Affiliate Business Cash |

As some of you know, WordPress 2.5+ has some issues running widgets in certain themes. Buggy code in 2.5 causes a break in quite a few themes that run double sidebars. Since this is the case with the original Dateless Sniper, I decided to create a new version that doesn’t break, and have make a few other significant changes including:

• Removal of the RSS icon
• Change to a single sidebar
• Increased width on content section

This theme was created for maximum SEO benefit, is widgetized, and could be used in any niche. Here’s how the new version looks:

Enjoy and please let me know if you have any questions about the theme!!

Download Dateless Sniper 1.1

~ Court

(original article)

Q: I am new to affiliate marketing. Is opening a store offering the best deals for brand names a good way to promote affiliate programs?

A: If you’re new to affiliate marketing, I don’t think you’ll have access to the best deals.

The deals that are better than those publicly available are typically made available only to affiliates that are generating lots of business already.

The thing you should focus on is a point of differentiation for your site.

What are you bringing to the table with your affiliate site? What is your value proposition? How are you different from everybody else that makes people want to come to your site initially and then return in the future?

Think about those questions. Don’t think about what the merchant can give you, but rather what you can give the consumer.

You need to have a valid reason for your site to be a part of the food chain.

If you’re not doing something different and better and unique than everybody else who is out there, your site is unnecessary.

Your earnings equation for making money online:

Page Impressions x Click Through Rate x Earnings Per Click = Total Earnings

Get more traffic so you have more Page Impressions.

Increase (ethically) your click through rate.

Increase your Earnings per Click.

And that’s about it. I was about 550 words into a post this morning, and then I realized all I needed to say was what you see above. I wanted to keep this simple in the spirit of what Court has taught lately about avoiding information overload. If you’d print those posts out, read them daily, and follow their instructions, a few months from now you will be making money.

Here at the Internet Marketing School we are passionate about seeing you reach the point where you can pursue making money online full time (if that’s what you want to do). Last Thursday I quit my day job to work online full time and I can tell you the feeling is even better than I thought it would be. We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible experience the same.

Have a great day.

(original article)

Once you have a site that’s somewhat established (or one that isn’t for that matter), you should consider adding to its ability to grab search visitors by using organic landing pages. This lesson will teach you what organic landing pages are, and how you can use them to increase the traffic you get from Google and other search engines.

Definition of Organic Landing Pages

This type of a page is created with the basic intention of getting a search engine ranking for a specific keyword, and is one of the basic fundamentals of internet marketing.

There is a ton of debate as to whether this type of page should be written with visitors or search engines in mind. The answer seems pretty easy and obvious to me - it should be written with both in mind.

Creating a landing page that doesn’t have the keyword in the right places would just be stupid and creating a landing page that didn’t make sense or help a visitor is also not a good idea. If a Google engineer came across the page you could be banned or penalized. On the other side of things you could also get a benefit from people naturally linking to a solid page if it helped people that were searching for the information found there.

How to Create a Solid Organic Landing Page

First of all, you need to make sure you get the keyword you’re trying to target into a few strategic locations:

• HTML title tag
• Page URL
• Within the page’s main body of text (near the beginning)

With a static site, you would have to do all this manually. With a WordPress blog this will pretty much happen automatically as long as you have permalinks enabled and use your keyword as the post title and post.

To add to the effect of the page, I usually like to add the keyword multiple times into a few other locations. While these placements are debatable, I have used them and they have worked great for me. Here are the additional locations where I like to use them:

• Tags
• H1 Tag
• Toward the end of the main body of text

As a general rule, you don’t want to ever stuff content with a load of keywords. I find that by creating landing pages that are 500+ words, I can fit my keyword into the text two or three times naturally without making it feel spammy.

If I have the keyword three times in the main body of text (in a blog this would be within the post), in the post title, and in a tag, that gives me five visual occurrences within the body of the document. This means that a person could visually find the keyword five times on the page.

In a 500+ word document, this is sufficient and not overly stuffed.

When I started creating this type of a page, I remember being a little nervous to get started because I didn’t want to do it wrong. As I have grown in experience, I came to understand that it isn’t an exact science. If you follow what’s in this post, you will be just as good at creating solid landing pages as anyone else.

