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For many newbies, starting out in the affiliate marketing game can be really daunting. Often it’s the case that you’re so desperate to make money, that you end up buying every guide on building a residual online income and get seduced by the clever titles and the psychology employed on the sellers’ squeeze pages. Hopefully, you’ll find this article I just wrote useful to avoid these commonly made mistakes: Dos and donts of affiliate marketing

FACT: A lot of internet marketers out there aren’t making good use of their email lists that they capture on squeeze pages/optional subscriptions newsletters, etc.
Often the emails collected, will be collected on some .xls file and never to be truly utilized. Such a waste, after all if someone has actually bothered to type in their email address (let’s for arguments sake assume its real) then they must at this moment in time showed some sort of interest in what you’re offering.

Okay so many people, may just enter their email address, just for the free goodies you may be providing, and that’s the last you’ll hear from them. But, there’s that small percentage, that if your product is good, will come back again. And this is what all these hours of hard work are for. To capture interested buyers and keep them on as repeat buyers. But how can you possible do this, if you’re not sending out newsletters, offers and updates on a fairly regular basis. These people aren’t after all mind readers.

So what im basically saying, is that before you launch a product – whether it’s an ebook on miracle hair growth or a tutorial video series on how to get dates, think about the process you’ll have in place for maximizing the return on your email lists. Set up systems for targeting these people, find out what works and what doesn’t by trial and error. Make sure you can get stats back on things like open rates, CTRs, unsubscribe clicks, conversions etc. In short pay for a reputable email marketing company to manage this for you. Or if you have the time and money integrate a highly regarded email marketing platform and syncrhonise with ur server(s).

The dividends can and will pay off, and you’ll be kicking yourself as to why you didn’t start doing this earlier.

It’s absolutely phenomenal how goggle can look at what everyone’s been doing for ages, and just change the ball game completely. With Google Buzz, it’s certainly added an interesting dimension to social media applications and quite frankly pisses on twitters and friend feed’s parade.
In my humble opinion Google Wave would have been a lot more successful, if they integrated into the Gmail system. One of the main reasons why Buzz has caught on so fast and its rapid growth increases on a day to day basis is because of its hassle free set up. Buzz is already there, once you sign into your gmail account, and very little is needed on your part to get started.

Also the range of supported media that users can share with friends, colleagues and family is needless to say more extensive than the likes of Twitter.

Quite frankly everyone is buzzing about buzz, and the buzz is rightfully justified.

Perhaps I’m posting this a year too late, I don’t know, but even though many analysts are saying that 2010 is the year that we will see many countries moving out of current ongoing economic crises and towards positive growth, there’s still many countries that will bear the brunt of it for sometime to come.
So why the post, if things are on the up this year? Well, at one point or another, we have all had to market our websites, blogs, products etc on a shoestring (indeed many people do so well, because they make this a regular habbit).

Today, I also sat in on a marketing 101 seminar for beginners aimed mainly for technical engineers to get a grasp on what effective marketing is in today’s e-commerce world. However, it failed to address, how to effectively market in a global recession, where marketing budgets are reduced, and sometimes even scrapped. The obvious answer is to focus on leverage free forms of online marketing. What that translates today, is effective SEO marketing strategies – delivering free traffic to sites, blogs….

It also means leveraging any existing position you have within your target niche, be it existing relationship with other bloggers who can perhaps review your product or building upon a previous reputation. In times of economic hardship, it means sending out e-newsletters or electronic direct marketing mail messages, informing your marketing database (your existing list of people who are happy to receive mail from you) of any upcoming product launches, membership programs etc. The tip here, is not to piss them off too much, by sending them too frequent messages, you’re the best person to judge how often you should send emails to your list whether its once a week or fortnightly. If you find you’re suddenly getting a high unsubscribe rate, then perhaps look at the frequency of sending. Make sure the content in these emails are engaging, with dynamic interesting content in them. If you’re worried about committed common gaffes made by even the big guys, it’s worth reading this as well:
http://listverse.com/2009/06/08/top-10-worst-marketing-gaffs-ever/

If you are going to market on a shoestring, it’s always a good strategy to make the best of what you’ve got, and make sure whatever you do, you do it well.

