product from cj.com or Linkshare.com. As a general rule of thumb, I like to choose a product I know about that either I would use or I have used. Choosing a product you like will add enthusiasm to your review (whether you realise it or not) and create enthusiasm with the potential buyer.

I also try to choose products with a decent return (50-75% affiliate payout for electronic products, 15-25% affiliate payout for physical products) for my primary campaigns. More on this later …

2. Keyword Research
Brainstorm a list of keywords for your product and check how popular they are in Google. Remember, if you are not in the top 5 in Google then you might as well not be in there at all. Filter your keyword list down to about 15 that you think you could actually be competitive in.

3. Write an Article
Pick one or 2 keywords or phrases from your list and write your article to these keywords with a 4-6% keywords density. Be sure to write 5-6 articles for each product you wish to promote.

4. Submit your article
This is where your primary and secondary products become important. Remember that Google penalizes same content, so you want to make sure that the articles for your “primary” product only go to one article directory, and preferably that is ezinearticles.com, with a secondary option of articledashboard.com (this is just my preference, other affiliate marketers probably have their own).

For products that you consider secondary, either because of a low affiliate payout, or maybe you just aren’t excited enough about the product to really sell it, I would suggest “spamming” articles sites. I would also suggest using software to do this so you don’t waste too much time on your secondary products.

5. Add your affiliate link!
Most sites will allow you one or 2 links in your author bio or in the text of your article however most will frown on direct affiliate links. So if you don’t already have a website, now is the time to get one. The easiest way is to set up a blog on blogger.com (free) and post your article there as well, but with your affiliate links embedded (real or cloaked, it’s up to you).

6. Of course, repeat. Repeat. REPEAT.
You need to do this over and over until you have about 5 articles for each of 10-20 products for which you are an affiliate. Yes, that’s right, you will have to write 50-100 original articles (you can borrow ideas and flow from other web sites and articles, but not words – remember the lectures on plagiarism from High School?). They don’t call this a “Workhorse” affiliate marketing method for nothing.

As you can see it is possible to become a successful affiliate marketer without spending any capital of your own. Of course you will have to invest your own time, but for some people that seems to be an easier initial investment than actual cash money.

Of course if you are serious about affiliate marketing, here are some resources that are well worth the small cash investment:

Tigerdirect Affiliate Program Review

2008-08-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

One of the easiest affiliate programs available is TigerDirect. Why? TigerDirect is a very popular online computer and electronics retailer. I regularly shop for my computer needs on their site, mainly because they always have great deals. They have recently expanded into HD TVs, cell phones and PDAs as well.

So how do you can tap into TigerDirect’s success?

Step by step what you need to do to join the TigerDirect affiliate program.

Step 1: Visit the LinkShare website and sign-up as an affiliate

Step 2: Log into your LinkShare account and click on the “Join Programs” button at the top of the website

Step 3: Search for “TigerDirect” and put a checkmark in the check boxes below TigerDirect’s program details and then at the bottom press the “Apply to all checked programs”

Once your application is approved you should receive a welcome e-mail. The next thing you want to do is to start promoting TigerDirect’s website and try to get some sales going.

Here is an example of how to promote TigerDirect products

To get the banner code and other such promotional items just click on “Create Links” at the top of your LinkShare members page and select the “TigerDirect” option. From there on everything is pretty much self-explanatory.

Here is the commission rates TigerDirect offers:

Monthly Total Sales Commission Rate
$0-2,499 2%
$2500-9,999 4%
$10,000-24,999 5%
$25,000-49,999 5.5%
$50,000+ 6%

Be Careful or you Might Learn something!

2008-07-18T11:57:00.000-07:00

Nobody likes to be told what to do, and you should only believe ½ of what you hear – and yes, many internet get rich quick schemes are designed to make the author rich, not you.

Anyhow, I thought I would post this Calvin and Hobbes comic – it was always one of my favourites:

Make Money Online - Ways on Earn Online

2008-07-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

Nowadays, Internet is dominating everyone because of its limitless possibilities . You can shop online, learn and acquire information online, and most of all earn online!

Earning online is now abused today because of its accessibility (basically everyone can sign up) and it requires less effort to earn big bucks.

Here are some of the ways to earn money online:

Blogging or Online Journal- almost everyone knows blogging, the modern version of the so called Diary but not all knows that with blogging they can earn big bucks. Here you get to post anything it may be a personal type of blog, a informative style and an entertaining type. You get to earn on blogging by putting some advertisements for the visitors to click.

One of ad providers is AdSense. The advertisement on your blog will be based on the content of your blog. For example your blog's about coffee, the ad's that will appear on your blog will be based on it .Like an ad title that says Espresso Coffee Maker.

Once a visitor of your site clicked one of your ad's, cash will come in your account.

Answering surveys - Many sites today offer money by just signing up to them and answering some surveys. Each survey may cost a 2$-5$ for every answered surveys.

Like Treasuretrooper.com where they offer money for every finished surveys, they also have mini games that will boost your earnings.

eBay - eBay is a online store where you can buy and sell things. Its good to use eBay as your tool for selling things. Because on eBay there are a lot of possible buyers. Your product will be showcased over the internet. You can also auction it for you to find the price that is comfortable to you.

Visiting - Some sites will ask you to sign up to them and earn money by just visiting on their selected sites for 30 sec and you'll instantly earn cash. Like Bux.to.

Mysearchfund.com - You earn money on this site by using their search engine to search things in the net. For every search you made it is then converted to cash. The deal here is that they pay on Pounds!

By Neil Audrey Sapong

Can you get paid for doing surveys?

2008-02-29T11:12:00.001-08:00

Sites promoting paid surveys were all the rage a few years ago. These days the well of paid surveys is drying up. There are still many sites running surveys on the internet, but most of them do not pay per survey, instead they enter your name in a draw for every survey you fill out. Some pay a few dollars in gift cards, and others pay as much as $50 000 to the winners.

Most on-line surveys take 10-15 minutes to fill out. If you fit the target product demographic, you may even be invited to attend a focus group in your area (and this can pay as much as $250 for about an hour). Once you have completed your profile, the companies sent you e-mail invitations to take the surveys for which you fit the profile. So, is an hour or 2 a week worth of work worth your time? Last year I earned $6000 in prizes and cash. You be the judge …

You can get paid to read email!!! with SnapDollars

2008-02-18T05:22:00.000-08:00

I wouldn’t normally post junk or spam like this, but for once I have actually found a program on the internet that does what it says is does. Snapdollars is not exactly an affiliate program, but it is a way to get paid on the internet. They literally pay you for reading spam. You get 4 or 5 emails a day with a link in them, and when you click the link you get about 5 cents. It’s not much, but I earned $30.01 in the last 15 days and I have posted the screenshot to prove it (payout is at $30).

In addition to reading spam for money, you can also sign up for things and get paid. I signed up for 2 “30 day trials” that cost $1, but paid me $7.50 each. I guess they hope you forget to cancel, but I cancelled both about 2 days after Snapdollars confirmed my sign-up and put the money in my account.

So if you want to earn a free pizza every 2 weeks, sign up for SnapDollars.

The Rich Jerk - A Study in Anti-Marketing

2008-02-07T05:49:00.000-08:00

I've always been fascinated by "anti-marketing", and how powerful its effect can be if done properly, so when I stumbled upon The Rich Jerk salesletter, I was immediately intrigued.

I'll admit, I'm one of those people who *never* reads a salesletter when I am considering buying something (I do read them when researching techniques, but that's another story), but from the moment I read The Rich Jerk's headline, I couldn't keep from reading the entire thing. Sure, in the back of my brain, I was telling myself that I was only reading it from a research perspective, and that I had no intention of actually purchasing the book. However, by the time I was halfway through the salesletter, I absolutely HAD to buy the ebook. Even if it was just the same rehashed old stuff, this guy deserved my money just for the education (and entertainment!) I got from his salesletter. My point here is that anti-marketing works very well if done right, and The Rich Jerk has done it extremely right

However, after reading the book, I'm pleasantly suprised! The Rich Jerk does indeed contain information that WILL assist you in making more money online…

His writing style is easy to follow, and perfectly understandable if you've been around the internet for a short time, but it is definately not for complete newbies (he does not, for example, take you step by step through registering a domain name or obtaining web hosting) - if you feel like you need any amount of hand-holding, this ebook is not for you.

In the first chaper, entitled "Creating an Affiliate Website that Sells Like Crazy", he covers building affiliate websites to earn commissions from the sales of other people's products. He starts by listing 13 affiliate sites and ranks them as "must join", "maybe join", and "join if [you are] bored". Once you've selected a product to sell, he goes through six specific writing strategies to use on your affiliate site to hook the reader and get them to click through on your affiliate link. He then gives you a complete sample "sales letter" (it's more like an article) with all of his strategies at work.

The third section in chaper one discusses offering rebates to your customers, but it's not just the same old "buy from me and I'll give you part of my affiliate fee back". Rich Jerk delves into specific ways to do refunds that will increase your bottom line as opposed to simply offering a rebate.

In the final section of chaper one, Rich Jerk writes about setting up pay-per-lead sites, where you get paid $10 or so for each person who provides you with his or her information (which you then pass on to a company which pays you for the lead.) I found this section to be a bit light on content, although there is enough there to get his point across. I think this is a technique that has not been explored in-depth by any of the mainstream internet marketing channels, and one that warrants further research.

Click Here to buy "Rich Jerk"!

By Marc Quarles

How much and how soon? Questions for new Affiliates ...

2008-02-05T05:26:00.000-08:00

The most common questions I see from people new to affiliate marketing are 1. How much money can I make? And 2. How quickly can I start making money? Both of these questions are extremely important. You wouldn’t start a new job without discussing salary and pay schedules, so why would you go into affiliate marketing without asking those questions?

How quickly can I start making money?
I wanted to start with this question because I think it is the most important. The answer is (maybe surprisingly) immediately. There is a qualifier here. Making money and earning an income are very different. You can put up a website with some Google ads, post to a few sites and news groups with your URL and you will probably make a dollar or 2 your first day.

While it might be satisfying to someone new to affiliate marketing to see a couple of dollars in their Google account, this is not an income. And if you calculate the amount of time it takes to create and advertise your site, it probably amounts to just pennies per hour of work. Which leads us to the next question …

How much money can I make?
Your income potential from affiliate marketing is virtually limitless, but really, probably about 1 in every 100000 people that start will actually earn anything close to a salary at it. The simple reason is lack of knowledge and fast burnout.

Too many people dive in head first without researching their target market, assembling their keyword lists, analysing the competition, or researching their options (for example, blog vs website vs Google Adwords). After a few months of spending money on advertising and hours designing and promoting sites only to earn $50 most people will quit.

So what should you be aware of as you start Internet Affiliate Marketing?
My best advice is - have fun. Don’t expect to make money. Don’t expect to grab a top 3 ranking in Goolge in 3 months. Don’t expect $1000s of dollars in Affiliate checks every month. Learn to enjoy what you are doing and be prepared to stick with it for at least a year before you see any income.

Also, do your research. There are many great books out there (check out the Affiliate Toolbox to the right). While there are many books that are pure hype, there is also a lot of good information out there for under $50. If you are going to blog, check out "Blogging to the Bank". If it’s websites for you, check out "Rich Jerk" or if it’s Google Adwords, check out this Google Adwords Guide.

But no matter what, have fun. More to come …

Exoclick - Pay-Per-Click ads for Adult and Gambling sites

2008-01-16T05:24:00.000-08:00

Maybe it is cliché, or maybe it is sad, but some of the most viewed websites are related to dating, porn, video gaming and gambling.

My personal philosophy on web-mastering and blogging has always been to do something I like no matter how many hits it gets, and do another thing for money. It works. And my sites related to adult toys and pornography gets great traffic. The only problem comes from monetizing these sites.

Google Adsense does not run on adult content sites. Trying to fool Google can get your account suspended and banned. So what are your options? Exoclick! I am not suggesting you put Exoclick on your content rich legitimate pages. Also, according to Google terms of service, you can’t run other ads that look like, or can be confused for, Google Adsense.

Exoclick offers most of the same options as Google Adsense. Horizontal and Vertical banners (with images or plain text), search boxes, and even offers full pages and portals. Exoclick ads are specially designed for pornographic and gambling content and blend in perfectly with those types of pages.

So if you have a high readership site that can’t run Google Adsense, join Exoclick today!

Blogging To The Bank - Is Blogging Your Key To Making Money Online?