Example Landing Pages

Here are a few landing pages that I have created for your convenience (and to get search traffic for the site):

• How to Make Money at Home
• How to Make Money on the Internet
• Ways for Kids to Make Money
• Ways To Make Money Online

Getting the Actual Ranking with a Landing Page

To the best of my knowledge, the landing page examples I’ve shown above are pretty much as good as it gets. However, this doesn’t mean that I will get an automatic number one ranking. I can have better keyword placement than other sites, but if the other sites have more keyword authority than I have, they will outrank me.

This means that getting an organic landing page to rank well involves two steps:

1. Setting the page up properly (this article teaches you how to do this)
2. Building links to increase the keyword authority of the page

Conclusion

By finding keywords that are related to your site, and creating solid landing pages, anyone can increase the traffic they get from Google and other search engines.

(original article)

Teenagers can go through literally boatloads of money, especially if they have a car. With gas prices at about $4 per gallon (5/15/2008), life can be difficult for a teenager that’s short on funds. The price of dating, playing sports, and doing other activities can really put a damper on a teen’s lifestyle.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways for teens to make money. They can get jobs, start businesses, and do chores for family members. This lesson will start with some of the more conventional ways that teens make money and will then go on to some very unconventional ones.

Teens Can Make Awesome Money by Starting Businesses

The ‘wealthiest’ teens out there are all running their own businesses. Businesses that are perfect for teens include lawn mowing, yard cleanup, pet waste removal, pet care, house cleaning, baby sitting, elderly care, and snow shoveling.

One kid I know bought a used lawn mower at a thrift store for $10 one summer and turned that $10 into more than $10,000 worth of profits in just one summer. What’s cool about that story is that he turned his lawn mowing business into a very successful landscaping business later in life and now makes much more than a six figure income. Most parents would gladly give a teen a $10 loan to buy a lawnmower (or a $100 loan for that matter).

Most of the other businesses that teens can run cost basically nothing to start up, other than the cost of some paper to make fliers.

Jobs That Teens Can Get to Make Money

There are certain jobs that are perfect for teens, including working at fast food restaurants, department stores, clothing stores, and pretty much any other type of store that you would find in most malls.

Some teens won’t want to get a job at first, but will figure out how cool it is to have their own funds. They don’t have to beg mom and dad every time they would like to go do something with their friends. Many times, teens are able to make enough money to buy a car, and that is a dream for most teens. It allows them to grab some off-campus lunch with friends or hit the mall after school.

Untraditional Ways for Teens to Make Money

In this day and age, teens can make great money by using the internet, especially if they have the skill set. Blogging has provided great incomes for many teens, in fact there are teen bloggers who are now making more than $100,000 per year from their blogs.

We are now living in an age of global business, and the internet gives us the biggest opportunities for creating income from people everywhere in the world. Teenagers are usually more tech savvy than adults, giving them unique opportunities to create online income. Encouraging your teenager to learn online business can really help them to create a bright future for themselves.

Hopefully this article has given you some ideas. While there are many other ways for teens to make money, we hope that we have been of some help to you.

(original article)

Earlier this week I had a very interesting conversation with one of my consulting clients. She has been working on her online business for a little over a year, and has followed quite a few ‘make money online’ blogs and sites during that time period. She expressed to me a concern that I would imagine many of you are dealing with.

I can’t remember the exact wording of what she asked, but it was something like this, “Court, what you’re telling me just seems too simple. I’ve been reading and reading and honestly I’m starting to feel like I’m never going to understand everything I need to learn.”

I’m going to tell you what I told her, and sincerely I hope that this helps you to gain some perspective.

One of the biggest challenges of being a ‘make money online’ blogger is that people’s attention spans are very very short. Everyone has literally hundreds of options of sites to read. This creates a lot of pressure for MMO bloggers to create content that compels. A lot of the time, this means that they have to create something downright sensational to get any attention.

