Category: website business

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7 Viral Ways for Exapanded Online Reach

What would happen if one of your friends tells about your newest blog to her five friends and they, in turn, tell their friends and it goes on like this? Pretty soon you will have all the traffic you need for a comfortable income from your new-found writing careers. Is it possible to to achieve this kind of success using the virality of the social web, or does it sound like a pyramid scheme?

The emergence of social web provides opportunities for viral marketing that never existed before. Face to face talk or talk over the phone has its limitations in reaching your audience. The Web 1.0 offered forums for a limited viral marketing opportunity. The social web has opened up avenues manyfolds expanded online reach. This article describes seven techniques for using the social web to achieve virality.

1. Before jumping to social websites to launch your viral adventure, make your site social web friendly. Provide a link on your site for users to invite their friends. When someone joins your site through an invitation, reward points to the inviter. Announce a contest on your site and reward the top inviter with e-books or a t-shirt with your site logo.

2. Spend sometime at Digg. This is a community based news popularity web site. If your blog article hits the front page of Digg, you will get thousands of visitors and some of them will eventually become your regulars. Study the types of articles that end up on the front page of Digg. Write your blog articles targeted to Digg users.

3. MySpace is the ultimate social website because of its sheer size in terms of visitors. If you have lots of friends who have their MySpace pages, create a niche network community in MySpace with common interests. Post teasers of your interesting blog articles in your MySpace page with links to your full article. Ask your friends to write comments on your blog postings.

4. Take a look at Delicious. Google Delicious to get the url because it is not a dot-com domain. It is a social bookmarking site to store your bookmarks online. You should build a network of friends at this site and study their bookmarkings to assess the type of articles they prefer to bookmark. Tailor your blog articles to mimic the article style your network appreciates.

5. Visit a site called Squidoo. At Squidoo you create “lenses” (a Web page) about any topic. You can create as many lenses as you want and you can embed external links in your lenses. Squidoo lenses also have a good search engine credibility. So, your sites will get some good external in-bound links for free.

6. LinkedIn is an online community of experienced professionals. Create your account at LinkedIn and network with professionals in your fields. Offer some free services for other professionals in your network and solicit their recommendations. All recommendations appear in your profile. LinkedIn provides great opportunity for someone to find your business or services.

7. YourElevatorPitch provides a free online spot to announce your business and services. User rates your ad pitches. This site also allows you to link back to your site.

Other sites worth exploring for viral opportunities are Flickr and YouTube. Both the sides accept multimedia (photos for Flickr and videos for YouTube) contents. These sites are good for establishing your brand by regular posting of theme oriented humorous contents.

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How to Keywords – A Short Guide to Keyword Selection for Online Business Success

After long hours of work or some out of pocket investment, you have created a professional looking web site. You have studies al about search engine optimization and gone to great lengths to make sure it is Search Engine Friendly. You have great content and you are sure that you have done everything to reap the benefits of organic search engine traffic.

Your big launch date comes and goes, and nothing. But it takes time to show up on the generic search engine results, you might say. So you try an aggressive marketing campaign, and still, your sales are almost non-existent.

What is happening? Your keywords are the fundamental building blocks of your online success. Because the competition is so great, choosing general or broad keywords is almost a guarantee that either you will not show up on the search engine results, or if you do, your target audience will not be looking for what you have to offer.

Your keywords need to be as specific as possible to get you the results you are looking for. In other words, shoppers ready to buy your product or services are your target and the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword, the less competition you will face.

Choosing the right keywords when your Website is new can be tricky as well as time consuming. There are a few ways to go about it:

1. You might not think objectively. Ask your clients, family members, or friends what they would look for if searching for your product. You might be surprised at what insights they can give you.

2. Get personal with your keywords. Take the obvious general keywords that come to mind, for this example we will use “toys”, and try narrowing it down. Try “toy trucks” or “infant toys” or “water toys”. Now go even deeper in your category and try “infant rattle toys” or “baby teething toys”. You see how you are now targeting exactly what someone might be searching for?

3. Do a manual search for the keywords you choose, and see who your competition is. Is that your target? Also look on the upper right hand corner of your search results. Typically, Search Engines will display the number of found results. The more specific the keyword, the less results displayed, the better your chances of obtaining results for that keyword.

