Search engine basics

Maybe the single most important part of running an affiliate website is understanding how people find your site and how to make your site stick out among the billion or so other sites on the Internet.

If you’ve been using the Internet for more than an hour or two, chances are you know what a search engine is. Websites like Google, Yahoo and Ask.com have developed into multi-billion dollar corporations in the last ten years.

Using search engines is extremely simple. You just go to the site, type in what you want to find and click enter. But how can you make sure that your site will be found? As it turns out, it’s all about the keywords.

When a site like Google or Yahoo searches the Internet to come up with results from a web query, it takes the number of keywords on a site into consideration. It also takes particular keywords or phrases into account, too. If someone is doing a search for “Book about Rolling Stones,” a site that has that phrase or a phrase similar to it 10 times is going to come up higher than a site that only mentions it once. That’s why its so important to incorporate keyword text into your web content so that when someone does a search for, say, “Oolong Tea from China” and that just happens to be what your site sells, your site comes up high on the list, not buried on the bottom.

The trick is to incorporate these keywords or keyword phrases into your web content, and still have your content make sense. This is a super-tricky obstacle to get around. The best advice I can give is to simply read around and see what other affiliate marketing sites have done. Remember, your content is a huge part of your site. If people don’t stay on your site for a minute or two reading your content, they will never, ever click on any links you have and buy any products you’re selling. You must find the balance between a heavy use of keywords and well-written text.

Knowing how to use search engines is a big part of affiliate marketing. You can have the best content, the most timely links and the best product in the world and you won’t do a lick of business unless people can find you. Learning the art of incorporating keyword text into your affiliate website may seem tough, but it’s the difference between making a few bucks here and there and making it big in affiliate marketing.

More common affiliate mistakes

In the last few years, affiliate marketing has exploded on the Internet. In pretty much every web search that is done during every second of the day on the Internet, people are steered towards affiliate marketing sites. Some work, some don’t and some are gone before they even have a chance to get going. Let’s go over a few common mistakes affiliate marketers make when setting up and running their site.

• Make sure you completely understand the affiliate program you’re signing up for. It can be really tough to turn down that one program that brags about the huge commission, but if the program is selling car parts and you don’t even drive, you might want to pass it up. If you know a lot about sports or pets or horses, try to find an affiliate marketing program geared towards your area of expertise. You might not become a millionaire overnight, but in the long run, you’ll make a LOT more money that way, and you’ll enjoy the affiliate marketing experience a lot more, too.

• If you have the option on your site for folks to sign up for emails, make sure the ones you send out are informative and fun and not spam. Yes, you want to make sure you get the links of the product you’re selling in the email, but you have to take the time to set it up so it doesn’t look like spam or people will get annoyed with your site, opt out of your emails and never visit your site again. It’s the difference between taking a bit of extra effort and not. If you’re willing to go the extra mile, you’ll see the reward in your sales.

• Try to write your own content. It’s not unheard of for a person to visit 4-5 different affiliate marketing websites and see the exact same content on all of them. The site creators simply used the same public domain copy and didn’t even bother to change it up at all. Don’t let this happen to you. The only way your site will stand out among all the garbage is to make sure your content is completely unique.

Making mistakes when you start a new business are common. It’s going to happen, so don’t panic when it does. But with a little research, and a bit of common sense, you can avoid most of the mistakes that plague the laziest of the affiliate website creators.

Marketing in niche markets

One of the great things about the Internet is how it works as a complete reference. The encyclopedia, the dictionary, the White and Yellow pages and even maps have all become antiquated with the invention of the Internet. How can this help you, the new affiliate marketer? It’s easy. The big money in affiliate marketing is found in niche marketing.

Before we get into it, what exactly is niche marketing? Niche marketing is marketing to a particular group instead of the public at large. Now, on the surface, this sounds a bit strange. Don’t you want EVERYONE to buy from your website? Of course you do, but making a site that appeals to everyone and writing web content to sell your product that appeals to everyone is impossible. That’s where niche marketing comes in. You pick a product, say, Hickory Farms meats and cheeses and you do your best to market these products. When you take on a niche product, you have to ask yourself a series of questions.

• Who is going to buy my product? Well, if you’re selling Hickory Farms products, chances are you won’t be selling to many teenagers. Your market is going to skew older, so you want to write copy that is going to appeal to an older audience. Hold off on the slang, the off-color jokes and the pop-culture references.