Everyone wants to break the next big news, product, or technique and this often comes at the expense of talking about the stuff that really works. You aren’t going to read much about the nuts and bolts of marketing online on many of the sites (of course there are exceptions). Why? Because that stuff doesn’t grab people’s attention.

Here’s what I find funny. I have lots of friends that ask me how to do this stuff. I’ll show them how to choose a keyword and will then help them set up a domain and hosting. I will then teach them how to create content and build links. Since they haven’t read all of the sensational stuff that doesn’t matter as much, they get right to work. They don’t question. They get the results we thought they would get.

When I get the chance to talk to people from the MMO world, it’s a VERY different story. They usually ask like 5,000 questions about this technique and that one. Usually when it comes down to the nuts and bolts, they aren’t doing the tasks that are the most important.

What are the most important tasks?

Building content and links.

Building content and links.

Building content and links.

Building content and links.

There’s nothing wrong with reading MMO blogs. But… if you let the sensational stuff get in the way of the stuff that is going to make your business grow, I’m afraid that you will run into a lot of frustration and confusion.

Internet marketing has become very social. But… if you’re frustrated about your results and have no idea why, you’re probably working on the wrong things.

(original article)

Every business owner should be thinking about the longevity and sustainability of his or her income streams. This is especially true for web business owners because we invest huge amounts of time into our sites, as opposed to money. It may sound a little crazy, but I’d rather lose money than time. I can earn more money; I can never get time back. That being the case, I want to make sure any project I invest time into is going to have lasting value.

Build Your Sites to Last

Some of you may have wondered if your keyword sniping websites will provide an income that can last years beyond when you set them up. They can, and they should. You’ll just have to be proactive in making sure your income streams not only don’t stop flowing, but grow. Here are a few things you can do to protect your future earnings:

1. First and foremost, make sure your content has value to a searcher. I’m not saying your sniper sites need to be the Encyclopedia Britannica, but I am saying that a reader should be able to learn something substantive by reading any page on your site. Quality, original content will protect you from being labeled a “Made for Adsense” site, which will get your account banned.

2. Strengthen your winners. I hope you’ll follow the advice to create 10+ (or 50+) sniper sites. In the short term the best way to have a high average daily income is to have as many fishing lines in the water as possible. In the long term you’ll start to identify which of your sites are performing best in terms of traffic and daily income.

When those patterns begin to emerge, pick your two or three most successful sites and focus effort on them. Add more content, build more links, and consider expanding into more a competitive, more lucrative niche. Any sniper site should earn between $5 and $20 per day; you can expand the best of them into sites that earn $50 or $100+ per day.

3. “Cut” your losers. Why do I put cut in quotes? Because I’m not necessarily saying you should get rid of your lower performing sites. If they are covering their own expenses (domain renewal and hosting), and not taking up any of your precious time, why not keep them around. They gain value as they age in Google’s index. Down the road you can either re-visit them when your winners are fully developed and you have more time, or you can sell them on the open market.

So by ‘cut your losers’ what I really mean is don’t allocate them mental or creative energy. Part of making your income sustainable is not spending your most precious asset (time) on sites that you know aren’t performing for you.

Always Keep An Eye On the Future

Above all else, maintain a long term perspective. Forgive the sports analogy, but today’s home runs aren’t likely to win tomorrow’s baseball games. We’ll all have to adapt and grow with the times. Optimize your business the best you can for today’s environment, and be flexible. The only people that will lose the ability to make money online are those who choose to stop learning and adapting.

(original article)

While many dream of a life spent working from home, most people will never make it. Partially this is because most don’t put in the elbow grease that is needed to build a successful home based business and others fail because they chase the wrong dreams.

It happens everywhere you look. It even happened to me too. In the past I wasted months with the classic “show stoppers” like procrastination, chasing the wrong dream and feeling sorry for myself. I think to some extent we all experience this at some stage during our business building cycle and there really isn’t much wrong with this.

It’s called being human.

We all make mistakes. After all, making mistakes is part of our life and helps us to move ahead. You might have heard the saying “the more mistakes we make, the more successful we will be”. If I take this as some measurement of my future success then I shall be very happy indeed.

Hoping alone won’t get me there and neither will this work for you. While hope is great for the health of our mind, it is another attribute that help us to step out into the fresh air.

