Paying For Links

The reciprocal link principle is simple – find websites with good rankings and plenty of traffic, and trade links with them. But when you’re just starting out, why should a big important site give a little upstart like you any kind of link at all?

There’s only one way to find out – ASK THEM. It helps if you have some kind of relationship with the site owner. But even if you don’t, you can sometimes use the time-honored principle of bribery to get a link from a well-ranked site.

Ask for a link. If you get turned down, say “Would you consider linking to me for $100?” You’d be surprised at how many webmasters will take you up on your offer!

This technique works best with privately owned sites that rank in the top 10 for targeted keywords in niche markets. There’s no point in trying to get a link from Kiplinger’s or Newsweek’s or Vogue’s web site. But if you’re selling weight loss products, and $50 will buy you a link from a small web site that’s ranked #1 for “low-carb dessert recipes,” you’re probably better off buying that link than buying $50 of PPC advertising. This also can’t hurt your own search engine ranking.

Make sure you have a simple written agreement about exactly what the link will say (you want your keywords in it) and the duration of the link – 6 months, a year, forever, etc.

Yes, you’ll have to wrap your brain around your site topic and the products you’re trying to sell. That’s what “targeting” requires – being selective. You have to know not only the kind of visitors you want, but the kind of visitors you DON’T want.

A similar technique involves finding all the sites that link to your competitors, and offering them a cash incentive to add your link to their site. You can find these sites by going to Google and typing in link:www.yourcompetitorslink.com.

Get Listed On Coupon And Special Offer Sites

There are dozens of special offer, coupon, and rebate sites online today. Simply go to Google and type in “coupon sites” and you’ll see what we mean. “Coupon” is searched at least a few hundred thousand times a month. Some smart folks are getting a lot of traffic with simple sites that are just lists of links to various sites with special offers.

How can this help YOU get targeted traffic? The people who visit these sites are looking for a discount, a deal, a freebie, a rebate, or a bargain. If you can offer some kind of special bonus – whether it’s a cash rebate, a physical or digital product, or a service – you can ask to be included on these sites.

As long as you can come up with an offer that qualifies, you’ll get accepted. If you wish, you can create several web pages, each with a slightly different special offer, and see what makes the most sales. Very few affiliate marketers are taking advantage of this.

Yes, it does mean you have to create a little something extra for the people who buy through these sites. You’ll have to track their purchases. But considering that you’ll also be getting incoming links from some very highly ranked web sites, it’s worth the little bit of extra work.

Make Powerful Friends Online Via Your Spam

Another way to make powerful friends online is to read your Spam.

That’s because ALL online merchants want to know if someone is promoting their affiliate product via Spam. It’s not just the Spammer who can suffer some stiff legal penalties – they can too. So if you see someone’s ebook or software being sold via Spam, write to them and let them know.

Make sure you keep the original Spam, and send it to them as an attachment (not
forwarded) so they receive all the headers intact. How can networking help get you targeted traffic? If you make 20 strong, personal, one-on-one business contacts every month, at least five of them will end up sending you traffic. Somehow, someday, they’ll start pushing the right kinds of visitors to you.

It might be by linking to you. They may mention your site in a viral ebook or one of their articles. They might want to do a joint venture or partner on a money making project. They might do all these things – and many more. Yes, it’s old fashioned. It’s not autopilot. It’s not passive. But networking costs you nothing except time – and can be worth gold in the long term.

Old Fashioned Business Networking

Yes, even though we’re all buried in Spam, it’s still possible to make new business contacts online. The recent JV (Joint Venture) craze reflects the simple principle that in the end, people do business with PEOPLE – not with pixels, bits, and bytes.

Old fashioned networking is still alive and well online. And it’s the best method for getting some good exposure if you’re just starting out and have no money for marketing. By building strong business relationships, you’ll soon have other marketers offering to link to you, publish your articles, write about your site in their newsletter, and even offer you free advertising.

One of the best places to make business contacts in your field is in forums. For example, if you’ve started an affiliate web site that sells specialty dog training devices, hang out in the many dog-related forums and newsgroups.

But instead of trying to help end consumers so they’ll visit your site, make friends with experts in related fields. In this case pet sitters, groomers, dog trainers, veterinary assistants, and even animal behaviorists can all be excellent contacts.