So now you have all these great keywords, what do you do with them? Knowing what your keywords are is not enough; you need to keep a few critical points in mind:

1. Continually evaluate your keywords, keeping in mind that trends come and go, and what is “HOT” today may not be what people are looking for tomorrow.

2. Keep track of where your visitors found you. If you are doing a paid campaign, this is easy to do, but if you are looking at generic results, you can use a tracking software to show you what your best resulting keyword searches are. Google Analytics is an example of a free service, and one of the best to track your traffic, visitors’ keywords and behavior.

3. Your visitors should never have to find what they are looking for on your Website. This applies mainly to your PPC programs. Point them directly to where they need to be. Whether it is the page where they can purchase your product, fill out a form or subscribe to a service, land them directly to that page. If you simply send them to your home page, you will lose that visitor because they did not immediately find what they were looking for.

4. Lastly, optimize your pages to your keywords. Take time to carefully write your meta-tags. Properly written Titles can make the difference if your generic result is clicked on or not. Edit the individual pages to have a keyword rich description. This does not mean stuff your keywords anywhere you can find space for them.

Read it over, and make sure it makes sense to you. Keep in mind that you not only want to score a lot of points with the Search Engines so that they deem you content “valuable” to their users, you also want to make your visitors keep coming back to your Website .

All this may sound like a lot of work – and it is! But to put it bluntly, “what you put in to it, is what you get out of it”. If you put the time and effort into your keywords, you will eventually be rewarded with the results you are seeking.

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Introduction to Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks

What is a copyright? Can everything be copyrighted? A copyright is the expression of an idea. The idea itself is not copyrighted. Ideas can be patented and I will talk about patents later.

Let’s consider the example of a story: a poor man who found lots of cash on his way back to his home from his work. He decided to keep the cash to improve his financial situation. But he could not sleep at night because he was haunted by strange voices that told him to find the owner and return the cash. This idea cannot be protected. Anybody can write a short story based on the idea. What is protected is how the author expresses the idea in the form of texts, illustrations, drawings, photographs, etc.

Once an expression is copyrighted, others can still use it for fair use. You can tape a few 15 seconds video clips from a copyrighted TV programs and post it in your video blogs about a commentary on the program or broadcaster, etc. This will be considered a fair use and you will not infringe the copyright.

After a copyrighted material expires, it falls into the public domain. The life of a copyrighted material is the life of the author, plus 70 years. The public domain copyrighted materials can be reproduced without any infringement. For example, if you have an old picture with expired copyright, you can post the picture in your website.

In the USA, the Copyright Act of 1976 governs all copyrights. The Copyright Act does not protect any ideas, procedures, process, systems, and methods of operations, concepts, principle or discovery regardless of how it is expressed. It is the expression that is protected by the Copyright Act. You cannot copyright titles, names, slogans, and short phrases even if those have new ideas.

As mentioned earlier, the life span of a copyrighted material is the author’s life, plus 70 years in most cases. There are a few exceptions to this rule and they are: un-renewed copyrighted materials published pre-1964, materials published before 1978 without a copyrighted notice, and materials published by the US Government.

All copyrighted materials should be fixed in a tangible medium (papers, CDs, DVDs, etc.). If it is not fixed in a tangible medium, it is not copyrighted. For example, your speech to the graduating class that was never recorded, taped, or published is not protected under the US Copyright Act. Your can register your copyrighted materials with the US Copyright Office. All expressions of ideas are copyrighted regardless it is registered with the Copyright Office or not. If you register the expression with the Copyright Office, you can receive statutory damages and attorney’s fees if an infringement occurs. If the material is not registered with the Copyrighted Office, you can only recover actual damages.

A patent holder of an invention has the right to exclude others from using, selling, and making the invention. The United States Patent Office (USPTO) awards patents. There are three kinds of patents: utility, design, and plant patents.

The most frequently used patents are utility patents. They have a life span of 20 years from the effective filing date if the filing date is after June 8, 1995. A utility patent also requires periodic maintenance fees. A utility patent must be a novel, useful, and non-obvious process, machine, manufacture, or compositions of matter or improvement to the same. There are three things that define a utility patent. First, it must be novel. Nobody should have invented, published, used, or manufactured the invention before. Second, one should be able to do some thing useful with the invention. If it is just novel without any usefulness, it cannot be patented. A patentable invention should not be obvious to the person with ordinary skills in the same technology space related to the invention.