Success is the result of our ability to learn from our mistakes and act

I know, this is a very strong statement to make, but look around you. How many successful people do you know? I bet all of them have a pretty powerful story to tell.

A story of failure, sadness and defeat eventually lead them to success.

Pretty much all successful people in business have taken what they learned from their failures and turned it into success.

We all deal with our own little demons day by day. Whether they are related to the way we’d like to run our business, customers, family, colleagues, business partners or last but not least ourselves, we can choose to learn from negative events and use them to our advantage in the future.

You are not dumb

If you understand this concept, but still struggle to make a dime with your business you might want to look at your patterns of behavior.

Often we tend to repeat mistakes, because we are in a habit of doing things a certain way. As you might already know, it takes 21 days to change a habit and really, this is the only thing that stands between you and your bad habit right now.

Take baby steps

The problem for most is that we try to change too many things at once. We are sick of our habit to check email ten times a day which stops us from working effectively. Then we remember that while we are at it (changing things for the better), we could also clean up our messy office.

Soon enough we have a list of twenty things we want to change and give up before we even start.

We fall prey to the classic signs of over commitment and that is the end of that exercise.

Less is more

Instead of pushing too hard, we should aim to work with a conscience at changing things for the better. Some issues can be resolved within hours, while others take days.

Don’t worry about the time. As long as you are moving in the right direction, all is well.

I used to try to take big chunks out of my “negative patterns of behavior”. I resolved to be good by the end of the week and set out to become the next success story…

…Only to give up half way down the road because I tried to take on too many things at once. Countless times I stood up again, only to trip over my own feet the next minute.

I only learned to stand strong once I allowed myself to take things easy, naturally and from that day forward my business magically improved. Well, actually it wasn’t magic. It was hard work, passion and resolve to be successful once and for all that did it in the end.

I gave myself permission to become successful and started implementing steps to move ahead, one step at the time.

It worked!

Are you keen to try, or have you already experienced this amazing feeling of getting closer to your goals every single day?

(original article)

Affiliate Business Cash is getting down to the nitty gritty of Internet marketing. With a brand new website that is devoted entirely to Internet marketing strategies and tips, visitors can learn how to take their own business up a notch. The marketing information contained in the site is a virtual one stop shop for people who need a little help with marketing their business or website. Basically anything that you wanted to know about Internet marketing, the Affiliate Business Cash has it all covered.

Many people start their own businesses online only to quit after a short time because they are confused or overwhelmed by the Internet marketing that is required to drive traffic to the site and generate sales. Glenn Alan, founder of Affiliate Business Cash as created several information products on the subject of Internet marketing. However, he does not plan to include any of these information products in the content of the site. “The information is based on real world experience” Alan says, “and not presented as any sort of sales pitch, although I include links to various products which may be helpful”

Glenn Alan began his Internet ventures with a retail Internet site. He found that the retail side of the business was not something that he particularly wanted to do, so he sold the business. A few years later, he struck out on the Internet super highway to satisfy his entrepreneurial sweet tooth. He found that through affiliate marketing. As he worked in this industry, Alan learned that the marketing of the affiliate program was vital to the success of the program. He then devised a system of showing others how to achieve the successes that he has enjoyed through affiliate marketing and incorporated it into an extensive website.

The site appeals to those who are new to Internet marketing or who are old pros. It covers long tail keywords and a variety of marketing information that visitors can use immediately to boost their page rankings in the search engines and drive relevant traffic to their site. Alan says, “Internet Marketing is work, and there are no fast ways to a Ferrari and a house in Maui. I make a very nice second income doing very simple things, but I am armed with patience, time and a few battle wounds”
Affiliate Business Cash markets over hundreds of Internet marketing websites covering a wide range of products. Check out www.rxcr.com

During the 15 months that Court’s Internet Marketing School has been around, we have discussed literally dozens of ways to make money online. Many of you are quite new to the site, and many others will be introduced to the site by searching for information contained in this article. In order to help everyone to better understand the ways people go about creating an online income, I wanted to provide a simple list, complete with a simple explanation of each method. I will also try to point you toward some resources that you can use to dig deeper into creating online income.