2008-01-15T08:37:00.000-08:00

I am going to bet that you are not one of the richest people in the world. As a matter of fact, you are probably an average guy or gal who works 40+ hours a week (making money for someone else) and when all the bills are paid, you have very little left to show for it. How do I know this? This describes just about everyone who starts trying to make money online. Therefore, it goes without saying that you would probably be very excited if you had a way to start cashing in without any money down and with no start-up costs. One way to start doing exactly this is to start writing a blog.

Why Blogging Is A Good Idea

Writing a blog is one of the best ways you can get started making money online because you get two things that are very important in my opinion.

You get an outlet for posting affiliate links on the web without resorting to Pay Per Click campaigns, which can become very costly, very quickly.
Blogs are easier to create than webpages because you don’t have to bother with or learn HTML.

The best part about blogging is that there are so many blog sites out there that are free for anyone to use. In the same way that GeoCities gives out free webpages, there are many sites that are turning to giving out free blogs, such as Blogger.com. Using these free blogging services, you could easily have 40-50 money making pages for free.

Why Blogs Get More Traffic

One of the most difficult parts of making money online is actually getting people to visit your website. Lots of people have tried and failed but never learned how to get traffic to their website. The secret is actually very simple. You need to get listed in the search engines. The problem is that most search engines will favor listing you more if they find you on their own. So it quickly becomes a chicken vs. the egg situation. You need to get the search engines to visit you, but you can’t submit to them because of the potential penalties. The great thing about blogging sites is that they are already being crawled by the search engines so you will automatically get listed. Blogs using RSS feeds can be listed even quicker in most cases.

Your First Money Stream

One way to make money with blogs is to sign up for Google Adsense. This is a block of advertisements that you show for Google and they pay you every time someone clicks on one of the ads. The best part about this is that it often monetizes the visitors that weren’t going to buy anything through your site anyway.

The Power Of Reviews

One of the more popular ways to start earning a paycheck is to promote affiliate products. It is a well-known fact that products on the internet sell better not through advertisements, but by reviews and word of mouth. Just think back to the last time you bought a book from Amazon. Did you buy it because it had good reviews? You sure did. The nice thing about blogs is that they are all just opinions posted by ordinary people, and because of this, blogs can be an incredible selling machine just waiting to be released.

What Should You Write About?

I often get asked what is the best topic to write about in a blog. The answer is simple. You should only write about topics that you know something about, otherwise people will detect that you are not being sincere. Pick a topic that you know lots about, and start writing a little bit each day about your topic. The best format could be anything, but think about teaching something to your readers. Make your blog a series of lessons, presented one per day or one per week. This will keep your visitors coming back every, and every time they come back you’ve got another opportunity to make a sale to them.

An Army Of One

Have you ever heard the phrase “There’s power in numbers”? This is especially true for making money online. Most successful online marketers know that when you strike upon an idea that makes you $20 per day, if you do that idea 20 times, you should now be making $400 dollars per day. Therefore it goes without saying that if you have one blog that makes you money, you should make more of them. However, there is a certain way to do this successfully, and if you do it wrong your your blog will get banned by either the blogging site, or worse, by the search engines.

Rob Benwell's Blogging to the Bank 2.0 eBook shows you how to do it the right way which will save you the time, money and frustration of trying to figure it out on your own.

Your Possibilities Are Endless

Overall, there are many ways that you could make money on the internet, but many of them will take more time, energy and money than the average person has to spend on them. Blogs are definitely one of the newest and most effective ways to earn you some cash without taking more from you than it provides. Hopefully, I’ve opened your eyes to an easier, cheaper way for making money online.

By Mark Mann

Affiliate Marketing: Find Time for Motivation

2008-01-07T10:17:00.001-08:00

The idea of intentionally taking a break from your affiliate marketing activities in order to find a source of inspiration may seem counter-intuitive. If you are sufficiently motivated to be “on the job,” why would you want to take even a second to walk away from your affiliate marketing projects in order to ingest motivational materials?

Taking an intentional break from your affiliate marketing efforts to seek out and study motivational readings serves a few important functions. Although purposefully ignoring your other responsibilities may feel odd, you will be glad you scheduled a regular chunk of your time to find motivation. Let us look at why.

First, affiliate marketing offers a very unique career dynamic. You are not just your own worst critic--you are your only critic. Others in the traditional workforce have other people to point out imperfections. That allows them to learn lessons while having a safe outlet for their frustrations. People do not just complain about their bosses for fun--it is a form of psychological self-defense, reducing the power of the critic and re-inflating ego. Affiliate marketers cannot really lash out at anyone and that can lead to some real frustration and self-doubt.

Motivational stories, illustrations and quotations are a great way to feed your self-esteem in a career that often requires you to correct yourself. Consider motivational materials a way of counterbalancing the situation.

Second, motivational materials can actually serve to increase your knowledge base and to inspire new ideas. We can get stuck in the affiliate marketing rut. We spend a certain amount of time each day on a series of repetitive tasks and before too long, we lose our edge and creativity.

By taking a break to find and read an important life lesson, we can re-energize our psyches and open the door for more creative thinking. Those “off topic” moments can inspire creative epiphanies and provide us with an important opportunity to remember and re-embrace the goals that led us to affiliate marketing in the first place. The end result? Better performance.

Not everyone in the business reads self-improvement pieces or believes in popular empowerment techniques. However, if you take a good long look at those on the top of the affiliate marketing “standings,” you are going to find that most of the biggest successes vouch for the effectiveness and importance of constant motivation.

Affiliate marketing is an exercise in consistency, focus and patience. Yes, it is also a lot of fun, but the nuts and bolts of success stem from these tried and true traits. Over time, a work life built on those objectives will begin to wear at even the most naturally optimistic and upbeat person. Affiliate marketing loses hundreds of potential success stories every year to burn out. Taking an intentional break to increase one’s level of motivation is a great way to avoid burnout and to find success.

By Dave Cooper

How to become a Super Affiliate

2008-01-02T12:45:00.000-08:00

If you are like me then you are most likely interested in multiple passive income streams. You most likely found your way here because you are interested in Affiliate Marketing?

Yes?

Over the last several months I have created a successful Affiliate Marketing business generating multiple streams of income. I have been asked so many times "How?" that I decided to write it down for everyone.

First - get a good affiliate marketing handbook that will teach you the basics. I personally recommend this handbook that got me started - and I still read it everyday and it is constantly updated The Rich Jerk .

When I first started my Affiliate Marketing business I went searching for someone who had already been successful - and I found the Rich Jerk (who wrote this handbook) who has earned more money than you can imagine selling other people's stuff online. That was proof enough for me. The book is written in a "boasting" style that keeps it interesting even after 100s of re-reads - and I still refer to it almost daily!

Next, I discovered a new book that discloses the REAL secrets of Google Advertising. Seemed to me that spending money to make money wasn't going to make me rich. Dr Jon Cohen, MD (retired) found a little-known “twist” in how to use the pay-per-click (PPC) and paid-for targeted advertising programs at Google and the other search engines and has earned an estimated $87 million in free advertising over the last 9 years.

Next, I started a blog to create passive income.

Whether you have a blog or not, Rob Benwell can help you get started and earning a profit using free blogs with his Super Blogging Secrets, also known as Blogging to the Bank ... and version 2.0 has just been released!

So What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Simply put, Affiliate Marketing means means offering "other people's stuff" for sale online... and earning commissions!
It is a way to create passive income.

For years I worked for wages that made someone else rich. I decided it's time to work for myself - so should you.

Once you have some on-line experience and a few solid sales under your belt, you should upgrade your guide as well. The Super Affiliate Handbook explained step by step how I could organize my affiliate programs onto one website and market them together. I learned what to do and what not to do.

The author of The Super Affiliate handbook made more than $400,000 her first year in Affiliate Marketing - just selling other people's stuff online!

The hidden hit machine in Google

2007-12-11T06:22:00.000-08:00

There are thousands of articles on SEO and website development for Google. In fact, there are many of them in this blog. But there is a hit machine hidden in Google that very few people exploit to generate web page hits ... and I mean THOUSANDS of hits every day.

What is this hidden hit machine? Google images.

Google image search allows Internet browsers to search for specific images (based on alt text and file names ... so do your SEO here). Google Images allows you to search a specific category and one of these categories may well be powered by actual image recognition (as opposed to textual keyword analysis). Right now, the available modes are the following:

1. show everything (the default old search)
2. show faces
3. show news images

In addition, Google Web search now puts image results at the top of the page (don't know what I mean? Go to Google and search for "birthday". What's at the top of the page? "Goolge Image results for Birthday".)

What does this mean to you, the Affiliate Marketer? Put pictures of your products and service logos on your page. Name the files correctly and insert your ALT tabs. If someone does a Google search on your product name or general service names, you might not be in the top ten, but if your image is, it will appear at the TOP of the Google search results ...

... And that can mean thousands of hits a day!

Be Patient - Google will find you

2007-12-09T11:20:00.000-08:00

The most frustrating thing about Internet affiliate marketing is the waiting. Many products out there promise to teach you how to make instant money. The reality is that all BIG money comes from a return on investment. And what better way to make a large return than FREE listings in Google.

I have posted many other articles about getting listed in Google, but there is one truth you must remember - a quality Google listing takes MONTHS.

Google's ranking algorithm ranks inbound links very highly. These links will often take 3-6 months before they are counted and calculated (and visible through Google's webmaster tools).

I have 6 blogs that were all started in September, and Google only started counting the back links in my ranking this week. However, average viewership of my most popular blog (http://pulp-pictures.blogspot.com) jumped from 100 readers a day to over 500! All my other blogs have show similar growth.

So if you are looking to make money in Affiliate Advertising, go through the normal routine of posting your site link on 2-3 pages per day. Make sure you list your blog on Technorati and ping often. Within a few months your readership will grow, and the money will start rolling in!

Pay Per Click Perfection

2007-12-03T06:46:00.001-08:00

There are several methods that you can use to drive traffic targeted to your website. One of the most effective techniques that you can use today is Pay Per Click services like Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN.

You also want to make sure that the Pay Per Click targeted traffic converts. These networks have very high conversion rates, IF you use them correctly. You can waste an unnecessary amount of money and sap your advertising budget quickly if you use them incorrectly.

Since you're going to be paying for clicks on Google for example, you want to make sure that all those clicks count. You want to get traffic to your site, but if the traffic is not converting then what's the point.

You want to target the keywords where people are searching for something very specific. Ultra-targeted keywords where you target people who are ready to purchase. For example, if your keyword terms can include "buy"if you're trying to sell something, you will find that most of the people who are clicking on your ads are in the final stage of the buying cycle.

When it comes time to actually bid on keywords, keep in mind that it may take a little experimenting in order to get things just right. You'll notice that the search engines will try and help you. The suggested bid price for each keyword phrase is just that, a suggestion. Stick to a daily budget that you can afford and an acceptable bid amount. This will allow you to create a nice test ad to see how you're doing.

Once you have your targeted keyword list complete and you're comfortable with your bidding amounts, it's time to create your test ad. A well written test ad should have your keywords in the title, description, and URL. When you place your keywords in these places, you're ad is going to stand out because all of your keywords will be highlighted.

So now how do you get to Pay Per Click Perfection?

Monitor your results - You will need to pay close attention to what's working and what isn't. If your click through rate isn't up to par or your conversion rate is low, you can make the necessary adjustments because of your constant monitoring.

Analysis your results - What is your return on investment (ROI) based upon how much you're spending for the top position of the search results in Google? Are there any more cost effective ways for you to optimize? Are you paying too much for a 1% Click-Through-Rate (CTR)?

Perfect your results - After your monitoring and analysis are complete, try tweaking your ads to increase your return on what you're spending on ads.

When you have all of this information available, it's really beneficial to create different variations of your ad to test. The key aspect is to make your changes very small. So let's say that you create 3 test ad campaigns with very small variations. There's obviously going to be 1 out of the 3 that converts the best. So you can discard the 2 weak performers and keep your golden egg.

You can achieve Pay Per Click Perfection when you continually test. Create ultra-targeted keyword lists and construct customized ads for each one to get cheaper cost per clicks. The end result will be highly relevant, top page positions. Perfection is within your grasp.

By Don Downes

Best Affiliate Program For Advertisers And Affiliates

2007-11-23T06:22:00.000-08:00

An affiliate program can be best if the target of advertisers and web-site publishers is fulfilled. One should have the technical know-how to run a best affiliate program. The refreshed marketing business is full with many programs which boast to be best. The so called best programs are run either by advertiser, web-site publishers or network service provider. Everyone infer out different meaning of best affiliate program according to his interests. However, there are different meanings of a program for advertiser, web-site publishers and network service provider too. The best program can be described as an affiliate program in which advertisers and web-site publishers share a common interest.