A design patent is the appearance or aesthetic of an article and it has a life span of 14 years after the patent is issued. A plant patent, as the name applies, protects a distinct plant produced asexually. It has life span of 20 years from the filing date.

A trademark is word, symbol, design, or a combination of one or more of these items. It is used to identify the source of goods or services of one company and differentiate a company’s goods and services from others. A trademark should not be confusingly similar to other existing names or symbols.

A trademark is registered with the USPTO. It can also be registered through the state’s Secretary of State’s office. If the trademark is not registered, the rights to the trademark may be geographically limited. You cannot use the symbol ® to represent a mark if it is not registered.

If you want to maintain a trademark for your business, you must actively use it. Just registering a trademark without using it actively will result in diminished rights over time. Never allow a trademark to become a generic word. For example, the trademark “Aspirin” by Bayer has become a generic word to represent acetylsalicylic acid. Others can use it without causing any infringement. When you see a trademark used by authors as a noun or a verb, it may become a generic word. Trademark owners vigorously pursue authors from using the trademark as a noun or a verb. A trademark should always be used as an adjective. For example, Google is preventing others from using the word Google as a verb.

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7 Unusual Online Business Ideas

So you want to start an online business. You have surfed the web, read some blogs and have found that lots of people are making some decent mullah. But you are frustrated due to the lack of any new idea. Don’t worry. There are still many ideas that you can implement using a little money, lots of efforts, and some persistency.

1. Think about your hobby. What you would like to do in your spare time? May be you like to go hunting, or scuba diving. May be you want to make dolls. List some of the annoyances and inconveniences you encounter while pursuing your hobby. Search in Google to find solutions to your problems and then write a small e-book. Sell the e-book using clickbank dot com.

2. If you are an artist, crafter, or designer, check out etsy dot com. You create your own shop by signing up for free. Listing an item with photos cost 0.20 cents. The selling fee is 3.5% of the final sale price. You can accept payment through PayPal.

3. Start a blog. But don’t start a blog on making money. Find your niche and sign up for free at Blogger to create your blog. You need to select a name for your blog. Select the name of your blog carefully. Write down half a dozen names that tell something about your blog topic. Check out those names using the overture keyword selector tool for search popularity. Use a name that people search at least more than a thousand times every month.

4. If you decide to use the number 3 (starting a blog) method to generate incomes, sign up with ReviewMe, PayPerPost, and Chitika for writing paid reviews of other companys’ products and services. This will supplement your Google’s Adsense incomes.

5. If you are good at computer programming, write a simple online tool, e.g calculating carbon foot print of your visitors, or total body fat. You get the idea. The program should be simple to use and easy to develop. Build a website around your tool and sign up with affiliate programs for revenue generation.

6. If you frequently go on short trips or vacation, buy a good but small and high resolutions digital camera for easy carrying with you all the time. Take at least 200 pictures on each trip and put them for sale on shutterpoint dot com. There are a few other websites where you can put your photos for sale. Check them out by doing a Google search.

7. Participate in paid survey.But don’t pay to join any program for paid survey. Use Google to search for paid survey and visit a dozen paid survey websites. Review their offerings and write those down. Now search webmaster forum in Google and then sign up in a couple of webmaster forums. Ask about others experiences with paid survey companies and pick a good one.

Now you have these seven unusual ways to make money online. You will not make a ton of money overnight. But once you gain experiences in online money making opportunities, you will explore other methods to earn big bucks.

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New Approaches to Email Marketing without Spamming

It does not matter whether you are running a small online business or a local eatery, your budget is limited and your challenge is to keep getting new customers for growth and turn your existing customers into repeat buyers for business sustainability.

You can use a variety of advertising options depending on your budget. Email marketing is a low cost solution that you must use regardless of any other methods you pursue. However, if you don’t know how to start an email marketing campaign in a right way, you soon will be become the biggest spammer in the town and may lose everything you have due hate and litigation.

Start with email addresses you have in your existing contact list. Explain them what you are up to and emphasis the benefits your business provides to ordinary folks. Don’t use any sales pitch. It should be informational with the emphasis on benefits. Keep it short because people don’t have time to read long emails. Also, encourage them to spread the news to their contacts.