Many affiliates will run PPC campaigns, or PPC arbitrage campaigns. If you’re not familiar with the term, probably not enough time to go into in this post – just goolge ppc arbitrage and you’ll get the necessary info.
Anyway, my new job role affords me some time to play around with some cool google tools. Also the weekly meeting with the google adwords team often is a chance for them to show us some new beta tools to help with our own PPC campaigns. Because I’m so nice, I’m going to share some of these tools with you now, for you to have a play with.

First one, which you might already be familiar with is the Adplanner tool, which essentially is an extension of the automatic placement tool you get with the content network:
https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile#siteDetails?identifier=www.imdb.com&lp=true

- The good thing about this tool is that it allows you to laser target the sites you advertiser more effectively. Some GA type data is also presented giving you a better insight into your site or competitor’s site. You can log in to this tool through your adwords tool, as yet, there’s no synchronising app that allows you to ad the returned websites automatically to your adgroup. But hopefully, we should see this in the future.

The second tool, which has been around for a bit, is very good for keyword research:
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

This again, gives you more data and search trends since 2004. It allows you to enter up to 5 keywords/phrases and pull data across locales, seasons, specific categories and so on. Also a cool feature is the heat map for regions, so you can see which region is particular active in searching for your keywords.

Just a couple of useful free tools to get going with. In addition to the usual paid tools such as keyword spy, keyword tracker etc…If you’ve come across any useful tools for PPC, comment and ill try to check them out.

Cheers

This for many internet marketers is the ultimate goal, to launch an info product that not only educates and informs, and offers training on a specific subject or group of subjects but also gets the sales in. Much like choosing a niche to work in launching your own info/educational or training product requires careful planning and research. There’s two main option, either starting something from scratch, or improving upon an existing informational product already out there on the market. Many internet marketers will go for the latter, although the former is perhaps more beneficial to revenue growth over a longer term.

Another tough decision you’ll face is whether you should release an Ebook, which frankly too many people go for, or a series of video training courses. Of course it’s a no-brainer that people would rather watch a video which tells them exactly how to do something, rather than go through pages and pages of text looking for the answer. So I would recommend launching perhaps a combination of video modules with a short ebook with more weighting on the video training modules.

How you want to set up the release of info products is entirely up to you. You may want to release a membership site, where you can charge anything from $47-$1000 depending upon how much content you want on there. I would say don’t create all the content before you launch, ideally you want to be adding content for the members, and it’s important to get the money in. Obviously makes sure there’s enough content on there in the first month to keep the paying members happy.

Or you may fancy just doing a squeeze page, with a link to a download page where people once they sign up can download the videos/Ebook as a one-off system. However, whatever method you decide upon you want to make sure it’s adding something of unique value to your targeted market, and the necessary help and support is there for your paying customers.

We’ve launched a new website offering SEO consultancy and PPC management services.

There will be some more content added ongoing through the week, but we hope there’s enough there

to get you going, please provide any feedback you have on the site through posting a comment here.

Many thanks,

Here’s the link: Web.SEO.Consultancy

Choosing the right domain from the start can help your SEO campaign tremendously, particular in the long term. Often people will make the mistake of choosing a URL/URI with their company name in the domain. However, this is a mistake, as it’s often the case that there’s not much benefit derived from ranking for your company name. Depending on what niche your in, you can usually come up first or in the top spots anyway without doing much SEO.

So what makes a SEO friendly domain?

- A URL with your main core keyword(s) in.
However, do make this too long, a general rule to follow buy 2-3 tailed keywords are okay, but no more than this. Even though you can get domains that go up to 63 characters, try and keep it under 50 if possible.

-Use the Keyword search tools, find the most relevant keywords to your business.

-Go for a .com domain name if available. The .com websites generally tend to fair better in the search engines, and most people think of .com sites when they think of online businesses. A .com generally has more authority in the search engines, than other ending sites such as .biz .net etc……

-Finally, avoid strange characters in the URL such as &% etc. It waste characters and makes for an unfriendly SEO domain name.

To start the week ahead smiling:
Sasquatch Viral Dancing Guy