Best affiliate program for advertisers

It is true that advertisers are the back-bone of affiliate marketing industry. The need for advertisement gives birth to best programs. An advertiser searches for high traffic web site with relevancy to his advertised product. The sole aim of advertising is to increase sale of the advertised product. Advertiser pays to web-site publishers according to his expectations from visitors such as click, lead or sale of the product. The web-site publishers only run a program.

Best affiliate program for affiliates

Web site publisher is instrumental in giving desired result to the advertiser. A web site publisher increases the traffic on his site. The advertiser uses his traffic for promoting his product through a best affiliate program. Web-site publishers get commission whenever the advertiser gets his desired result. In a best affiliate program, web-site publishers maintain record of all clicks, leads or sales to ask a commission.

Best affiliate program for a network

The role of a network is highlighted in bringing advertisers and publishers together for a program. Marketing network mediates between the two. He looks after the interests of an advertiser as well as a publisher in a program. It is through network that payments are received by publishers. Marketing network keeps record of all the account. It keeps a close watch on the clicks, leads or sales generated through a best affiliate program. Network provides all the tools necessary to run a program to the publishers in a best affiliate program.

Examples of a best affiliate program

Cost-per-Click (CPC), Cost-per-Lead (CPL) and Cost-per-Sale (CPS) are all examples of a best affiliate program. In CPC, publishers get hefty commission on mere clicks. The CPL affiliate program generates revenue for publishers whenever a lead is received by the advertiser. CPS is the best affiliate program because advertisers pay commission on furnishing a sale. Advertisers can choose a program according to their requirements. If you need only contact details of the visitors then CPL affiliate marketing can be a best affiliate program for you. If you wish to display a banner then CPC program can work as a best affiliate program for you.

By Arun Lakhera

Raising Extra Money for Christmas Using eBay

2007-11-20T06:48:00.001-08:00

EBay and Christmas time goes together like a hand and a glove. EBay is perfect for finding great gift ideas for your family and for your friends and it’s even better for selling that knitted sweatshirt your auntie bought for you. The truth is you can buy and sell anything you want on eBay and you could potentially do all of your Christmas shopping and “post Christmas” selling using only the world’s greatest online auction site.

What many people don’t know however is that you can also use eBay to raise a tidy sum to fund your Christmas spending extravaganza. Christmas is a fantastic time of year, and while money does not make or break Christmas, it sure can help reduce stress in the run-up. This article plans to provide you with as many ways as possible to raise some extra Christmas money so you can buy that great gift for your son, your daughter or your wife.

Raising money for Christmas using eBay – Method #1

This is perhaps the easiest and most obvious way, yet many people forget to use this method when they need a little extra cash to see them through a stressful time. All it involves is selling your unwanted items that you have at home. It’s a method I have personally used on many occasions. It is estimated that each homeowner has at least $1000 worth of unwanted items at home that they could sell, but I’m sure if you dig a little deeper then you could find thousands of dollars worth of items. You could sell that TV that no one uses, that PlayStation 2 that your son got bored of after just a week, all those PlayStation games that are never used, those antiques that simply sit in a cupboard being no good to anyone and just collecting dust, those DVD’s that you’ve seen 1000 times before and are sick to death of. If you walk around your house now and took stock of everything you could potentially sell, I’m sure you could easily do without at least $1000 worth of items.

Find those items, sell them on eBay and spend the profits on your loved ones.

Raising money for Christmas using eBay – Method #2

The above method is probably the easiest method of money raising for Christmas, however this one comes close. It’s a method I am currently using to great effect. All it involves is selling other people’s stuff and keeping a per cent of the profits. To do this you need to team up with a friend or family member, or you could pursue this on a wider scale by teaming up with a local business.

If you have any technophobes in your family who can’t even find the “On” button on their PC, then they are the perfect people to team up with. (It also helps if they have a lot of great stuff to sell as well.) All you have to do is ask them if they have anything they could do without or would like to sell and if they do, would they like you to sell the items for them in exchange for a commission. If they agree, then negotiate the commission, sell their items, send their items to the winning buyers, give them their money and take your commission.

Teaming up with local businesses is also a great way to profit from consignment selling on eBay. I’m sure there are plenty of local businesses struggling to sell their stock and would love to be able to sell it online but just don’t know how to. Contact these business owners and offer them the perfect solution: you sell all the stock they would be unable to sell without your help, they take the majority of the money, still make a profit on their items and do absolutely no work!

Raising money for Christmas using eBay – Method #3

Despite what many say, selling eBooks on eBay still can be a profitable business if it’s done in a creative away. This method involves you selling a package of eBooks at a high price or small and cheap reports for a small price but for backend profits.

To sell a package of eBooks at a high price, you first need to locate high quality eBooks and software. If you are like me then you probably have hundreds of megabytes of eProducts on your computer somewhere. What you need to do is find a number of products in the same “niche” that are of a high quality, bundle them together and write a sales letter.

For example, you could create a package about adsense. For this you could add a few eBooks about making money with adsense, include some software to make adsense websites, include some private label articles to use as adsense content, include some website templates to add the content to and you could also include some ready made adsense websites. Once all of that is done, create a sales page outlining exactly what the customer will receive and how it will benefit them and list it on eBay. Sell it for $10 to $50 depending on the quality and if you just sell five or six a week, then you have created a nice bit of extra money to fund your Christmas adventures :)

The second method of making money using eBooks and eBay is to create a short 8-12 page mini-eBook which you sell on eBay for $0.01 to $1 and then follow up with your buyer about a related affiliate product.

All you have to do is find a niche affiliate product you would like to promote, write a short report related to that affiliate product, include affiliate links in the report and sell it on eBay very cheaply. This way there is a chance that a customer who buys the report for $1, then goes onto buy the affiliate product and you take a commission, usually around $30. You could easily sell 50-250 reports per week on eBay (depending on the price) and if only 2% of people buy the affiliate product, that is 1-5 affiliate sales.

Raising money for Christmas using eBay – Method #4

This method probably involves the most work and you really only need to do it if you are desperate for cash. It involves selling your skills. You list an eBay auction saying something like “I will write a unique 500 word article for the winning buyer for $X”

You could also write eBooks for customers, create graphics for customers, design websites and there are many more services you can sell. You will need to work hard for this method but it is excellent if you are severely strapped for cash.

Raising money for Christmas using eBay – Method #5

This is certainly the most creative idea and the only one I have not yet done. For this method you need to use your imagination and not everyone will be able to perform this activity. It involves taking advantage of the Christmas season and is perfect for our objective and I imagine really good fun in the process.

You could do one of two things (or both).

You could create a mystery auction where you wrap up something of value into a gift and then list it on eBay, not revealing what is wrapped up inside. These types of auctions create great interest and the bidding usually soars, you could easily take advantage of that.

Method two involves writing custom Santa letters. You simply list an item on eBay explaining that you will write a custom letter from Santa and send it to the buyer. You could sell this for $20 a time and you would probably be flooded with buyers at this stage in the year. All you have to do is create a well designed letter, fill it with the winning buyers chosen words and send it to their chosen address. It’s an excellent gift for their kids and many people would be prepared to pay for this service.

That’s about it for this article. I hope I gave you a few ideas to help you raise some much needed cash this Christmas and you could also use the majority of these methods during the remainder of the year. Have a good Christmas!

By James Penn

SEO - Hot Blog Content is Excellent SEO

2007-11-14T06:43:00.000-08:00

The most essential component of a blog is not only its keywords, but also the timeliness of its content. It is timely content that is going to attract the search engine and also readers. This means that you must have content that is unique, expert or original. When your readers add their own comments and links to your blog this expands the search ability of your content. It should also be content that is focused on one topic and that seems specialized, fresh and new.

Another essential component of Blog content is that it must be up to date, just as any news article is. This is also what marketing and advertising experts call "hot content.” Cutting and pasting articles from other sites simply won’t work because the search engine sites will simply ignore what you come up with. Nobody wants to read yesterday’s news. Or you will get a complaint if the page is indexed in the search engines and the content belongs to someone else. When it comes to hot content, originality is key!

Another crucial reason why your content must be original and fresh is because on the blogging page, your content is arranged in reverse chronological order. The most recent content is presented at the top of the visible page and provides immediate access to topics that are most timely (meaning the blogs you have just written.)

Another great thing about a blog is that it is of a viral nature. It can be distributed for free through an RSS, Atom or XML feed that allow readers to subscribe to your entries just like they would a magazine or newsletter. This means that users can subscribe to blog content. This brings repeat business to your site and increases your chances of the affiliate links inside your blogs of being picked up and spread by other affiliate marketers.

By Anthony Gregory

List Building - 3 Sure Ways to Build Your Mailing List

2007-11-07T06:11:00.001-08:00

A mailing list is very important to your online business because it represents the people who are your currently and potentially loyal customers. It's your task to make your mailing list grow in order for your business to grow as well.

When you have a mailing list, you can send members regular updates on the products, services, or facts you provide through your site. The constant communication strengthens the professional relationship between you and your customers, which gives way to better sales and profit for you.

To help build your mailing list, here are some suggestions you might find helpful:

1.) Publish an e-zine -- One way of acquiring the contact details of your site's visitors is providing them with something to sign up for. Usually, an e-zine, or an online magazine, is your best choice to do the job. If the articles you write are interesting, people will want to read more issues of your e-zine. You can take advantage of this fact by making the access to your e-zine exclusive to subscribers only. To subscribe, a visitor will need to sign up using his email address. Once you acquire the email address, you can add it to your mailing list.

2.) Offer incentives such as discounts and freebies -- It's a proven fact that people by nature have a hard time resisting free stuff. You can use this to your advantage by offering special promos on your products and services exclusive to members who sign up for them. If your site's primary purpose is to offer content, you can provide a members-only access to more in-depth articles and discussions on the already readily available information on your site.

3.) Provide teasers -- Create irresistible headlines that are sure to get the attention and stir the curiosity of your site's visitors. A headline that says "Look 10 Years Younger in Just 10 Days--No Surgery Required!" is bound to get more than its fair share of views, and you can take advantage of this situation by providing a "Sign up to read more" option once people click on the link to check it out.

By Sean R Mize

Non-SEO Ways To Huge Traffic Using Blogs

2007-11-07T06:09:00.000-08:00

If you have been looking for ways to increase traffic to your sites, you’ve probably heard the expression SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so many times by now that you are starting to get a little sick hearing about it. That are a lot of sick people out there because anybody with a web presence of any sort needs traffic.

So is there another way to generate loads of traffic without being involved in any SEO? Actually there is. And what’s more, this other method will give you much more targeted traffic.

Despite the fact that blogs are the ultimate SEO tool and weapon, the same blogs can be used for very effective non-SEO traffic generation. Actually there are quite a number of businesses doing very well generating tons of traffic using non-SEO methods.

Why Interest in Non-SEO Traffic Generation Is Growing

The SEO game has gotten extremely complicated even as the stakes have risen to dizzying heights. On one side of the divide we have search engines involved in an increasingly fierce contest for supremacy. To win this contest they have to ensure that their search results are as accurate and useful as possible to users.

On the opposite corner are millions of people with a web presence who want their sites to rank as high as possible at all costs so that they can receive the sort of traffic that will make them highly profitable or successful in whatever they are doing. Most do not really care how accurate or useful searches using search engines are. All that matters to them is high ranking and therefore high traffic at all costs. Thus they are constantly devising all sorts of methods to get their sites ranked highlky. Even as search engines are devising all sorts of methods to keep search engine results as accurate and useful as possible.

This collision course is the main cause of grief for many webmasters who frequently face a nightmare of colossal proportions. Imagine waking up in the morning and finding that all your traffic has been wiped out simply because some new rule introduced by a search engine knocked you clean off your high ranking perch, literally overnight. A position that cost you dearly both in terms of dollars and time spent working on your SEO.

Little wonder that more and more webmasters and site owners are embracing non-SEO traffic generation options. Actually a vast majority is combining both SEO and non-SEO methods to limit the chances of having all their valuable targeted traffic wiped out overnight.

Non SEO Blog Magic

There are actually several non-SEO ways a blog can generate tons of regular traffic for you. However the most effective is related to the use of opt-in email lists.