As customers start coming to your establishments, get their emails and tell them what you intend to do with the email. Make a commitment to your customers not to sell their emails to third parties or spam their inbox every day with.

Start with a newsletter to share your expertise and insights. For example, if your business is catering to the lunch crowd, start talking to about nutrition, recipes, how to save money on lunch, etc. Forget how you are going to benefits from the newsletter. Take it as mission to help others by giving good information.

Talk to your family and friends to solicit tips and ideas for your newsletter. Form a network with other related businesses. For example, if you offer Greek foods, bring in businesses that offer Chinese, Italian, and even Greek foods. Talk about benefits of Italian pasta in your newsletters and suggest some delicious dishes from your friend’s Chinese restaurant.

Once your customer start realizing that the newsletter is not meant to spam their inboxes by incessantly promoting your business, they will start trusting you and your business. You will be able to grab their precious attention. We are moving towards the attention economy where it will become extremely difficult to get people’s attention by traditional advertising.

Because you make a commitment to your customers not to sell their email addresses, as a principle, you also should not buy email addresses from a third party. Moreover, because you don’t know how the third party has obtained the addresses that you are going to buy, you may as well be buying emails obtained without the owners’ consents. Build your own email list slowly and you will get the reward in the long run.

Stick to a monthly schedule of sending your newsletters to your subscribed list. You do more often, you lose your recipients attention and they more likely to drag it to their trash folder. Sporadic and irregular campaigns will not generate interests and anticipation.

If you don’t have time to create a newsletter regularly, outsource the activity to a third party with strict guidelines. Engage your kids to find information and write articles and tidbits for your newsletter and compensate them. Go to your local community college and hire somebody for researching and writing your articles and creating the newsletter.

The email marketing should be all about connecting with your customers and building trusts. It should provide value to your customers. Once you build trusts, your customers will be your fans and help spread your business virally.

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7 Steps to Leverage Social Media for Increasing Web Site Traffic

Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc. have become popular among the internet marketers. Most marketers hawk their websites, blog, affiliate links, list building URLs, etc. all day long to drive traffic to their web sites. Not only it is annoying to the network members, but also the effectiveness of such a strategy is yet to be proven.

However, you cannot ignore this emerging medium. You need to embrace it using a different mindset. If you follow the seven guidelines discussed below, you will be able to increase traffic to your site from these social media sites without exposing yourself as a self-centered marketer who will do anything to cash in on every opportunity.

1. Create a profile page at each site and detail your interests, expertise, blogs, and websites in your profile. In Twitter, you are limited by text space and the number of URLs you can use in your bio. Facebook has more flexibility and you can pull your blog RSS into the Facebook notes.

Social network sites are pull medium where the old push marketing fails miserably. Your goal should be to pull people to your profile page by regularly posting valuable and interesting contents from other sites. You can post your blog article in Twitter occasionally but don’t submit every blog post your create.

2. The old school marketing relies on four Ps – price, product, placement, and promotion. The social media adds another dimension and one more P to the marketing philosophy and it is the participation.

You need to participate in the conversion and at the same time encourage others to participate. If you want to build a community that will trust you, you need to participate by providing expert opinions and valuable information. You need to help others when somebody has a question. Even if don’t know the answer, find it out by spending sometime on the Web.

You also need to draw others in the discussions by asking questions, giving controversial opinions, raising interesting issues that affect your niche. Passively posting your URL all over the place will not bring traffic to your site. Only concerted efforts to position yourself as a knowledgeable person in your niche will result in more visitors to your site.

3. To position yourself as an expert in your niche, you need to create contents that are fresh, interesting, and valuable to your readers. You also have to discover high quality contents in your niche for sharing with others. Subscribe to a few dozen blogs and scan them everyday for high quality contents so that you can share it with others in your network.

4. You cannot hide yourself in the social media world. If you are a fake, people will discover it fast and you will lose trust and traffic. So, be authentic, transparent and humble in all your conversations. If you make a mistake, admit it and move on.

5. To establish your credibility and expertise, you should read a wide variety of topics in your niche and explain them to others in the form of blog post, ebooks, white papers, etc. Give it all for free without any strings attached. Encourage others to distribute your materials.