#1 - Starting a Blog

Blogs are informational websites that people use to share information. The basic idea here is that the sharing of free information can bring visitors to your website, and you can in turn make a profit from that traffic. Most blogs will show the latest articles (known as posts) on the homepage, making it very easy for people to find the latest information that has been shared.

Examples:

• Engadget
• The Huffington Post
• Lifehacker
• Treehugger

People use a variety of methods to bring traffic to a blog including search engine optimization, social media, paid advertising, email marketing, and press releases. Recently there is a growing trend of bloggers using traditional media such as television and radio to gain exposure to their blogs, but in all honesty this is only happening for elite level bloggers.

To make money with a blog, people use a variety of different methods including selling advertising space, products, and services. Many other blogs make great money by using affiliate marketing, which is selling products for others in exchange for commissions.

This method is a great way to go, especially if you want to start casually. You can start a blog with no pressure, and allow it to build up over time. For more information on this method, check out this post: Starting a Blog.

#2 - Starting a Content Website

This method uses the same basic idea as idea #1. You will use free content to attract visitors to a location where you can sell advertising and products.

Technically, a blog is a content website, but for the purpose of this guide, ‘content websites’ are the traditional content sites that aren’t blogs. There are a lot of ways to create content websites. Usually people use content management systems like Joomla, Drupal, and Mambo to manage the content.

You may be wondering to yourself what type of content people use to create content websites. These sites can be built around literally anything, but many of them review products and services or report on news specific to an industry or niche.

Like idea #1, people use a lot of different methods to bring traffic to content websites, such as search engine optimization, social media, paid advertising, email marketing, and press releases.

Examples of successful content websites:

• GSM Arena
• SEO Chat
• DP Review

#3 - Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is the process of promoting products for other people and companies, in exchange for commissions. For example, let’s say that you have a site that provides people with home loans. I could sign up as an affiliate and then push people to your loan site. When people get a loan, you will make some money and will pay me a commission. I would be the affiliate marketer and you would be running an affiliate program.

There are thousands of different affiliate programs that you can use to make money online. Here are some examples of some of the more well known programs:

• eBay - eBay’s affiliate program pays you commissions when you get people to sign up for eBay, and also pays some commissions if the traffic you send ends up buying something on eBay.
• Amazon - Amazon’s program pays you commissions for pushing people to Amazon. You earn a commission when a person you pushed to Amazon buys a product. Amazon commissions start at 4% and go up from there and depend on how many conversions you can get.

Affiliate marketing is often combined with a few of the other ways to make money online. For example, bloggers often use affiliate marketing to make money from their blog traffic. List builders (see list building section) use affiliate marketing as the primary method of making money with their lists. They will usually send their list an affiliate offer (an offer to buy a product or service) around once per month (sometimes more or less often).

Affiliate marketers often stay under the radar, but for a good site that teaches this process, visit Super Affiliate Zac Johnson.

#4 - List Building

List building is one of the more aggressive and powerful ways to make online money. The method combines amazingly well with affiliate marketing, and most good affiliate marketers rely heavily on building lists to scale up their businesses.

A good list builder will usually set up a site specifically to capture names and emails. You have probably done a search in Google to find a page that offered you a free product. All you have to do to get the free product is type in your name and email, right? By downloading that free product, you will probably be signed up to be on that marketer’s list. He will then be able to communicate with you in the future and will send you and everyone else on the list offers. A certain percentage of the people on the list will take advantage of those offers and this will get the marketer paid.

Good list builders will come up with ways to help the people on their list, which will keep them on the list for a longer time period. They are able to create a win-win. Over time, their list grows larger and larger which provides them with larger and larger income. Good affiliate marketers sometimes end up with millions of names.

To build their lists, list builders usually use a service like Aweber, which helps them to create forms to capture information, and stores the names and emails in a database for future communication.

List building combines with quite a few of the other methods, including blogging, affiliate marketing, lead generation, and starting an online service business.

#5 - Lead Generation

Generating leads can be an extremely lucrative way to create money online. Mortgage leads, for example can be sold for more than $40 per lead, with no promise of conversion.