An opt-in email list is an email list created from visitors to a site who ask to receive regular emails and updates on a particular subject that is close to their hearts but also closely related to the site. An opt-in email list is more valuable than gold. It is a list of targeted visitors to your site, prepared to receive regular email from you telling them about new developments at the site, so that they can re-visit often. You can also tell them about products and services related to their interests. There are people who earn a pretty good living doing just this. They usually end up selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of product from a single simple email to a list of a few thousand.

A blog is one of the most effective ways of creating an opt-in email list quickly. One of the reasons for this is that blogs usually receive lots of visitors. Obviously not all visitors will sign up to be on your opt-in email list, but the more visitors you receive, the quicker you’ll be able to build your opt-in email list, even if just a tiny fraction end up on your opt-in email list. An opt-in email list is many times more effective in generating tons of regular traffic, including regular repeat visits than SEO is. No search engine ranking can compete with opt-in email lists. To start with lists will usually be a lot more targeted than the masses of traffic received from search engines. So how do you create an opt-in email list quickly and how do you use it to generate traffic?

By Christopher Kyalo

Prosperous Blog Affiliates - Discover How They Make Their High Staggering Affiliate Income

2007-10-30T06:08:00.000-07:00

There must be certain things that prosperous blog affiliates do that make them excel in the art of using blogs to promote affiliate programs. The fact is that most of the high staggering affiliate income made by prosperous blog affiliates is usually generated from the affiliate programs that they promote.

The question you should ask yourself now is “how does prosperous blog affiliates earn serious money from their blogs? The answer to that is that everything still falls back to the techniques that prosperous blog affiliates use to make it big.

Here are two secrets that prosperous blog affiliates use that you don’t:
(a) Prosperous blog affiliates know how to choose lucrative affiliate programs. There is no denying the fact that if an affiliate program is not lucrative, there is no way that one would be prosperous with such a program. This is one of the reasons why prosperous blog affiliates are different from you. Prosperous blog affiliates can identity lucrative affiliate programs when they see them.

(b) Prosperous blog affiliates usually test affiliate programs. Testing affiliate programs is a way to find out if an affiliate program is lucrative or not. In the process of testing, you will be able to find the lucrative ones that will generate lots of income for you like crazy. The reasons why prosperous blog affiliates test affiliate programs is the fact that not all affiliate programs that appear attractive are lucrative. There are times when the less attractive ones turn out to be more lucrative than the initially attractive ones.

These are two secrets that prosperous blog affiliates use that you don’t. You’ve discovered what they do and how they do it. Follow these simple rules and you are guaranteed to become a prosperous blog affiliate. Get started now!

By Sam Ayodeji

Going Beyond the Blog - How to Extend Your Blog

2007-10-23T10:29:00.000-07:00

This post was written by Aditya Mahesh of BlogOnExpo, a free digital conference for bloggers that will feature sessions about blogging and interviews with Darren Rowse from ProBlogger, RandFishkin of SEOmoz, and others. The conference kicks off on December 1st, 2007.

You have a successful blog. You post on a frequent basis, have a strong reader base, get a decent amount of comments, and earn some revenue from the blog you run? So what do you do now? Many bloggers simply continue to post and reply to comments. Hoping that their blog continues to grow and eventually earn more revenue.

There is nothing wrong with is, but the question I most often have for successful blogs (and by successful I don’t mean 1 million page views a month and 200,000 RSS subscribers with $50,000 in ad revenue, I mean a consistent steady reader base (5000+ monthly) and some ad revenue), is why they don’t go beyond just a simple blog?

Blogs aren’t the only way to make money online and there are tons of features bloggers can add to their website to improve the user experience and generate more revenue. Here are a few of the best features you can add to your blog.

1. Forums
Blogs are all about discussion and what better way to generate discussion than by launching a forum (eg Darren’s Digital Photography Schools Forum). Forums keep users on your site longer and get them involved in your blog’s community. There are a number of free forum programs available like PHPBB; however, your best bet for a highly scalable, reliable, and feature-rich forum would be VBulletin, the software that runs thousands of the most popular forums on the Internet. Single licenses start at $160.

2. Job Boards
Job Boards are a great way to provide quality content to your users and increase revenue. Like the job board here at ProBlogger.net, companies will pay a certain amount to have their opening listed on your blog’s job board and your visitors looking for a job will have a place to find a job in an industry they are interested in. Job boards work especially well in blogs that attract students and freelancers. You can code your own job board, or use services like JobCoin.com, or SimplyHired’s Job-a-Matic.

3. PodCasts / VideoCasts
Many bloggers run their own daily/weekly/monthly online radio or video shows and there is no reason why you shouldn’t either. While podcasts work well, I prefer to create videocasts like the one Darren has on the homepage. All you need is a webcam. Just sit in front of your computer and record a video post about anything that relates to your blog’s content. Videocasting has a number of advantages. It puts a face to the blog and is a great change from just a plain text post. Video ads from sponsors can monetize these video posts and submitting videos to YouTube and other video sharing websites can be a great way to reach new readers. Also, you can encourage readers to respond with “video comments” of their own, though this would require a video sharing script. vShare.in has a decent script for just $10.

4. Social Networks
This can get expensive and thus should not be attempted until you have a decent number of monthly readers (20,000+). To further engage your readers, you can create a social networking website like MySpace or Facebook specifically for your readers. Why would you want to do this? Well, it’s a great way for people with similar interests to meet or connect. A social network would be ideal for any type of blog that relates to business/entrepreneurship as communication is a major part of professional success and a blog’s social network will be a great place for people to connect with others in the same industry. Creating a social network from scratch can be very time consuming if you are familiar with programming/designing and can cost tens of thousands of dollars to get a custom script made. As a result, most blogger will have to go with a common script, but even these can be quite expensive. Your best bets would be PHPFox.com ($300) or SocialEngine.net ($250-$419) - (eg - check out Mashable’s Social Network for a great example of this type of thing extending a great blog).

Video Blogging and Podcasting

2007-10-22T06:50:00.001-07:00

Web logs, commonly referred to as "blogs," came into the mainstream about 2 years ago.

Not really a newsletter or traditional html page publishing, blogs resemble more of a web-based diary where the creator records their thoughts, posts links, or responds to questions.

Initially, blogs contained only text and pictures, but then came "audio blogging," which entails the use of audio on a blog.

Audio blogging also gets referred to as "Podcasting" because of the ability to let people with iPods and other portable MP3 players download your MP3 audio.

The simplest form of video blogging, or "vlogging," means putting a video file online, linking to it from your blog, and anyone subscribing to your rss feed (automatically created by your blogging software) will get notified about your new video.

They can then open up your latest blog post in their "feed reader" and view your video by clicking the link.

More advanced forms of video blogging include getting your "vlog" accepted by Apple's iTunes so their subscribers can find and subscribe to your vlog (which gives you access to 19 million users at last count).

Vloggers use a variety of video file types (like Windows Media, Quicktime, Real Media, and MPEG) and there's no restriction on which file type you use to be considered a "vlog."

However, two file types stand above the rest if you want to reach the widest possible audience.

For video Podcasting, you must publish in either the FLV (Flash Video) or SWF (Shockwave Flash) file formats if you want people on both MAC and PC to view your video files.

FLV is better suited for full motion video, but they both work on smaller length video files.

For Video PodCasting, you must publish in the MPEG4 file format or Apple's proprietary version of that format known as M4V.

Apple's QuickTime Pro software rates the simplest and easiest way to convert your video files to the proper video PodCasting format.

To create a basic "vlog," you need the following list of equipment and software: a web cam or digital camcorder; a microphone, production software; a blog; an rss feed to "syndicate" your content.

A webcam will work for a basic vlog, though a digital video camera will create much better results because they contain better optics.

Using a separate microphone instead of the microphone built into your web cam or camcorder will also produce a much better sound quality.

Once you shoot your video you need to produce it to display on the Web. At a minimum, if your computer operates with Windows XP, you can use the Windows Movie Maker software that comes free with XP.

Though you can't save as an FLV or SWF, you can save as a Windows Media file (wmv) to get you started.

For a blog, you can use the free Blogger.com service. To create a feed to syndicate your site, you can use the free service at FeedBurner.com.

Though audio blogging received mediocre acceptance from the mainstream Internet audience, "vlogging" should do extremely well simply because of our fascination with moving pictures.

If you're looking for a precedent, look how far TV has come in the last 50 years compared to radio.

By Jim Edwards

Achieving Balance

2007-10-18T07:09:00.000-07:00

I thought this would be a good read for all those working really hard and possibly ignoring some other aspects of life ...

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them - work, family, health, friends and spirit … and you’re keeping all of these in the air.

You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls - family, health, friends and spirit - are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or evenshattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for Balance in your life.

How?

Don’t undermine your worth by comparing yourself with others. It is because we are different that each of us is special.

Don’t set your goals by what other people deem important. Only you know what is best for you.

Don’t take for granted the things closest to your heart. Cling to them as you would your life, for without them, life is meaningless.

Don’t let your life slip through your fingers by living in the past or for the future. By living your life one day at a time, you live all the days of your life.

Don’t give up when you still have something to give. Nothing is really over until the moment you stop trying.

Don’t be afraid to admit that you are less than perfect. It is this fragile thread that binds us to each together.

Don’t be afraid to encounter risks. It is by taking chances that we learn how to be pave.

Don’t shut love out of your life by saying it’s impossible to find time. The quickest way to receive love is to give; the fastest way to lose love is to hold it too tightly; and the best way to keep love is to give it wings!

Don’t run through life so fast that you forget not only where you’ve been, but also where you are going.

Don’t forget, a person’s greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated.

Don’t be afraid to learn. Knowledge is weightless, a treasure you can always carry easily.

Don’t use time or words carelessly. Neither can be retrieved. Life is not a race, but a journey to be savoured each step of the way…

–Brian G. Dyson

President and CEO, Coca-Cola Enterprises during his speech at the Georgia Tech 172nd Commencement Address Sept. 6, 1996

Use Video to increase Blog Readership

2007-10-16T13:45:00.001-07:00

Blogs began as places where anyone could post his or her thoughts about anything, in the hope of finding an audience. But mostly, blogs were piles of words piled on top of more piles of words.

But that has changed in a big way, and the photographs which used to add visual interest to blogs have been supplanted by blogging video.

If you want to perk up your blog so that your visitors will spend more time with you and make a point of coming back, habits you should be cultivating if you want to turn your blog into a money maker, you need to start dressing it up with blogging video.

But that doesn’t mean you have to go out and drop a thousand bucks on a video camera.

Tip One: YouTube as Your Blogging Video Source

The Internet is awash in video sites like YouTube, where the world has congregated to share its discoveries, talents, knowledge, and daily experiences on video.

Blogging video can be used to illustrate whatever point you are trying to make with your blog. If you are trying to tell people how to become bloggers, there’s no better way to do it than to set up a series of blogging videos that walk them through the process.

If you’re a WordPress blogger, and you really should be, you’re in luck because Wordpress has a plugin designed to enable you to embed your favorite YouTube videos directly in your blogs.

The WordPress Viper’s Video Quicktags will let you embed not only YouTube videos by those from Metacafe, MySpace, IFILM, and Vimeo. What’s involved?

Clicking a button and pasting the url of the video into your prompt box. And just to make things even easier, the plugin lets you configure the downloaded videos so you get the most effective presentation on your blog page.

You don’t need to worry about embedding blogging videos against their owner’s wishes, because anyone uploading videos to YouTube can disable the embedding feature if they want.

Tip Two: How to Find The Best Blogging Videos for Your Blog

All you need to do is look over the YouTube categories, and find the one which seems most likely to have blogging videos related to the focus of your blog.

Then do a specific search in that category, or just flip through pages of that category until you find video which sounds like it might be a good fit. You can even tell how many people have watched each video, so you’ll recognize which ones have wide-based appeal.

There’s really no mystery to enriching your blogs with video content, and in the Xtreme competition of blogging for bucks, you need to do whatever you can to get an edge on other bloggers who are trying to capture the same audience as you.

Blogging video is a great way to keep your audience coming back for more, and besides, it will save you the time you normally spend in having to paint word pictures!

By Matt Garrett

Blogs for better SEO

2007-10-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

Why Start A Blog?

I knew about blogging and blogs for years before I actually started my first blog... So this begs the question... "Why did it take me over 4 years to start my 1st blog?"

Well, why would I want a blog? After all, blogs are just for geeks, self opinionated left or right wing zealots pushing some obscure political agenda, teenage school kids waffling on about their zits and boyfriends or technical journals full of terms and jargon only a rocket scientist could understand.