As with all business networking, look for ways to help your colleagues. If they have their own site, offer them a link on yours. If they have an opt-in list, perhaps you can set up a special web page, and give them a rebate on any commissions you make. If they write their own articles, perhaps you can turn them into a mini-ebook and offer it to all your visitors.

And there’s no reason you can’t be proactive, and send an email to noncompetitors – or even competitors – whose sites you admire. You don’t have to consider every competitor your enemy. Simply look for opportunities to be helpful.

One easy way to help – provided you do it diplomatically – is to point out a problem on someone’s site or in their ezine. If you find a broken link or some other error, drop them a note. Most webmasters WANT to know if a link suddenly stops working or if their database is generating internal server errors.

You never know where such acts would take you

Best

Free Affiliate Marketing Courses

Affiliate marketing has been around on the Web for quite sometime now, but I know a lot of affiliates who don't know much or even nothing about it.

Most of these people think that they can easily make a quick buck or two from affiliate programs. Well that's not the case. Now the question is can someone really make money with affiliate programs?

There are obviously many ways to make money online: Some simple, some quite complicated. Personally, I feel affiliate programs are a great way to reinforce your home business. Affiliates struggling to earn $150 a month often find it hard to believe that other people could possibly earn as much as $8,000 or even $80,000 to 100,000 a month in commissions.

In fact, such commissions do happen!

That is why, affiliate-marketing training is an important first step to becoming successful in affiliate marketing. And if you are looking to start your career as a successful affiliate marketer, it’s the only step you should be considering before you begin.

Now, anybody would like to be more successful in Affiliate Marketing

Then the first step is to get hold of some Free Affiliate Marketing Courses. You can get them at the below link

Clickin It Rich - Michael Campbell (FREE DOWNLOAD)
An A to Z guide to getting started in affiliate marketing.

The Affiliate Masters Course - Ken Evoy - (FREE DOWNLOAD)
The Affiliate Masters Course is considered to be the best affiliate guide online

Freelancing And Blogging Handbook - FREE DOWNLOAD

Search Engine Yearbook - FREE DOWNLOAD

Free Affiliate Marketing Downloads

Make Your Site SELL! 2002

Make Your Content Presell

A Work At Home Mother's Guide

Make Money With Clickbank

These courses are not just for beginner's. Even if you have been involved in affiliate programs for some time, you will benefit greatly from these courses.

You can use it to either start an affiliate marketing business, or use it to learn the essentials of online marketing, or how to start a web based internet home business that can earn you substantial income.

Equipped with these basics, I reckon you more or less have the theoretical side to affiliate marketing in your hands. What remains is the practical side and that is something no one can teach you - you got to learn it by yourself!

Wishing you all the best in your Affiliate Marketing

Offline Advertising

Have you ever wondered why some of the biggest online businesses spend huge sums on direct mail, as well as TV, magazine, radio, and newspaper advertising? Is it because they have money to burn?

No, it’s because mass media ads and direct mail can actually draw highly targeted visitors – prospects who are ready to buy.

Those big companies with deep pockets use mass media ads to create indelible name recognition in the public’s mind. After branding their company into our consciousness, they use direct mail techniques such as postcard mailings to send offers to hand-picked prospects who are most likely to make a purchase soon.

It’s strange, but very few online marketers have discovered the power of direct mail. A handful have learned to use classified advertising – the distant cousin of expensive mass media advertising. But almost none are using other forms of offline ads. This can also give you an enormous edge.

If you make your living from affiliate programs and related upsells, you can bet that your competition isn’t doing any sort of offline advertising If you think offline advertising is too expensive, think again. Because PPC has become so popular, the cost of high quality online advertising is rising dramatically. It’s common for a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign in a competitive field to cost $1 or more per click – sometimes much more. And you don’t even know if those clicks are coming from real prospects or your competitors’ itchy
fingers.

In fact, today PPC can actually end up costing as much, or more, than direct mail on a cost per sale basis. So do the math before you write off direct mail. A mailing of custom color postcards, for example, can definitely cost less than $3 each to print and mail, and that includes the mailing list.

More importantly, you must think about your projected COST PER SALE when comparing PPC and direct mail. Clicks may be cheap, but customers may not. All traffic – whether targeted or not – is made up of people. If these “clickers” are unlikely to be buyers, you’ll lose money on PPC no matter how cheap the clicks are.