If you are not sharing some valuable information, somebody else will share it. You cannot hide any information. It is better to be the first mover than wondering how did everybody find it out.

6. Be prepared to change your mind set. The old school mindset for driving traffic is posting you site links everywhere. The social media mind set is establishing yourself as an expert and sharing your knowledge. Once people know that you are a good resource for solutions to their problems, they will come to your site and you can monetize your site in different ways.

If you are wondering how you are going to make money if you give every thing for free than you need to understand this new medium before you jump into the bandwagon by posting your URLs every hour. Your goal is to drive traffic to your site. Your site may monetize using a variety of methods like, third party advertisement, selling tutorials, affiliate marketing, selling memberships, etc.

7. Social media is a marketing tool set that you leverage to drive traffic to your web site. For leveraging this new medium, you need to establish yourself as a good community member first. Don’t be farcical like Walmart who paid to Jim and Laura to blog around the country in Walmart parking lots capturing stories of Walmart employees and how they loved to work at Walmart.

You may enjoy a short-lived traffic boost to your site, but it will not last longer. When the truth is exposed, it will be a public relation nightmare for you or your brand. Build your brand by telling the truth. There is nothing wrong if you are sponsored by a corporation, just reveal the truth.

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Online Marketing: All I Need to know I Learned in Kindergarten

Robert Fulgham’s timeless assertion “All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten” is applicable to every aspect of life, work, and business. Online marketing is no exception. This is how you can apply his ground rules to online marketing for achieving excellence.

Share everything. If you know a few tips, software tools, useful websites, etc. share it with others. Don’t be afraid of others taking your share of the pie. The pie is huge and you will never be able to eat it alone.

Play fair. Competition is good but play by the rule. Think of it as a sport. You practice and practice a little more to win. Likewise, you acquire a few online marketing skills and apply them, experiment with them and then measure your success. If the techniques work for you, leverage that knowledge to acquire more skills without foul play.

Don’t hit people. You hit somebody because you are angry with him. Don’t badmouth somebody because you think you did not get a fair deal from the person. Try to resolve your differences. If the person is not reasonable and does not want to play fair, share the facts with others without name calling and labeling.

Put things back where you found them. If you are going to use somebody’s contents with their permissions, give credits to the creators. If you are referring a web resource in another site, make it easy for users to find it, e.g. provide a link.

Clean up your own mess. Get organized and create a plan before you start your marketing efforts. Write down exactly what you are going to do and for how long you will execute your plan before making a determination on the plan’s success. Also, know how you are going to measure your success.

Don’t take things that aren’t yours. This one should be easy to understand. Not only don’t steal others contents but also don’t try to hurt somebody financially using foul plays. Don’t think how you are going to reduce your competitor’s profits. Think how you can increase your take.

Say you are sorry when you hurt somebody. You have customers even if you are running a free website. Don’t let your customers think that they are hurt by your actions. If they do, apologize for their inconveniences and fix the problem.

Wash your hands before you eat. This one is not that difficult to understand. It is there to protect you from people who don’t want to play fair. Find out more about pundits’ opinions, software tools you install in your computer, programs you buy to increase your skills, etc. Don’t take every thing blindly. Think about it before taking an action.

Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. You will excel when you mix new knowledge and old skills or new ideas with existing opportunities.

Live a balanced life. Always execute a few techniques at any time. It will help you weed out unsuccessful ones quickly. But don’t try to experiment everything you come across on the web. Pick a few at a time that you are comfortable with and you believe you can implement using your present skill set.

Take a nap every afternoon. Relax and take a break. Take your mind off from things that don’t work instead of going out to all the online forums and posting one hundred questions. When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together. Seek out like-minded people from online forums and social networking sites. Form your own groups in the social web. Network with a few influential people in your areas of expertise.

Be aware of wonder. Sometimes unexpected things will happen. If you or people in your network cannot explain the cause, don’t spend too much time thinking and analyzing it. Just be aware of wonder and move on to new things.

They all die. So do we. Old techniques will become ineffective. Methods and websites that worked yesterday might not generate incomes today. Anticipate this outcome and be prepared to take actions before that happens.

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Online Marketing – No Need to Spend a Fortune

The pressure is on those small local business owners who have been holding out, hoping against hope that the Internet would go away. It’s become fairly obvious that that’s not going to happen.