And I never bothered with blogs or the development of the "blogosphere" again.

Then something changed the way I viewed blogging about July 2004. I was introduced to using a blog as a tool for SEO - Search Engine Optimization. In the crudest form it was almost spamming, but done properly, it will get your website pages spidered almost immediately and indexed in less than a week.

Blog and Ping

The crude method involved first setting up both a blogger (.blogspot) blog and a free myYahoo page. You add the RSS or Atom link from your blog to your myYahoo page, so that your blog feeds into your myYahoo website.

You then write a page into your blog with links to webpages that you want Google and Yahoo to find and index. After posting your new blog entry, you then ping your myYahoo page to tell it that there's a new entry at your blog. Then you go to Yahoo, open your myYahoo page, and the blog headline should be there.

The assumption is that Yahoo would spider all feeds going into it's myYahoo pages and because Google owns Blogger.com they would spider all new blog entries at Blogger.com ... and in fact this is indeed what happens. Start a blog, add entry's to it every day, and in less than a week it will be spidered as soon almost as you post to it. But you must post daily.

By Russell Savige

SEO for Google - Keyword and Content

2007-10-12T07:26:00.000-07:00

SEO for keywords and content is relatively easy. Choose your keyword. Write content around that keyword. Use an SEO optimizer program to make sure you have done it right.

Long gone are the days of writing unrelated content, and then typing "Britney Spears" 100 times at the end of the article. Today's search engine spiders can spot the "Black Hat" SEO techniques a mile away, and your site can be banned for life.

Here are a few tips for SEO optimization:

Be focussed in your meta keywords - 1 to 3 SEO optimized keywords is enough

Put your keyword at the beginning of you page title tag.

Make sure you title tag is the first tag in the head section

Make sure your keyword appears in the alt tag for images and in link text, but no more than 3 times
Put your keyword in bold

Put your keyword in the H1 section of your page, and H2 if you can

Have a keyword weigh in your article between 3-6% (higher is "keyword spamming")

SEO for domain names

Going back to the Nike.com example from my "SEO for Google" article. Since the keyword weight is 0%, how does nike.com get to billing when you search for them? Easy, Google gives a rank weight to domain names.

Make sure your primary domain name reflects the main purpose of your site (domain SEO). This site, for example, is all about my desire to "retire with millions". The site is subdivided in to many SEO optimized sub-domains each with a URL that denotes the sections. For example, all my SEO articles are in a sub-directory called ../seo.

Many articles have been written about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Google. Google is the largest search engine (for now) and getting your SEO right for the Googlebot can make your site top ten site getting millions of hits a day. On the other hand, poor SEO and your site may never be ranked and your campaigns for Adsence will never net you any real money. Even worse, bad SEO might mean that your cutting edge product is un-findable by your customers.

SEO fo Google

2007-10-12T06:29:00.000-07:00

Google page rank is determined by a number of factors:

SEO keywords

SEO content

SEO domain name

Originality of content

Number of links from external sites

SEO keywords and SEO content will be dealt with in another article, lets focus on the other 2 for now.

Original Content

Having original content on your site is a no-brainer. It is the "why" that escapes many SEO web content developers. We have all seen the ads promising "150000 Adsense and SEO optimized pages". If it were this easy, all of us would be multi-millionaires by now. The reality is, Googlebot applies a penalty for non-original content, no mater how SEO you might think the page is. Think about it - why does "Nike.com" come up number 1 when you type Nike into Google? You or I could probably write a better SEO page about Nike than Nike.com. In fact, Nike.com keyword density for "Nike" is 0%!!!

Links from External Sites

Google take into account the number of links you have from external sites. Each link is like a "vote" for your site. Before you go and sign up for a link exchange program, consider this, some links do not count, in fact, being a "link spammer" can kill your ranking, no matter how good your SEO.

There are ways to generate quality back links:

Create a blog on blogspot.com (a Google Site) and write about your web page - include properly formatted links

Join blogs on respected sites and comment on articles, putting your URL in your signature
Write "press releases" when you update your site and post them on the free press release sites around the web

Take out classified ads in respected on-line newspapers

Make small donations to charity sites that keep a "Thank You" page and include your web site with your name

These are just some tips to compliment your SEO work to get a good Google ranking.

Ebook selling on Ebay

2007-10-11T09:14:00.001-07:00

In case you have been asleep for the past three or four years, Ebay has grown to become one of the biggest, most visited websites on the planet. As of June, 2007 it ranked as the 19th most visited website on the planet. Ebay has over 160 million registered users worldwide and only less than one tenth of one percent of those users are Ebay sellers. In short, Ebay is a big time sellers market and anyone interested in selling digitally delivered products like ebooks should not miss the incredible opportunities Ebay provides. Up until recently Ebay was not very friendly to ebook sellers, you could even say that it was discouraged.

But now things have changed.

Ebay has finally recognized the huge profit potential in opening up their vast marketplace to ebook sellers. The process of listing ebooks on Ebay and providing the buyer an instant download link has become incredibly simple, even for those who are not very web saavy. The main problem faced by many ebook sellers who list their products on Ebay is actually making money in a market where the average price for an ebook is less than two dollars. After listing and paypal fees the final price drops even further. Unable to figure out how to make a profit, many ebook sellers give up quickly or never try selling on Ebay in the first place.

The truth is, selling ebooks on Ebay is actually extremely lucrative. Many of the top ebook sellers are pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from their Ebay business. The difference between these top sellers and the average ebook seller is mainly in the methodology employed. Essentially those sellers who consistently pull in huge profits from Ebay are doing so because they have managed to turn selling ebooks on Ebay into a science. Recently, I was fortunate enough to talk to John Thornhill, who started selling ebooks on Ebay back 2005 and by the first quarter of 2007 was pulling in an astonishing $400k+ from his Ebay business. Needless to say, John does things just a little bit different than the other sellers he competes with.

Here is a brief list of things that John does differently:

1) Like most other ebook sellers on Ebay, John Lists hundreds of ebooks for sale and prices them at ninety-nine cents. John doesn’t hope to make a profit from the sale of these ebooks though. Instead John uses the cheaply priced ebooks as “loss leader” products, that is, a means of drawing buyers into his Ebay store. Once the buyer has visited John’s store he can sell them higher priced products.

2) Viral ebooks. This is a crucial component of John’s strategy. Whenever John creates a new info product he includes a link back to his store and other products and includes master resell rights. This creates a “traffic explosion” as he calls it to his ebay store

3) Re-brandable ebooks. John sells these as both loss leader products and as an inexpensive means of promoting his affiliate programs. With the sale of a re-brandable ebook the seller will earn a little bit of money up front and potentially hundreds of dollars from back end sales.

4) Newsletter subscribers. According to John, obtaining newsletter subscribers from his auctions is what has made him so successful. John does this by linking all of his auctions to his about me page. Once the person clicks thru to his about me page the visitor is offered the chance to join his newsletter. Additionally, John delivers all of his ebooks thru an email delivery system that captures subscribers. By using these two methods John has managed to build a list of more than 19,000 people. This list alone brings in over tens of thousands of dollars for John’s business.

By Zachary Skinner

The Affiliate Marketer's Toolbox

2007-10-11T09:13:00.004-07:00

Affiliate marketing tools are essential for an affiliate to succeed in making money online. Many experienced affiliates would subscribe to this idea especially when they start to see their business growing, and work done quicker and more efficiently and effectively when applying tools in their marketing efforts. Right here, we will talk about 3 must-have tools for affiliate marketing that all successful affiliates have.

These affiliate marketing tools are what separates a veteran from a newbie. Newbies would perhaps take an affiliate website and start buying traffic to promote it. They may occasionally make a sale or two but this never touched off as a proper business. Not so with the successful affiliates who would make use of proper tools to drive traffic, and to multiply and maximize their earnings.

Affiliate Marketing Tool 1 – Your Very Own Website

Many gurus would make bold claims on their sales pages that you do not even need a website to earn because they will be providing you with a ready one. Sounds good right? Well, it is great for them because as long as you are convinced that you do not need a website and only needs their affiliate site, you will be more inclined to work for them as their affiliates? Who wants to do hardwork? No one! So it is just plain gimmick to tell you that you do not need a website to succeed as an affiliate. With so many replicates out there, how can you stand out as an affiliate unless you have your very own website.

Spend some time to build a professional looking and clean HTML website. Make sure it is fast loading so that visitors do not click away. At the same time, you have to provide relevant and useful content that would be helpful to your visitors. The idea of providing quality content is to convince your readers that you know your subject well and to get them to trust you. At the appropriate time, include a sales pitch or product recommendation to presell your customers. By the time, he or she clicks to the sales page of the affiliate product, the chances of a purchase is much higher!

Websites that offer unique and quality content tend to enjoy high search engine rankings as well so that means a constant targeted stream of free traffic for you.

Affiliate Marketing Tool 2 – List Building Elements

You probably heard it a million times. The money is in the list. This is true. If it is not, why are the gurus contacting you all the time? Research estimates the value of a subscriber at $0.50 to $1 to the list owner. Imagine having 10,000 subscribers or even more in your list…

To build a list, you need list building tools such as an autoresponder and a name squeeze page with an opt-in box. To top it up, an attractive incentive such as a free newsletter or a free gift like ebook, software, templates and so on is necessary. It works like this. Offer the free gift to your prospect in exchange for their email address and name. Once you have that, follow up with them using your email series over time to build a relationship. Make use of the emailing opportunities to promote your affiliate products at different times.

Affiliate Marketing Tool 3 – Link Building Tools

Link building should be part of every affiliate’s website promotion strategy. It cannot be emphasized enough that the link popularity of your website would determine your search engine ranking. Higher search engine rankings would bring in a constant stream of quality, laser-targeted traffic that would convert easily into sales for you.

Link building tools include article submission software and service, directory submission software and service, social bookmarking tools and so on.

This is a sneak peek at the top 3 affiliate marketing tools in every successful affiliate’s toolbox. Many more ideas are available in the column to the right ...

By Davion Wong

General Tips - Making Money with your Blog

2007-10-11T09:13:00.003-07:00

Blogging is nothing more than keeping a web log, or a series of posts on absolutely any topic you like. The majority of bloggers are just personal blogger, writing about their daily life and experiences. These people tend to have a large following among family and friends, but not necessarily anyone else, unless they happen to have a fascinating life. Blogger.com is where you can start your project, follows the steps, is very easy and free. In order to earn money blogging, you need a topic that interests someone besides your mother. That doesn’t mean choosing a technical or difficult subject, just one that will draw a crowd when you write something interesting about it. This could be anything from natural cosmetics to horror movies and anything in between.

Although some recommend choosing your niche based on things like high quality keywords, I personally believe that you are far better off selecting a subject that interests you. After all, you will have to write about it day in and day out for the next several years if all goes well! You ought to feel some passion for the topic.

Starting a blog is easy enough. Most people have plenty of ideas at the beginning. You can start off with a handful of articles on the basics of your topic and then post every day or every week, as you please, from then on. Keep your blogging posts on topic and full of interesting information to bring people back.

Now, just because you start blogging does not mean people will come flocking to read what you write. In fact, you will probably be dismally disappointed when you see the hits counter hasn’t budged in a week. Once you have a few posts up, it is time to start promoting your blog. That means talking it up to friends and family, MSN contacts and adding your blogging URL to your signature line anywhere you can . . . in your email, forums and assorted message boards. These also count as backlinks which will eventually help you out in the search engines.

Earning with blogging can be done in several ways. For example, you can add ads to your blog. Adsense is a good one to start with, but there are plenty of alternatives. You can also take on a paid review ad from a website like Pay per Post or something similar, where you write a review of a product and post it on your blog and the site will pay you.

Affiliate marketing is another way to earn through blogging. Recommending a product and then offering your own affiliate link for buying it or signing up for a service is a good way to monetize your blog, I recommend thenewsroom.com,every time someone visits your blog you'll get paid.

You could also try selling your own products. These could be real life products that need to be shipped, print on demand products like from CafePress or Printfection, or information products like e-books. The idea is to turn blogging into a profitable venture.

Even after you start selling on your blogging site, remember to continue offering good solid information on your topic.

By Alejandro Leguizamon

Be patient - Blogging income takes time ...

2007-10-11T09:13:00.001-07:00

Are you trying to make money online? One of the most popular ways to make money online lately has been blogging. One of the quickest ways to make money with blogging is to join a blog network, like b5media. When I make money I make them and have a plan for them.