Usually the process of lead generation involves setting up a site to bring traffic, and then funneling traffic to a page where the visitor requests more information about a product or service. In the case of mortgage loans, the visitor would request more information about a loan. The marketer doing the lead generation (the person who created the lead) will then sell the information to a mortgage broker or company, who will in turn call the lead to try to get them to get a loan.

There are literally hundreds of different industries that rely on lead generation including:

• Loans
• Finance
• Weight Loss
• Real Estate
• Credit Cards
• Cell Phone Plans

Savvy marketers will set up businesses that capture leads in these and other industries and can make some truly killer profits.

To find lead generation programs, I would visit CJ.com - they manage affiliate programs and lead generation programs for hundreds of companies.

#6 - Starting an Online Service Business

Those who become good at generating leads will often transition into creating their own service businesses. They usually realize that while they are able to make good money selling off leads, they could make more by creating businesses for the leads.

For example, a marketer may create a site at some point that provides people with good information about finance. They then go through the lead generation process to create and sell leads to an experienced financial planner. This goes great and the marketer makes great money, but eventually realizes that the financial planner makes a lot more from those leads than he does.

At that point, the marketer will often find a financial planner to partner with, or will become a financial planner himself. The leads are already there so the transition isn’t too complicated.

Selling services online usually takes a few simple steps:

• Bringing traffic to a website
• Generating a lead
• Selling to that lead

Since the first step in the process is bringing traffic to a website, the method is often combined with other ways to make money online including blogging and list building. Many times, people that use this method will also purchase a good amount of paid advertising, as long as they are able to convert that traffic into clients.

Examples of online service businesses:

• Clientside SEM - Aaron Wall’s SEO consulting service
• Unique Blog Designs - blog design service
• Logoworks - logo, web, and graphic design services
• Article Marketer - article distribution service

#7 - Creating Products

Those that make the most money online are often those that create their own products. These products are often informational and can be downloaded by the purchaser.

For example, a savvy marketer will do research and then create an information product that will teach people how to lose weight. The product will probably be sold as an ebook or as a site that has a paid membership. The marketer will then use a variety of methods to bring traffic to the site including affiliate marketing (the marketer will recruit affiliates), paid advertising, list building, and sometimes blogging.

Since an informational product costs basically nothing to deliver, there is often great money in creating this type of product. I would highly recommend getting some experience before using this method because there’s a lot to it.

#8 - Setting up an Online Store

The old fall-back is creating an online store that sells tangible products. Some people will buy products at wholesale and sell them at retail for profits. Others will drop-ship, which is the process of selling a product before you buy it. You hold a list of what you can buy products for and sell them at an increase. Your supplier will then ship the product for you.

This method is often combined with many of the other methods including list building, lead generation, affiliate marketing, and creating products.

Examples:

• Amazon
• Lets Talk
• Buy.com

Hopefully this list is enough to get you started. While there are literally hundreds of ways to make money online, this list contains some of the most powerful. Adding one or more of these to your current arsenal may also help some of you to be more successful with what you’re doing now.

(original article)

A goal that I have had for Court’s Internet Marketing School in the last few months is to step up the pace in order to provide each visitor with more helpful information.

The addition of Mark has been truly great. He has been able to provide expertise and insights that we wouldn’t have on the site without him, and that has been good for everyone.

In order to expand the site further, I’ve been looking for another contributor for quite some time. I wanted someone with a true entrepreneur spirit and someone that had some experience with business and ‘making it happen’. Many of you are hoping to someday be able to quit the 9-to-5, and I wanted to bring someone on board that has made that jump to provide each of you with insights into what that’s like. I wanted a person that can help you with that enormous challenge.

After thinking about this and looking for quite some time, I found exactly the right person, and have invited her to contribute regularly to the site. Let me introduce to you our new contributor, Monika Mundell.

About Monika

Many of you are probably familiar with Monika because of her freelance writing blog, TheWritersManifesto. I’ve been reading her stuff for quite a while and can tell you that she has a great understanding of writing, blogging, entrepreneurship, dealing with working from home, and a lot of others areas that we all need to improve on. I couldn’t be more excited to have her.