As a matter of fact, the Kelsey Group says that “70% of U.S. households now use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services.”

It’s become obvious that small business owners who don’t have an Internet presence are at a serious disadvantage, and are losing more ground every day to their competitors.

But where to start? Many small business owners want to get online but the idea of it becomes overwhelming. One of the things many people are concerned about is the cost. Having a professional website created can be expensive, as can the online marketing needed to promote the site. Fortunately with a little work, there are some great low budget online marketing solutions for small businesses.

First, don’t immediately buy web space or register your domain name with the first site that pops up in Google. Web space can be pricey or fairly cheap; it all depends on what company you go with. There are some sites that offer free hosting, but those sites usually force you to include banners or pop-up ads on your site. If you want to be taken seriously, you definitely do not want to host your business on a free hosting site.

There are places on the web that offer a good amount of storage for less than $100/yr, which is not bad. You can also find sites that will register your domain name for less than $10/year, such as the popular GoDaddy.com.

Once you have your website set up, how do you get people to visit? One of the best ways is to take advantage of social networking sites like Squidoo.com and MySpace.com. MySpace.com is a huge site designed to let people keep in touch with others. However a lot of businesses set up MySpace profiles and send out “friend” invitations to clients and prospects. Retail store owners, service providers, authors, bands, magazines and even tourism companies do MySpace marketing. Same thing with Squidoo. This form of marketing is becoming even more powerful than reciprocal linking.

Don’t forget message boards, chat rooms and link exchanges either. They are great ways to get your word out. When you first began your low budget online marketing campaign, you’ll probably spend anywhere from 5 to 10 hours a week promoting your site, or you can train an employee, intern or your resident teenager to do it.

The simplest way of marketing your small business is to include your website address in your signature in emails and posts to message boards, even if they aren’t related to your business. While this doesn’t market directly to your targeted audience, it does make people aware of your website. Who knows, maybe they’ll know someone who needs your services.

It’s very easy to do low budget online marketing for small business because so many things on the Internet are free — message boards, networking sites like Squidoo and MySpace, and of course, email. The main thing it will cost is time, but even that can be “bought” at budget prices on sites such as rentacoder.com and getafreelancer.com. So there’s no reason for even the busiest small business owner not to get their business online, even if they’re on a tight budget.

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Online Business – Leverage Affiliate Products

Do you want to work online? Do you want to build your own business? Do you have a dream of working for yourself, from home, where you could work as many or as few hours as you like and still make a good living?

A lot of people have that dream too, but what’s the best way to make it come true?

Chances are when you start on this journey, you’ll end up joining some get-rich-quick schemes and multi-level marketing programs; but you’ll soon realize that only a select few make money this way, and unfortunately the odds are against you.

However, there are in fact many multi-millionaires being made online.

Most of them are selling their own products they’ve developed; but nearly all of them are also selling products as affiliates.

What does that mean? Selling as an affiliate means working as a commissioned salesperson, or making money selling other people’s stuff!

While the product owner takes care of billing, customer service, refund requests, tech support and so forth, the affiliate just recommends the product to others, and gets a hefty sales commission for doing so… which can often be as high as 50-75%, and sometimes even 100%, for digital downloadable products.

Why would a product owner offer such high commissions? They do it because 25-50% of your sales, and every other affiliate’s sales, add up to a lot more than 100% of their own sales. In other words, they wouldn’t be selling those products at all without you.

Why would anyone offer 100% commissions? Because they want to give you a good reason to promote their product (usually at a fairly low price point so they don’t mind giving up the sales money) in exchange for building their list of opt-in subscribers. Everyone who pays you the 100% commission for the product also ends up signing up with the product owner to download it, so it’s a win-win scenario.

Now here’s the biggest question: how do you get people to buy products through your affiliate link when it seems everybody online is promoting the same thing?

There are numerous ways to get the attention of a customer, which leads them to buy through you.

1. Pay per Click Direct-to-Merchant

Many people are making great money online by purchasing clicks from Google AdWords or other pay per click search engines, and sending that traffic directly to the product owner’s sales page through their affiliate link. This can be very profitable if done right. The main drawback is that only a couple of people can use the same domain name when promoting through AdWords, so rather than using your affiliate link as it is, you should create a redirect link. The other drawback is that the traffic you have purchased may be interested in other products you’re promoting, but you don’t have contact with those people once they’ve clicked through to the sales page, so that’s a lost sales opportunity.