Blogging is an easy way to make money online. One of the current and most popular trends around at the moment is to create your own blog site. Blog readers get to find out other good blogs without leaving the blogs they love the most. Blog growth is and will be huge. However, blogging is not as easy as what it seems, you may have a good knowledge of computer/html/search engine tweak but without consistency or determination, you will never succeed. If you are not familiar with blogging it's basically the process of keeping an online journal that others can read. Do you visit and read many blogs about making money online? No matter how few back links that your blog will get will still count as votes to your blog for the anchor text that you used. However, if you wish to use hosted services (if setting up your own blog, etc is not something you wish to do), you can use Blogger. Once you have your blog set up, start adding content. They are completely free to set up and use, within minutes you could have your own blog online; with advertisements in place so that you can start making some money from your work.

A niche market is a specialized portion of a large market which normally has its own potential customers. Pick your niche, but make sure it is not too small. Pick a niche for your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it is a big enough niche that you can build significant traffic. Do not pick a niche just because you think it will make you money. But while focusing on your main goal to make money with your blog, it is better if you stay focused on your niche market. Building tightly, laser-focused niche blogs with your affiliate links in -- earn rewarding commissions for every successful referral sale you make. In other words, a profitable niche market is a market with a large number of Demands. As you may know, selecting a niche market is determined by finding some related keywords and key phrases. While you can do all the research process on your own, there are some great tools and resources which may help you find a profitable niche market. At many times long tail niche is very powerful and can give you a very competitive edge.

Blogging for money might sound easy enough (in some aspects it is) but, like any method make money online, it takes determination, dedication, and a true desire to make some good money. Bloggers never fail to make money online. So do not waste your computer by leaving it when you are moving out of it instead make money online with it. Even with very low traffic Bloggers can make money.

Additional Resources:

Atomic Blogging

Web 2.0 Wealth System

Blogging to the Bank 2.0

By Kelvin Frank

Blogging : Affiliate Marketing with Popshops

2007-10-11T09:12:00.003-07:00

You can make money by selling products or services on the Web. But what if you have no products of your own to offer?

If you run a popular informational Web site--perhaps a blog--there are several ways to capitalize on the value of your Web visitors and develop a new source of business income. One of the most popular methods is affiliate marketing, which lets you earn money by marketing other businesses' products and services on your Web site.

A new service from PopShops.com lets you create virtual storefronts to advertise affiliate products on your Web site or blog. PopShops doesn't work easily with every type of blog, but it can make quick work of designing and setting up a storefront. The basic service is free; editions with more capabilities cost up to $30 per month.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Some businesses let you sign up directly with them to sell their products, but many have joined affiliate networks. An affiliate network eases the administrative burden for both the business with something to sell and the information publisher who wants to earn money by marketing third-party products.

As a publisher, when you join an affiliate network, you gain access to dozens or even hundreds of potential advertisers at one fell swoop. Advertisers benefit since they don't need to cut thousands of little checks each month to pay each of the publishers selling their products. They pay the network, which makes one monthly payment to the publishers, accumulating earnings from all advertisers on the network. Generally these networks set a minimum amount that you must earn before they send you payment--for example, if you earn $40 per month and the minimum is $100, you won't get paid until the end of the third month, when you'll get a check for $120.

Typically, publisher earnings are based upon visitor purchases or some other desired action. In other words, the publisher makes money only when someone clicks an ad link on their site and makes a purchase from the advertiser. The publisher's earnings might be either a percentage of that sale or a flat fee.

Some affiliate network advertising merchants are well-known and established businesses, such as Kodak and Panasonic. Others you may have never heard of.

How PopShops Helps Publishers

There are many affiliate networks: LinkShare and Commission Junction are two established ones. Each network has its own conditions for accepting publishers and its own methods for how you must add advertiser links to your site.

The ad-linking requirements can read like so much technobabble to new publishers. That's where PopShops can help. The service integrates with several popular affiliate networks to ease the burden of designing a virtual storefront, selecting suitable products for it, and creating the ad-linking code for your online store.

Once you sign up with PopShops, you can use its Shopbuilder tool to view a list of all advertising merchants it supports. Clicking on an advertiser lets you drill down and view its products. Then you can click on a product to add its image and link to your virtual store.

The ad-linking code for the store is created by PopShops. When you're done, you publish your store by inserting the PopShops code into your Web page.

The beauty of PopShops is how easy it makes creating a store that mixes and matches products from different merchants from several affiliate networks. Currently, PopShops supports five affiliate networks (Commission Junction, LinkShare, Performics, Red Galoshes, ShareASale) with data feeds from over 1000 merchants offering more than 22 million products.

PopShops Limitations

You can set up a PopShops account in 5 minutes, but you're on your own when it comes to creating accounts with the affiliate networks that the service supports.

To join an affiliate network you'll need to do your homework and gather some information. Most networks want details on the number of your monthly site visitors, the content that your site contains, targeted visitor demographics, and so on. Count on spending at least 20 minutes to complete each affiliate network publisher application.

Once your application is approved by an affiliate network, you can enter your affiliate account name into your PopShops account.

Not all advertisers on affiliate networks offer data feeds; PopShops limits you to those which do.

PopShops has a widget that you can plug into a Blogger or TypePad blog. Support for WordPress is weaker, though a plug-in is planned. For now, WordPress bloggers will need to play with JavaScript or PHP settings to use PopShops. Frankly, if you have the technical savvy to do this, you probably don't need the training wheels that PopShops offers.

Can You Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

You must welcome a significant number of site visitors to make money using affiliate marketing. If your site receives just five or ten unique visitors per day, don't waste your time joining an affiliate network or setting up a virtual store; your time would be better spent increasing the popularity of your site and improving its content.

I recommend holding off on affiliate network marketing until you receive at least 1000 unique visitors per month. Even at that level, your affiliate earnings will likely be skimpy. Perhaps you'll earn enough to pay your Web hosting bill with enough left over to treat yourself to lunch. However, your site won't deliver a sizable supplemental income.

Another key element to success is matching the interests of your visitors to the products that you offer in your virtual store. For example, if you publish a blog related to outdoors activities, camping gear may be a good choice.

If your site receives many visitors and you select appealing products and services, affiliate marketing can be profitable. You may earn thousands of dollars each month--I know, because I've done it.

Is PopShops Worth It?

PopShops' basic free service lets you establish up to ten virtual stores, marketing up to 100 products per store. You risk little using the freebie service--just an investment of some time to sign up and then to modify your Web site.

PopShops Pro ($5 per month) can create an unlimited number of shops and lets you add search engine-friendly code. PopShops Enterprise ($30 per month) also lets you manage multiple affiliate IDs, which could be useful if you run several different Web sites. A 15-day free trial is available for Pro and Enterprise accounts.

If you already run affiliate marketing sites and have your ad-linking procedures worked out, I recommend you test the free service to check out PopShops on one site. You can upgrade to a more-capable paid account if you believe the service is worth it.

by Richard Morochove, PCWorld Magazine

Tag and Ping!! (Not Swedish Twins)

2007-10-11T09:12:00.001-07:00

If you're just heard the phrase 'Tag and Ping' and scratching your head in puzzlement --- this article may be worth your time. Not that Tag and Ping is some magic marketing formula that will deliver untold riches. It won't.

It is just one more marketing tool professional online marketers are using to give their site or sites a competitive edge over their competition. It will help put your site on the Internet map and if done right, Tag and Ping will deliver plenty of very targeted traffic to your sales pages. It will boost your rankings and increase your sales.

Tag and Ping is one of those simple, yet relatively unknown marketing techniques savvy Internet Marketers have been using and trying to keep quiet for years. To truly understand how Tag and Ping works, you will have to know some basic background information on keywords, blogging, tags, and how all these can work in sync to deliver traffic, links and sales to your site.

What are Blogs?

Most web users will know a blog is an online journal where bloggers post their daily or hourly entries (their opinions, views, info, links) on any subject that interests them. The most popular blogging systems are Blogger.com (owned by Google) Bloglines (owned by Ask Jeeves), LiveJournal, and many professional marketers use the free WordPress software which they can host on their own websites.

Each blog has its own RSS feed -- RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication although its original acronym stood for Rich Site Summary. These RSS feeds broadcasts the information in the blog posts to all concerned parties -- those who have subscribed and use an RSS reader or aggregator to view the posts. Or more commonly, they use the FireFox browser, Google Desktop, or MyYahoo to access their favorite RSS feeds. The next version of Windows will have RSS embedded into its operating system.

What are Tags?

Tags are really another name for keywords. Most surfers will know keywords are the exact words Internet users type into search engines to find what they're looking on the world wide web. Tags work in the same way and are a form of social bookmarking, a way of classifying and accessing all that content in all those countless blogs.

Many major blogging directories such as Technorati use tags to serve up the information to its patrons. One simple technique to create a tag in Technocrati:

<*a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Laptops" mce_href="http://technorati.com/tag/Laptops" rel="tag">Laptops<*/a> (remove asterisks in actual code)

Or if your blogging software supports categories; this will be recognized by Technorati as a tag.

What the heck is a Ping?

A ping is a simple way to notify the different search engines to let them know that your blog has been updated. You call up or ping your blog post.

You bookmark or place an entry in any one of the countless blogging sites such as Technorati, Furl, del.icio.us, Blinklist, Flickr --- you go to these sites and click your blog or tag to inform them you have updated your blog. Many blogging systems will automatically ping your blog updates.

Or you can do this manually, for example Technorati's ping form is here: http://www.technorati.com/ping

Simple Way to Ping

If this is still confusing to you, one simple way to ping your tags/blogs is to use a site like: http://pingomatic.com/

and it will automatically ping your blog in many of the most popular blogging services.

Enter The Online Professional Marketers and It All Hits the Fan

Of course, online marketers have long discovered that the whole blogging system -- blogs, rss, tags, pinging -- is an excellent marketing vehicle. One great marketing system delivering targeted traffic to their products and services.

It really is a corruption or commercialization of blogging and this surely wasn't the idea the original designers of blogs had in mind. But the whole blogging system is so lucrative, many professional marketers (the author is pleading the fifth!) are using blogging systems like WordPress to create mainly marketing sites that may have little resemblance to a real blog. It just uses the backbone structure of blogs, RSS, Tags to give their sites a slight competitive edge in a very competitive world.

As we saw with the 'comment spam' there is a great likelihood that Tag and Ping will be misused and further antagonize the blogging purists. So if you are going to use Tag and Ping make sure you're creating valuable, usable content -- then most sites will want to link to your site anyway. Content is still king no matter what tricks the professional marketers want to use. Always will be!

Using a Simple Tag and Ping Marketing Technique With Technorati

To explain further the whole idea of Tag and Ping. Lets just walk through a marketing system you can quickly create using Technorati, one of the most popular blogging services.

First, sign your blog up with Technorati. This is quite a simple procedure. Just upload a photo, doesn't have to be of you -- your site's logo will do. Register your profile with your 20 or so tags relating to your blog. Make sure these are keywords you're marketing with your blog. Then you have to place the Technorati code on your blog for a link back.

Next, you must understand that Technorati creates a landing page for each tag in their system. This page is made up of four parts:

- Flickr Photos

- Recent blog posts tagged with that keyword or phrase

- Who’s Blogging About sidebar which links to any profiles of blogs

that those same keywords or phrase in their profile

- Links from Furl for the same tag

So to take full advantage and to use this marketing technique you have to sign up with both Flickr and Furl. Your aim is to get your links in all four spots on this Technorati landing page for your tag or keyword.

When signing up for Flickr, many marketers use their site's name for their Flickr username, just use a dash instead of a dot in your site's url. You can use a photo of the product they're promoting to get a link from Flickr in the top spot on the landing page. Pick your tags and description for the product.

Set up a Furl account and download the Toolbar , bookmark a few sites to get the hang of how its done.

Now You're Really To Put Everything Together To Tag and Ping

1- You can start with the Flickr photos at top of the Technorati page.

Just post a photo or cover image into your Flickr account, making sure you tag it and use a catchy headline in your description. Link it to your landing or affiliate page url. Example:

Don't buy another marketing tool until your check out this site.

2 - Next, make the first of your blog posts on your particular subject or product to your blog, making sure you tag it with your keywords and then ping Technorati. Make all your posts good content, reviews, product information or free downloads. Your entry will appear on the top of the list for that tag shortly in Technorati.

3 - Furl your blog post and your landing/affiliate page with your tags to make sure your entry/post is listed the bottom section of the Technorati page for your tag.