Monika has been working as a freelance writer for a while now and does a great job with her work. I’ve hired her for writing before, and was very pleased with the work she did. If any of you could use a good freelance writer, Monika gets a 5-star approval rating from me.

Monika and I have spent a lot of time talking on the phone, and I can tell you that her understanding of online marketing is extensive. Hiring her as a freelancer would be very wise, she understands a lot of concepts that many freelance writers won’t - keyword targeting, niche marketing, lead generation, and sales. Since I have hired Monika to do some writing for me, I can tell you in all honesty that she is truly an extremely skilled and consummate professional.

Monika, we couldn’t be happier!

Everyone - please give Monika a warm welcome.

(original article)

Folks, twitter is stupid. I’ve spent the last two hours trying to find a single redeeming quality to the service, and I have nothing to report. For those of you who haven’t familiarized yourself with it, two things:

1. Don’t.

2. Watch the video below.

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It introduces the concept of twitter as “life happens between blog posts”. Well, yes. It should. But it’s hard for life to actually happen if you’re wasting it watching people’s…twitter feeds (did I say that right?) with such dazzling information as:

“Going to the store.”

“Working on my newsletter.”

“Overslept.”

All I see on twitter is an odd hybrid of a forum and a blog, except nothing meaningful is being said. And I mean nothing. So far as I can tell twitter is something the A List bloggers are promoting as a way to get their groupies to follow them around all day, begging for a shred of acknowledgment with some sort of “@joeshmoe” response to a….tweet (again, am I saying that right?).

Talk about a colossal waste of time. Be warned, there are those that are saying twitter is great for connectivity and getting information in real time. I can’t think of a tool that gives you a lower roi on your time when it comes to networking.

A noteworthy blogger talks about how he loves twitter, but then he disclosed his traffic sources: Google - 42%. Twitter - 1.87%. I think that pretty much tells the story. Go build some links.

Anything you get from twitter you should be getting from your blogging efforts. It’s nothing but a time sucker, and do any of you feel like you have lots of excess time?

Guys, when your content is written and your link-building is done for the day, get outside and get some sun. It’s Spring, and instead of tweeting you should be shutting off your computers and going to hang out with your kids at the park. Or going to spend some time with friends IN PERSON. I’m here to tell you that a good laugh in person with friends is quite a bit more gratifying than any LOL from a twitterer (”twitterer”…brilliant). Phones, emails, and blogs are enough…and maybe too much. Twitter is blogging taken to an unhealthy extreme.

And besides, how can I possibly participate in anything where the primary activity is called “tweeting”?

(original article)

I declare today to be a day for mass link building. There will be no reading blogs, no YouTube, and no writing blog posts.

Guys everyday I get emails from people saying that they don’t understand what they’re missing. Building links is what you’re missing. It does us absolutely no good to run around reading IM and MMO blogs all day if we aren’t building links that will bring us direct and search traffic. If you don’t get search traffic, it’s because you are NOT dedicated to this crucial aspect of internet marketing.

How are we going to build links? We aren’t going to get all crazy with the methods, we’re going back to the basics:

• Blogroll link exchanges (Use 50% of your time here)
• Article Marketer (Use 40% of your time here)
• Directory submissions (Use 10% of your time here)

One of the most important skills you can learn is shutting out all of the distractions to focus your link building efforts. In all reality you should be spending 80-90% of your time on link building anyway. I’m guessing that for most people, it’s more like 5%. If you aren’t getting results, that’s why.

(original article)

Starting your home business and making a push to become financially independent is one of the main motivations for becoming an affiliate marketer. The barriers to entry are non existent and there are literally thousands of products to sell. With this seemingly wide choice of selection and the even wider opportunity for making money, who wouldn’t consider joining the ranks of the online marketer?

But there are some caveats you should respect if you make the decision and they are not to be ignored.