2. Pay per Click to a Landing Page

This method uses the same type of pay per click advertising, but sends people to your own landing page first. You can offer a review of the product or some other type of unique content, before offering the visitor your affiliate link to click on if they like your review. Again, once the people click through to the sales page, you won’t be able to contact them anymore.

3. Combination of Pay per Click and List-Building

This method is very similar to #2, sending people to your own landing page first. However, the idea is to have them opt in to your newsletter list before they get to see your review or the sales page. Once someone is on your list, you’ll be able to send him or her related offers down the road. But be careful that your landing page is not just a “squeeze page” with an opt-in form and no content, which goes against Google’s AdWords regulations.

4. Combination of SEO and List-Building

If you don’t want to pay for traffic or worry about operating within Google’s pay per click terms, you can go the natural search way and build traffic through SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization. This takes a different resource – your time — in order to properly optimize your page. You will also want to research how to do it the most effectively. However, many super affiliates are to the point where all their traffic comes naturally from the search engines, and they get thousands of visitors a day.

To combine SEO with list building, you would once again offer an opt-in form to the visitor so that you can keep contact with them. Otherwise you’re letting them leave as easily as they came, which is a waste of your SEO efforts.

As you can see, there are numerous ways to get traffic to your sites and build your affiliate marketing business. If you choose an option that involves opt-in list building, then you’ll also have a growing list of subscribers who know, like and trust you, and will buy much of what you recommend.

Another way to stand out is to offer a bonus or rebate that nobody else offers. You’ll make less on each transaction if it’s a cash rebate, but not everyone will cash in on your offer, and you’ll also have more sales overall.

With a little ingenuity and effort, you can be a super affiliate in no time.

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Nine Ways to Increase Website Traffic Using Google Image Search

Google search engine indexes images in your web pages. When someone uses Google Image Search to find images on the web, what chance does your website have to show up in the search results? If you know how to optimize images in your web pages, your images will have high rankings in the image search results. Using higly relevant and properly optimized images in your web pages will bring quality traffic from Google Image Search. Use the techniques described below for optimizing Google Image Search.

1. Use the alt attribute in the html img tag. This is the most important one. Use a specific keyword or a key phrase that identifies what the image is all about. If the image is a red rose, use the key phrase ‘red rose’, instead of rose or flower, in the alt attribute.

2. Use the title attribute in the img tag. The title attribute is what people see when they hover the mouse over the image. You can use the same text for title that you use for the alt attribute.

3. Use both the width and the height attributes for the image. If the image height is unknown, use the image width. You should always use the image width from a design standpoint. Unknown image width can break your horizontal layout forcing your web site visitors to scroll horizontally which is very annoying.

4. Don’t use image1, image2, etc. for the image file names. Instead, Use descriptive names. For example, use red-rose for a red rose image file. You can use the same text that you use for the alt attribute. Just hyphenate the words if it is a key phrase.

5. Put some description texts just beneath the image. For example, ‘a red rose blossoming in a quite morning’ for the red rose image. Make the key word, red rose, bold. When Google displays the image in the image search result page, the result page will also display the texts surrounding the image.

6. Choose your anchor texts in links to images carefully. Instead of ‘click here for larger image’ as the text link to an image, you can use ‘a large red rose picture is here’ as the anchor text.

7. Put all your images in a root folder and, if you prefer, categorize your images in sub-folders under the root image folder. Make sure that your robot file does not limit access to the image folders. Use the img and src tags for images on your web pages. Avoid all types of java script tricks. Goolge search engine spider will be able to index all your images. If you have descriptive image files names, they will have high relevancy in Google image search results.

8. Use Google trends to find hot topics. Use your creativity to establish a credible relevancy between you images and the hot trends. For example, if ‘Hunt for Red October’ is the hot topic, you can use ‘Hunt for Red October Rose’ as your image text.

9. You should already have your website verified by Google. If Google has not verified your website, go ahead and get it done by opening an account for Google Webmaster Tools. Once you have your site verified, enable enhanced image search for your site by logging into Google Webmaster Tools.