To work this system, add another blog post every few hours, Tag and Ping, plus Furl your posts. For better results you can sign up for countless other social bookmarking sites and bookmark your pages. Here are just a few good ones: del.icio.us, blinklist, moreover, icerocket, weblogs...

Flickr, Blog, Tag, Ping, Furl

This is just one Tag and Ping method, professional marketers have countless systems and sites working many variations on this relative new marketing technique. But the information given above should get you started on your own Tag and Ping marketing system.

Remember, blogging and RSS are the wave of the future, make sure you're geared up to take advantage of all they have to offer. You must have at least one blog on your site. Use WordPress if you can -- Blogger will do in a pinch!

Just make sure you're using some Ping and Tag marketing techniques to harvest all those links, traffic and sales for your site. This is one marketing technique you should now be using. Just remember to Flickr, Blog, Tag, Ping, Furl - Rinse and Repeat!

By Titus Hoskins

Products to Monetize your Blog

2007-10-11T09:11:00.003-07:00

Blogging has become the preferred web site format for creating profit pulling content sites. Blogs are extremely easy to create and update with fresh content.

The steps involved for successful blogging include selecting a niche, grabbing a domain name, setting up your blog, traffic generation and then monetizing that traffic.

When trying to make money blogging the vast majority of people hit a brick wall when they hit the traffic generation aspect of their new blogging empire. Unfortunately for them, traffic generation and improving your conversion rates are the two biggest components of successfully creating a profitable blog.

While content creation is obviously a very important part of your blog (no content, no blog!), it's also something you can outsource. Some bloggers outsource all of their blog content to freelance ghostwriters and they focus solely on traffic generation and monetization.

Generating free traffic is the best way to make money blogging and it's still within reach, although it may not be as easy as it used to be. You can include search engine optimization of your blog posts to eventually drive organic search traffic to your blog.

Article marketing is still a great free way to drive traffic to your blog. Write articles on your blog topic and submit to article directory sites like EzineArticles.com. Article marketing is also a great way to get links to your blog. This will help drive more traffic as well as help with your organic search engine rankings.

Take advantage of Web 2.0 traffic generation and link building. Create profiles at sites like Digg and Netscape and submit your best blog posts to those sites. You can also find a bunch of these social new and bookmarking sites that are specific to your niche and submit blog posts there as well.

Register your blog at Technorati and tag popular and relevant keywords in your blog posts.

Be sure to comment on other popular blogs in your niche. Be sure to provide real value with your comments so that you are never accused of spamming other blogs.

As you can see, there are still many free traffic generation strategies you can use to make money blogging.

Once you are generating traffic you can experiment with a variety of ways to monetize your blog. You can use: Contextual Advertising such as Adsense, Affiliate Programs, Your Own Products, Paid Advertising (Banners or Links), etc. Then you can track your visitor value and test a variety of layouts and offers to keep increasing your value per visitor.

By Gregg Gillies

Top Blogging Mistakes (and how to avoid them)

2007-10-11T09:11:00.001-07:00

Are you doing it all wrong? You may be killing your own blog.

You log in to your blog, you write the post, you logout. Standard routine. STOP! Think you are doing everything correctly? Msitake Don't write another blog post until you read this.

Blogging Mistakes #1 - Not choosing the right title for your post

The title is the first contact point between you and your blog readers, if your titles failed to impact the reader, your post might not be read. How many times have you simply chuck in the title after you have complete writing the content? Its very common for top bloggers to use interesting titles to catch the readers attention. Why not spent a little more time on your titles.

Blogging Mistakes #2 - Not using the right targeted keyword for your post

Every webmaster knows that keyword is the key to SEO. Choosing the right target keywords can make or break a website, influences its ranking on searching engines, but do you know that your content should have targeted keywords? How much time did you spent on planning that keyword for your content? Not only is the keyword for your content important, it is essential to tag your post with the right keyword tag.

Blogging Mistakes #3 - Announcing your post

Top bloggers email other bloggers and their readers when they post an interesting article. Ever wonder why some blogger's articles get mention by a few bloggers? Why not try emailing a few other bloggers for your next post asking for feedbacks. If you article interest them you might get a few links and if not you have nothing to loose.

Blogging Mistakes #4 - Returning comments

Blogging is about communicating and building relationship with your readers. When a reader comments on your blog reply them through your comment, email or blog post. Returning comments not only keeps the commenter on your blog but make your blog interactive, and thats the whole point of web 2.0 and blogging.

If you are making the same mistakes, STOP!

Additional Resources:

Atomic Blogging

Web 2.0 Wealth System

Blogging to the Bank 2.0

By Bob Ong

SEO Blogging Software

2007-10-11T09:10:00.003-07:00

The Making of bogs has become more and more popular throughout the past 2 years as a result of the fact that it is much simpler than building a well established website.The majority of poeple who are out to make money make use of blogs as they are simple to work with and can obtain decent rankings in a much shorter period of time than websites.Lets briefly take a look at the seo techniques which can help increase the popularity of links and rankings of a blog.

First of all lets talk about content.Having lots of unique and targeted content on your blog is just as important for blogs as it is for websites, so make sure you have as much as possible.There is also the possibility to make use of content generators which allow you to spin different versions of an original blog post which can help save time.

The second aspect is that is important to build up some quality backlinks by participating in link exchanges with people who have blogs or websites in the same niche as you.Even better, try and buy links on blogs or websites related to your niche with high page rank and backlinks as this can greatly help your rankings.You can also submit your blogs rss feeds to blog directories which will notify them to publish your content on their blogs which can bring you more traffic.

Lastly another important aspect is pining your blog.It is essential that each time you publish a new post for your blog that you utilise a service like pingoat to ping your blog.What this does is it notify sites like technorati, digg and other popular bookmarking sites and blog directories that they need to crawl your blog for your newly published content.this will help more pages to get indexed in the on google and yahoo quickly and ultimately results in a bit more web traffic too.

I trust these few tips helped you in optimising your new or established blogs.

Additional Resources:

Atomic Blogging

Web 2.0 Wealth System

Blogging to the Bank 2.0

By Stephen Ahlfeld

How to Sell on Ebay - Top Tips to Big Earnings

2007-10-11T09:10:00.001-07:00

Selling on ebay can be very lucrative. Before you begin to sell a product on ebay, you should learn a few selling strategies to give you an idea of how this number one auction site can help make your ebay business a success.

Some people sell on ebay as a hobby or part time as a way to make a little extra money. If you are looking for a get rich quick business, this is not the business for you. Selling on ebay requires some work and it will take a little time to build your business and make it a success. Before you begin, you will need to find a product that is popular with those who shop there.

NOTE: You must be an eBay member to sell on the site (

Become an EBay Member

)

Here are some ebay selling strategies:

1. Set the starting price low. This will stimulate more traffic and get bidders interested in the item. Let’s face it if a bidder thinks they can get an expensive item for $1 they will bid on the item even if it is something they don’t want. This will usually get a higher final price on your auction items.

2. When possible, do not use reserve prices. Bidders may get discouraged and not bid if they see a large reserve price. The idea of an auction, for most, is to try to see how cheaply they can get an item they would like to own. Use reserve prices with caution.

3. Always include a photo in your listing. When a bidder can see the quality of the item they are more likely to bid on that item.

4. If you have more than one of any item, try selling them one at a time. You will find bidders will be looking for the item to come on the auction block again if they were interested in it before they will jump at the chance to bid on it again.

5. Try to use correct spelling when you write the sales pitch for ebay. You want the bidder to think you are intelligent and in control of your business.

6. Use descriptive words when writing your sales pitch. You can even mention the retail price of the item. This will show the bidder how much less he is getting the item for and he will be more likely to bid.

7. Auctions should never be shorter than 7 days. This will give your item time to be seen by more bidders. The longer the auction, the better results.

8. Make sure your auction does not end during peak bidding hours. Make it a bit after 9 p.m. And you will see a better result.

9. Watch your shipping costs, try and keep them reasonable. Check with your dropshipper, UPS, or post office to see how much you will need to send the item, and charge accordingly.

10. Try to avoid negative feedback. Make sure you describe the item correctly, so there will be no confusion about what the bidder expects. Also try to make sure the item gets to the seller in a timely manor.

11. PayPal is your best bet when collecting money from bidders. It is a safe way for you to receive funds without taking credit cards yourself. PayPal offers a debit card that gives you immediate access to your money as soon as it is posted in your PayPal account.

Paying attention to these ebay selling strategies will have you walking away with more sales.

By Tanner Larsson

How to Increase Blog Readership

2007-10-11T09:09:00.001-07:00

Remember: There are MILLIONS of Bloggers out there. Many bloggers write about the same subject as you. So, how do you make someone want to read your blog as opposed to another? Your HEADLINE - which should push an emotional, intellectual or sexual button in a potential reader, and make them want read your post.

The importance of grabbing the attention of a potential reader

You must accomplish this than with the first few words of your blog post. Make sure the topic and your arguments are clear in the first few lines. If your blog follows current events, make sure the who, what, when, and where are covered in the first few lines. Make the reader read your blog post to find out the why.

Tips for blogging:

The best time to post is at the beginning of the day (12:00 AM GMT - with most blogging services you can set your post on a time delay). Your blog post will be dated for the next day and potentially exist on blog indexed for a few more hours than your competitors.

Use excite terms like EXCLUSIVE!, LATEST!, FISRT!, FREE! in your headlines. People will be drawn to these headlines and will be more likely to read your blog post first. You can also use words with sexual undertones, or a comedic snap. Certain words create subconcious emotional responses in people. Use your imagination.

Don’t be predictable, but be predictable. Your audience should know what to expect from your work but be surprised and excited by the content.

If there is a photo in your blog don’t identify the subject directly underneath the picture as the names will used by search engines as part your first two lines. List the names of people in the photo at the bottom of the article.

Think of the simplest, most descriptive term that you would put into a search engine, then use it in your headline.

Acknowledgment is important. When someone makes a comment on one of your posts, send them a short e-mail thanking them, even if it’s just a line or two. If someone sends you something that you’re able to use in a post. Credit them at the bottom and hope they’ll send it to all of their friends. Developing a returning readership is easier than trying to get 1000 new unique visitors every day.

Use a “Pinging” service - Pinging services like AutoPinger combine all of the most popular blog directories and provide you with one place to enter your details.

If you know that you have a target audience that likes your blog content it is good to inform websites that carry news about your subject. Over time you may even develop a relationship with the site owner or webmaster and they might post your news immideately.

Additional Resources:

Atomic Blogging

Web 2.0 Wealth System

Blogging to the Bank 2.0

Resource: Guide to Advanced Blogging with Proven Results by Artie Wayne and Sebastian Prooth

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Blogs

2007-10-11T09:08:00.001-07:00

Blogs are generally search engine friendly. Blog content is usually:

text based

full of text links

Updated often

Use style sheets with very little extra HTML

I talked before about choosing your blog topic and keywords. The next step in getting people to your blog is to use general Search Engine Optimization tips. Follow some general rules for SEO and your blog can rank higher than static website pages in the search engine results.

Some general tips for Ranking well in Search Engines, especially Google:

When you choose your own domain, or a blogging site / service, make sure you primary key word is in your domain or sub-domain name.

Keywords need to appear in the headers for each post

Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post

Use your keywords in the anchor text of links

Make sure search engines can spider your blog easily

Get back-links from other blogs or websites

Update frequently

Keep your blog on the same domain for a long as possible. It may take a year for your listing to appear in search engines

SEO can be a manual process, or you can use specially designed software to do your SEO for you. I have always used software because it will catch the errors that the human eye may not. When you are trying to earn a living off your sites, it would be a shame to have one small stop word or extra piece of code stop the search engines from ranking you (and it does happen).

The next few blog posts will cover the various aspects of SEO, each one in turn and in depth (you can also check out the static posts in the SEO section of this site). If you can't wait, I suggest you purchase SEO Secrets for $10 or the ultimate resource Blogging to the Bank v. 2.0.

Leveraging Social Networks for Affiliate Marketing

2007-10-11T09:07:00.002-07:00

The growth of social networks has given Affiliate Marketers worlds of new opportunities to make contacts, expand their own personal social network and promote products to a different client base in new ways. Static website are almost a thing of the past, and waiting for Google Rank or paying for Adwords is sure to make you broke!To start, what is a social network? Most people think of MySpace and more recently Facebook. While these are social networking sites, and Affiliate Marketer must embrace a broader definition:

"Any website that provides a way for users to interact - such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, etc."