For highly competitive keywords you can easily end up paying over $3 per click if you want to be on the first page of Google. If you stop and consider WHO you’re selling to, the direct mail campaign may be a better investment. You can target exactly the sort of person you want, with just the right demographics, and tell them to go to your site where you’ll show them an irresistible offer.

What about classifieds?

With classified print advertising, you can advertise your URL in literally hundreds of small daily newspapers for ridiculously small amounts per ad. And classified ads in major national niche magazines can be very affordable – and usually pull extremely well.

These days, television ads may not even be out of your reach. If you enjoy the spotlight, you can purchase "leased access" time on local U.S. cable television. By Federal Law, every local cable station must allow the general public to purchase time on their channel, in blocks of 30 minutes. Since the costs are also controlled by law, even in large metropolitan areas a 30 minute segment may cost as little as $200.

These days, $200 won’t buy you much PPC in a competitive field like mortgages or debt management. You don’t even have to be selling to a local market to make a television segment pay. As long as you’ve got an easy-to-remember URL, put a special television offer page on your site.

Then offer a high value upsell free to the first 20 people who respond to the “TV special.”

Finally, don’t forget other incredibly simple offline methods of getting your URL out there. Instead of a traditional business card, print several thousand with your URL in huge letters and leave them anywhere relevant. Don’t forget pencils and pens, letter openers and coasters, calendars and T-shirts…

Remember, you don’t need a bricks and mortar location to use offline advertising.

Amazon, Gateway, Dell, AOL, and many other online businesses spend millions on offline promotional methods. That’s what’s made their brands and URLs famous.

You can do the same on a much smaller scale. It’s a big offline world.

Plenty of people spend more time offline and on. Open your mind to using offline
marketing to get your message in front of the RIGHT people. That way you can get your URL in front of targeted prospects. And when they visit your site, they’ve actually made a conscious decision to do so.

Watch The Links In Reprint Articles

If you are using reprint articles on any of your websites - pay attention to where the links within the articles and within the resource boxes are pointing to.

You could have an article that read well with good information - but the links within could point to a ‘no-no’ site.

And you would never know it just by looking at the domain name.

Once you point a link to a website, your own website is associated with it. So if it’s a ‘baddy’, your site could get flagged by the search engines.

It’s a jungle out there. And another reason to hesitate using those fancy automated rss to blog software packages available now. Unless of course you’re just using crash and burn domains.

If you’re not monitoring where your links are pointing to, you could really harm your website.

Article Marketing Tip

I spent some time on isnare.com’s distribution page and discovered a timesaver..

We can submit your article to more than 1,000+ sites who are members of the article announcement/distribution groups that we support, depending on your article’s topic/category. And we will also submit your articles to goArticles.com, articleCity.com, www.jogena.com, FreeZineSite.com and etc…, depending on your article’s category.

http://isnare.com

The smallest package starts at $10 for 5 articles to distribute - that’s $2 bucks an article! If I understand correctly, your articles would be sent out to article distribution groups (that you would otherwise need to subscribe to EACH OF THEM to submit your articles) plus several online article submission sites (62 currently) .

Looks like a good deal to take advantage of if you find yourself spending a lot of time submitting articles. One thing I could never bring myself to do is signup for all the article distribution groups out there.

For $2 an article, this may be worth a shot to test the waters and see what the results are.

Who’s Making Money From Your Parked Domains ?

How many of us have bucketfuls of unused domains?

Well if you do have domains parked at GoDaddy, take a quick visit to one and check it out.

So here’s a thought. Instead of a domain registrar profiting from your parked domain(s), how about changing things so you profit instead?

Make Money From Parked Domains

Sedo.com
Sell-My.com
Fabulous.com
DomainSponsor.com
DomainHop.com

*Note: I have *zero* experience with the above programs. Check out the various terms before choosing one to see which fits best with your domain portfolio (minimum payout, payment methods, traffic requirements, etc.).

I would think earning money from parked domain monetization depends on type-in traffic. Not too optimistic that the domains I currently have will bring any traffic, but heck - it’s free to give it a twirl so why not. If I find out GoDaddy has been making major cha-ching from kazillions of daily visitors on one of my parked domains - I’ll be so mad at myself!

I’ve opened an account at sedo to try things out.