Due Diligence

The first is to do very serious due diligence on the affiliate you decide to represent. A common mistake is to pick a product on the “buzz” that has been created without digging deeper into who is behind the product launch. Find out everything you can about the person behind the product. Have they delivered in the past? Are they reliable in paying out commissions on time? I make a point of trying to find out from another affiliate marketer if they have had any experience with this person. Just recently, one phone call with just such a person saved me time and money on a “buzzed” product my instincts told me was not all it was cracked up to be.

It’s important to take the time to do your homework and check things out before you make your decision. Your very success depends on it.

Trust and Confidence

The second point is to select only those products you understand, have researched and truly believe in. This means owning the product yourself and trying it out, to see if you are comfortable that it delivers what it is supposed to deliver.

This goes directly to the issues of trust and confidence you are putting in the product and it also addresses the trust your customers are putting in you to give them what they are paying for.

Focus

Finally, focus only on those products that have your undivided attention. There are literally thousands of products to choose from in the affiliate marketing space. With each product potentially representing an income stream, the temptation is to sell as many as possible and have as wide a sales funnel as you can get. This is a very unwise move because it gives the appearance of selling and can be a real turn off for your customers.

The better choice is to select one or two products that pay a commission of 50% or better and market them as much as you possible can. This will show that you really believe in what you are selling and raises the chance of creating a good revenue stream.

This approach keeps things clear and focused for your customer base. It makes it easier for them to find what they are looking for and also easier to decided to buy.

Conclusion

These key points are often ignored by many affiliate marketers who pay for it in lost business. They are losing customers they are unaware of and don’t realize the extent of their mistakes.

But their mistakes can be your opportunity for a prosperous and successful business launch.

Make the effort and take the time to implement these key steps and you will be will on you way to success and to fulfilling your goals.

May your travels be prosperous?

There’s been some debate in the SEO world lately over what’s known as pagerank sculpting. Basically pagerank sculpting is the practice of strategically placing no follow tags on certain links within your site as a way of concentrating your Google juice where you want it most. Let me show you this example:

If you’re wondering why those tabs in Court’s nav bar are red, it’s because I have SEO for Firefox enabled and one of its features is showing you all the links on a page that have the no follow tag in them. SEOQuake has the same feature - if you want this functionality on your browser you can read our post on installing SEOQuake. Incidentally, we get quite a few Google searchers on this site looking for how to identify no followed links. There you go, friendly searcher.

Why Would You No Follow Links Within Your Site?

So the question is why Court has put no follow tags on the About, Contact, Archives, and Advertise tabs in his navigation bar. Pretty simple really. Your site only has so much Google juice to share, and you want to make sure your channeling it to the right places. A few days ago we had a pretty solid discussion of backlinks (thanks everybody) and one of the main points was that anchor text matters.

The anchor text you use in linking to yourself is a message to Google about your site’s topic. Court doesn’t see any reason to tell Google his site is about….About. Make sense? Especially since your Google-juice-per-page is limited, and you have other links you really want to matter.

Concentrated Juice

Let’s say Court’s homepage has 100 units of Google authority. Every link he gives away on the homepage uses a little of that authority. So maybe if the tabs in the navigation bar weren’t no followed, they would eat up 20 units of Google juice he could be giving to his section on “The Basics” over in the sidebar.

Now before any snob SEOs pounce on me and say, “There’s no way to measure the authority of an individual page! It’s not that simple! You’re spreading false information!”, just calm down. I know there’s no such thing as 100 units of Google juice (not that I know of anyway). I’m just trying to give an illustration of when you would want to no follow certain links on your site.

Return On Links - The SEO’s ROI

You can put a financial spin on this. Would you rather put your money into a bank account earning 3%, or stock shares that earn 8%? You put your money wherever it gives you the highest ROI (return on investment) right? Well what about your “ROL” (return on links)? We may not know how to measure the authority of a page in specific terms, but we do know it’s finite.

Since Google juice is not unlimited, we need to wisely invest it wherever it will give the greatest return. Is Court’s business better off if people find him for the keyword “About” or if they find him by searching for “How to Make Money Blogging”? Obviously the second. So if he doesn’t hurt his business by depriving his “About” page of link power then the only logical thing is to no follow it and give a little extra oomph to “How to Make Money Blogging” and the others.

(original article)