• What benefits does my product have? In this case, Hickory Farms is a company that has been making quality products for generations. You can play up the history aspect, you can play up the quality aspect. You can even play up the holidays aspect, since they are a company that always seemed to peak during the holidays. Every product out there, every single one, has a list of benefits you can highlight. Make sure you know them and make sure you tell your customers all about them.

• Do I know enough about this product to write new, interesting content about it every few weeks? This is the BIG question. If you’re passionate about Hickory Farms and you love their products, then you should feel confident that yes, you can write a new article about their product line every few weeks. If you agreed to participate in an affiliate program only because the commission was high and you don’t know thing one about the product you’re selling, you might want to rethink your choice.

While niche marketing may sound a bit odd on the surface, it really is the way to go. Making your site focused and concentrating your energy on a particular group will make it seem more legitimate and you can count on better business in no time flat.

Is affiliate marketing MLM?

Because affiliate marketing works so well and seems to genuinely benefit both the website that is advertising as well as the website that is hosting, people tend to look for problems that just don’t exist. One of the “problems” that has dogged affiliate marketing for years is the idea that is is a multi-level marketing scheme.

What is multi-level marketing? It’s much better known as a pyramid scheme. In most traditional cases, pyramid schemes are illegal. They work by constantly signing up new people to sell a product that doesn’t actually exist. The people at the top of the pyramid make money be collecting a commission off of all the sales that happen below them in the pyramid structure.

In recent years, pyramid schemes have tried to gain a bit of respectability by offering legitimate products like phone cards that made the whole operation legal. But, in essence, pyramid schemes are still tainted by the perception that they are inherently dishonest and, unless you start a pyramid scheme and are at the top of the pyramid, you’re earning money for someone else.

Affiliate marketing is, in no conceivable way, multi-level marketing. In most cases, a site that wants to advertise pays another site to direct traffic to them. There are multi-level affiliate marketing set ups that have one site direct traffic to another site and then that site directs people to the site that pays both previous sites, but even in this case, the customer isn’t tricked or misled and there isn’t any sort of financial transaction that takes place, either. Multi-tiered affiliate marketing is simply another way for web pages to create traffic and revenue.

The way earnings work for multi-level affiliate marketing is different than a pyramid scheme, as well. Is it true that in the end, the site that is being linked to makes the most money? Sure, but that’s because they are the ones offering the product or service. The other sites are simply steering customers to them. With multi level affiliate marketing, everyone makes money and assuming a legitimate good or service is being sold at the end of the path, the consumer ends up happy, too.

It can be a little confusing for those new to Multi level affiliate marketing to tell the difference between it and a pyramid scheme. But rest assured the two have very little in common, most importantly the fact that almost all pyramid schemes are illegal while multi level affiliate marketing is quite legal and a very effective tool in Internet advertising,

How to write articles to boost sales

If you’ve been checking out this series of articles, you’ve seen how important it is for any serious affiliate marketer to have good web content. Good content can mean the difference between someone clicking onto your site and clicking away a moment later and someone staying for a while and then clicking through to buy the product or service you’re trying to sell. But what if you just aren’t a very good writer? What if your mind is programmed for business, not English. Don’t worry, there are options for you.

• Search the public domain. There are millions of articles that are currently in the public domain that you can use on your web site free of charge. A simple web search can bring up hundreds of these kinds of articles. And the best part is you can edit them, change them, alter them or do whatever you want to them so that they sound exactly like you want them to. You don’t have to worry about paying any authors or stepping on any toes. This is an excellent way to go if you don’t want to write content yourself.

• You can pay companies to write content for you, and in most cases, it’s cheaper than you think. When you consider how important good web content is, paying someone a few dollars to write exactly what you need isn’t such a bad idea. Of course, some companies charge more than others and it always pays to shop around, but don’t shut yourself off to the idea of paying for content. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money and this is one of those cases if you don’t want to write your own web content.

• Maybe the best choice of the three is to simply read and learn. Spend a week or two clicking around on the Internet and reading the web content on other affiliate websites. Take as much of that content in and then try to write in a similar style about the product you’re trying to sell. You don’t instantly become the best writer in the world this way, but studies have shown that the more you read, the better writer you’ll be. Experience pays and the more you know about how to write in this style, the easier it will be.

Having solid web content can’t be overstated. You will never have a truly successful affiliate marketing website unless you have good content. If you can’t write it yourself, you do have other options, but the best thing you can do is to learn how to write in this style. It will be an investment that will pay off time and time again.