Unlike the days when Google Search and Adwords would send targeted "ready to buy" customers to your website, social networking sites take a little more work before you can even consider directing people to a sales pitch (social bookmarking). Social networking sites often have strict rules about selling, posting links etc. Make sure you are aware and comfortable with them before you start posting. Most sites will let you post to them with a signature that can contain your URL. Use it. Post often, but don't spam.

Remember that your post content is what will gain you the reputation on the site that may eventually lead to sales. Personally I take 2 approaches to this:

I am extremely helpful and friendly and try to answer ever question I can with a thoughtful and helpful answer.

I try to take the extreme opposite or unpopular view from the majority of the posters. Never become insulting or aggressive. Present well thought out and researched answers that will make people think.

I find that my "negative" posts drive about 50% more traffic to my sites than the positive ones, however, sales number are about even which means I get a better ROI being positive and helpful.

When posting to blogs, keep your comments short and provide your web link with a descriptive in the comment text. Most blogs will link your "username" to your website, but that won't drive much traffic. If comments are moderated you will actually need to spend some time writing something, but it usually doesn't need to be more than a short comment to be allowed by the moderator. If your comment is more than about #10, don't bother unless you have a nice piece of ASCII art or something else that will draw attention.

File sharing can be a good source of traffic. Create an e-book (or re-brand one that has no copyright) and share it on P2P and torrent sites. Make sure to include links to your site or some sort of promotional material to drum up visitors. Don't expect many sales of traditional Affiliate products this way, but if the product you are promoting is well respected and related to the topic, you might get a few (Last year I had a lot of success with an e-book of Video Game Cheats packaged with Affiliate links to Video Game pages on Ebay).

The hottest social networking site for Affiliate Marketers right now is Squidoo. This is a topic too broad for this blog post, but you can get more information about branding on Squidoo here.

Next post I will discuss using article sites and software for branding and traffic generation.

Choosing Keywords for Each Post

2007-10-11T09:07:00.001-07:00

There are a few tools that every affiliate marketer (who wants to be successful) must have in his or her toolbox. You definitely need some ad creation and distribution software, article distribution software and a keyword tool. I will cover each tool in turn, beginning today with keywords.

It should be no mystery to you that Google and other search engines capture sites to their index and return results based on keyword searches. Getting into Google is a topic for another time (and a complex one), but choosing the right keywords can mean the difference between being in the top 10 or bottom 10. ONLY top 10 results will ever get natural search traffic to your site or blog.

There are a few tools available for keyword searches (Wordtracker and Keyword Elite are historically the top 2). Personally I use Wordtracker for one simple reason - portability. Wordtracker is web based, so I can use it anywhere I am when I get inspired to write a blog post.

In short, a keyword tool works like this - you type in the general keyword (ex. blogging) and the tool returns the top 100 or so related search terms and the number of times that term has been searched in the last month. Generally I prefer to be a big fish in a small pond, so I choose the terms in positions 3 to 8 and try to work them naturally into the text of every article or post I make on that topic. That part can be done using the free Wordtracker tool.

What you can't do with the free tools is keyword research. With the full tools, you can research online markets, find niche opportunities and exploit them before your competitors. And really, that is how you make money. Keep an eye on the search trends in your niche market. Terms have a natural ebb and flow that can be influenced by time of year, news stories and other events (ex. "online shopping" has a natural peak in late November for Christmas related keywords and late January for Valentines day related keywords, but is relatively dry the rest of the year). Making sure to use those keywords just before the peaks will ensure you get lots of traffic (being proactive) before your competitors only using the free tools (which are reactionary). With Wordtracker full version you can look at these historic trends and act accordingly (free trial here).

By now, you should have a blog topic, an outline of your first 30-50 blog posts, and done your keyword research to maximize search engine relevance for each post. So get your posts up on the web! Next time I will discuss leveraging social networks to generate hits while you wait for Google to index your site or blog.

How to Structure a Blog Post

2007-10-11T09:06:00.001-07:00

Remember in high school when you were taught that an essay consists of 3 parts:
1. the introduction with a summary of your main 2 or 3 arguments
2. Your arguments separated into one or 2 paragraphs each with supporting arguments, and
3. You conclusion with a summary of your arguments?

Well, blogging ISN'T high school.

When you are putting together a blog post, your structure needs to be as follows:
1. An introductory teaser, or funny statement
2. 2 to 3 paragraphs on a SINGLE topic
3. Closing statement, or call to action if you are monetizing your blog, and a teaser for your next topic.

Yes, each blog post should cover only one topic. Remember the goal of your blog is to get people to read it. Since about 90% of visitors to your blog will come via Google, the Google-spider needs to know how to classify your post. In order for that to happen, your blog as a whole should be about one topic, and each post should be about a specific subset of that topic, centered around key search phrases.

In order to keep your readers coming back, blog posts should be short - 400-600 words each - about 1 to 2 minutes read. After 2 minutes you will lose about 50% of your readers every 10 seconds. If your call to action is in the final paragraph (as I suggest it should be) most of your readers will be gone before they even see it!

If you have been reading this blog since the beginning, you should now be ready to start blogging. You should have your topic and first 20-30 posts outlined.

Next post will be about choosing keywords and how to write around them. If you can't wait and need to start blogging now my favorite resource is Rob Benwell's Blogging to the Bank 2.0. The best $50 I ever spent (especially since it taught me how to make about $50 a day from blogging!).

Picking Your Blog Topic

2007-10-11T09:05:00.001-07:00

Blogging should not be a chore.

Unlike a website, you have to update your blog regularly (and not just a few words here and there). Most blogs will take about 4-6 months before they start to show a profit. If you post 2 times a week, that means you will need to blog about your topic somewhere between 30 and 50 times before you see any income.

Read that again - 30 to 50 blog articles before you would expect to see one dime!

So what is the bottom line - before you start typing, pick your topic. Make sure that the topic you choose is something that interests you. Forget keyword positioning, Adsense revenue and Affiliate products (for now) and blog about something you are passionate about.

For example, I blog about fitness and Mixed Martial Arts on 2 other blogs. Combined these 2 blogs get about 500-1000 hits per day (it can vary - I had 2500 hits on my MMA blog after the last UFC) and earn between 25-50 dollars a day. It's not a fortune, but I am still starting out (a mature blog is about 2-3 years old with 1000s of posts).

So if you are considering blogging for a living, start today by brainstorming 1 blog topic and your first 20 articles. You don't have to write them out in full yet (I prefer to work from an outline and let the words flow naturally), but you should know what you want to say and have ideas that flow naturally from one to another.

Next post - how to structure each blog post.

Of course if you can't wait, sign up for Rob Benwell's Blogging to the Bank 2.0 free newsletter.

Why a blog?

2007-10-11T09:04:00.003-07:00

To begin, this is not my first blog.

I became involved in blogging about 6 months ago after a big drop off in Adsense and Affiliate Sales revenue from my other ventures. Why the drop off? Honestly, Google.

It is not my style to blame others for my problems, but Google's Ranking Algorithm combined with changes to Adsense and Adwords rules has made it really hard for Affiliates to earn income from those sources.

Case in point? Have you noticed the number of former Affiliates who are selling books and ideas to new Affiliates? That is because they, like me, know that it has become almost impossible to get an Affiliate site in Google ... and even if you do diligent SEO and secure hundreds of one-way links, the Google Sandbox still prevents you from showing up in Google searches for any terms other than your URL or site/company name.

So why blogging? Well, it is a big harder than website design to come up with new material almost daily, BUT Google will index and list you in searches. Also, with RSS feeds your blog can show up in numerous places, and it's easy to submit a RSS feed to dozens of listing engines.

Since this is my fist post on this blog, I will be honest - this is an income generating blog. Don't write to me, or comment complaining about ads and Affiliate links. I will make this promise though - I will not "promote" any product I do not use, or believe in.

Since you are here, you are obviously interested in monetizing and promoting your own blog. Check back regularly. Every couple of days I will comment on some aspect of blogging for cash and monetizing your blog. If you can't wait that long, buy Rob Benwell's Blogging to the Bank - 2.0 - the top clickbank product of it's kind about blogging.

Next time - choosing your blog topic.

Know your Credit Score

2007-10-11T09:04:00.001-07:00

Understanding your credit score rating scale can seem like an overwhelming and almost impossible prospect. A credit rating scale can be confusing, especially if you have trouble with numeric systems. In a scale you have several numbers that all mean something different. Even though it can be a hard and overwhelming to try to understand your rating scale, doing so can be rewarding and a necessity in fixing it if need be.

One of the first things you should look at it is how exactly your credit score rating scale is composed and put together. Companies look at a couple of different aspects to put it together. One thing that determines how your credit rating is put together is your past payment history. This includes how well you pay your bills and whether or not you pay them on time or not. This aspect also includes any outstanding debt, too much can make your credit rating lean towards the lower end. Something else that is considered is your credit history in general. Beginners as well as a poor one can lower it as well. Sometimes if you are just starting out it may be even lower than someone who has a history that is poor.

Other things that are considered as part of a credit score rating scale are any credit applications or inquiries into your credit. Too many of either can lower your score and reflect poorly on you and your score. Different types of loans and credit can also have an affect as well. Balances that are too high and the number of balances that are too high can be a bad sign to a credit reporter as well. High interest rates can even be a negative mark as well.

On the rating scale a score of seven hundred or more is excellent and someone with this type of score should have no problems with credit or interest rates. While those with scores around six hundred and fifty to four hundred and fifty will have some difficulty obtaining credit, though could still have a chance. A lot of times those who fall on this part of the scale will have to secure any loan they apply for with some type of collateral. Those who fall below four hundred and fifty will most likely not get approved at all, whether secured or not. These people need to find a solution to their credit problems and a way to improve where they fall on the scale if they wish to stand any chance at all.

Speaking of help in rising where you fall on the credit score rating scale there are a lot of places to start from. Free credit counseling is available if you know where to look and will greatly help you if you are in need. These credit counselors will not only help you improve your score but can also help you get back on track and be more responsible in the future to avoid the problem again.

After sifting through all the information and getting your bearings you can learn a lot. Things may not be so overwhelming after all. When it comes to the credit score rating scale and understanding it, all it takes is a little patience, which in the end can be well worth it.

By Mike Singh

Credit Repair before Applying for a Mortgage

2007-10-11T08:59:00.000-07:00

Credit repair is especially important for those who have poor credit and want to sell or buy a house quickly. This may be for any number of reasons: a distress situation, a means to make relatively quick capital, or a relocation opportunity.

Usually, motivated real estate sellers or buyers need to work with a lending institution to borrow capital. This is where having a good credit profile comes into play.

(In dealing with real estate generally, having good credit has its benefits. The lower interest rates provided to those with good credit make deals more profitable. Good credit can also open doors to new and different, but altogether extremely profitable, opportunities.)

There are various ways to repair credit, depending on the type of damage that has been done. Damage to credit can come in the form of recent bankruptcy, late payments, or a high debt to income ratio. Credit damage can seem an ominous and impossible challenge for you the consumer, but it is equally as foreboding and risky to the lender.

There is hope for credit repair.

In the case of a recent bankruptcy, it can be extremely difficult to secure financing - or to get any credit at all for that matter. Time is the only healer that can make a bankruptcy fade away, but in the mean time, it is essential to maintain a clean credit profile. Build your credit as though starting from scratch, and this coupled with time will alleviate the deep scar of bankruptcy.

Late payments and/or a high debt to income ratio are a little easier to resolve. Both of these problems have relatively simple solutions. For late payments, it is absolutely imperative that you begin making payments on time and continue to do so. The stigma of a late payment profile will be gone from your credit report in about ninety days as your positive actions are reported to the credit bureaus and published on your credit report.

With a high debt to income ratio, reducing or eliminating as much debt as possible is the key. Cut unnecessary expenditures and pay off any debts that can be dealt with quickly.

Credit repair can be a long and drawn out process with the rewards coming in many forms. Financial rewards come in the form of lower lenders mortgage rates, as well as more favorable interest rates on credit cards. The money saved on interest payments can be quite substantial over the long term of your loan.

Peace of mind is another reward for repairing your credit and should not be dismissed. It can be a huge relief to have a clean credit slate and the reduced stress can improve your life considerably.

As you improve and repair your credit, you may be tempted to use it. Resist this temptation with the thought of a promising credit future and you will be on your way to having clean credit and ultimately entering the real estate market with confidence.

By Karen M Ciancio