How to Get & Stay Organized

Keeping track of programs joined through an affiliate network is easy, as you will have only one username and password to remember. Once you’ve logged into the interface you can access statistics and get banners and ad copy for all the merchants associated with that network.

My Affiliate Program 2000TM

My Affiliate Program 2000tm is available as freeware from Pathfinder Software. After downloading, installing and opening the program you are presented with the ‘My Affiliate Program 2000tm ‘Affiliate File’ window, which is already pre-filled with a number of affiliate programs. If you are already an affiliate of any of these programs, you can hit the ‘Post to My
Affiliate List’ button and the information will be transferred to your own database of affiliate programs.

Affiliate Assistant 1.0

Similar in functionality to MAP 2000tm, Affiliate Assistant allows you to stay organized by storing contact information, affiliate numbers, passwords, URLs and more. It too will let you track payment history and payments due.

The Trusty Excel Spreadsheet

By using a spreadsheet you can organize your data exactly in a way that makes sense to you. Add a column, delete a column or widen and narrow the columns. Add as many parameters as you like. Make the fonts any size and color that you see fit. Link your affiliate information spreadsheet to your conversion rate information spreadsheet and access either with a single click.

The biggest trick is to remember to enter new data about stand-alone programs as soon as I join them. After you forget to make the entry a few times and have to search your email program for the data, entering it immediately into the spreadsheet will start to become a habit.

Regular Tasks

To keep your business on track, there are a number of tasks that need to be performed on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis. Use the following suggestions as a guideline for creating your own maintenance schedule.

Daily Tasks

Email – As an affiliate marketer you won’t get that much email related to your business.

Link Checks – Broken sales links are the bane of any affiliate marketer’s existence. It’s easy enough to make sure your links are working by regularly using one of the following tools. In many cases your HTML editor will have a built-in link checker.

Check Statistics-check your statistics daily until you’ve been at it long enough to know what to expect day by dayand week by week. Simply visit the statistics interface for each network and individual affiliate partner and input your total revenues into Quicken or other accounting software. Using quicken frequently will also keep you informed as to whether certain checks have become overdue.

Make Time for Yourself -A business that involves sitting at your computer for lengthy periods of time can lead to weight gain and repetitive strain injury if you don’t take proper care of yourself.

Weekly Tasks

Add & Submit New Pages – Add a new page of content to your site every week to keep it fresh. This will encourage your visitors to keep coming back. Be sure to submit your new pages to the major search engines.

Add & Submit Keywords – Always be on the lookout for new keywords and keyword phrases to add to your pay per click advertising campaigns.

Research – Spend some time every week reviewing and researching the news in your industry as well as Internet marketing news.

Monthly Tasks

Publish Newsletter – Stay in touch with your site’s visitors by dropping them a note or newsletter at least once a month. Share news and give them yet another reason to return to your site.
End of Month Statistics – Tally your income and expenses once a month to stay on top of your overall business picture.

Quarterly Tasks
Launch a New Site – Diversification is the best way to hedge your bets against significant market upheavals.

]]> http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/manage-your-affiliate-business/feed/ 0 jinkazama23 iscripts my-affiliate-assistant excell_2003_sample_spreadsheet http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/11-ways-to-market-your-site-offline/ http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/11-ways-to-market-your-site-offline/#comments Sun, 21 Mar 2010 14:28:34 +0000 Concordio III Diel http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/?p=140 ]]> 11 Ways to Market Your Site Offline

Car decals

Business cards

These are highly effective marketing tools when you remember to put them in your wallet.

Personalized Stationery

Speaking Engagements
Offer to share your knowledge by speaking about your area of specialization at seminars and clubs.

Classified Ads
Advertise your site in the classifieds section of local and regional newspapers. Do a small test first to see whether the return on investment (ROI) will be worthwhile.

Press Releases

A wellwritten release can dramatically increase your sales, expose your company to the masses, and greatly enhance the image of your business or products.

Trade Publications

The cost to advertise in a trade publication or journal can be prohibitive if you are starting a home-based affiliate marketing business on a budget. But it might still be worth your consideration.

Wear Your URL
Have some hats or t-shirts printed with your URL and logo and wear them proudly. Give them away so others may do the same. There is a slight chance someone will see and remember your site’s URL until they get home to their computer.

Promotional items

Become a sponsor at a conference related to your industry. Hundreds, if not thousands, of targeted consumers will be looking at your URL every time they pick up your pen or look at your mouse pad.

Tell Your Friends and Family

Unfortunately this metod doesnt work really well.

While this method rates a 1 out of 10 in marketing terms, more often than not it ranks 1st in the ‘ego boosting’ department. By all means, share your accomplishments with your friends and family. With luck, they’ll ‘pass it on’.

Happy Customers
This is one way to market offline that is worth its weight in gold. Happy customers spreading the word about your site is always a good thing – online, offline or via ESP.

As the name implies a banner exchange allows you to display your advertising banners on member Web sites in exchange for allowing them to display their banner on your Web site.

You must display two banners on your site so just one of your banners will
be displayed on another member’s Web site.

New Hope for Link Exchanging

“Value Exchange”

-Ken Evoy has just come up with a scam-free way to make link exchanging work without thehassle of putting hours of work into email requests.

Rosalind’s Rules for Linking

Try to keep all the links on your site productive. Any link that leaves your site should be a revenue-generating affiliate link.

Use an Email Signature

Cheap but effective, an email signature line gets your message out every time you send anemail.

Start or HomePage Traffic Networks

If every hit counts, then you might want to consider start page networks as a way to get free traffic to your site.

Sign-up and enter some basic information about the page that you want to promote. Set the Traffic Swarm code as your home page. Earn hits when you open your browser. Earn more hits when your friends sign up and open their browsers.
The more hits you have, the more times your site will show up on other members’ browsers. Your links are then displayed all over the network – consisting of 1000s of other webmasters and 1000s of other sites like yours – and with Traffic Swarm, your site is also automatically included in the TrafficSwarm Search Engine.

Refer-a-Friend Scripts

You enter both your name and email address, as well as those of a
number of your friends. Push the ‘SUBMIT’ button and a message gets sent to all of those friends telling them what a great site you just found.

Search engine crawlers visit sites and automatically build listings, generally without the need to submit your site. To get picked up by the crawlers, you need to have good links pointing to your site.

Getting found on the major engines is important. In order to do this, your pages must be optimized and submitted individually. Page optimization and submissions are dealt with in more detail in an earlier section.

Group and Forum Postings

Yahoo, Google, MSN and other major portal sites have discussion groups and clubs to which you can post messages.

It is  recommended that you take time to research the groups you are interested in before posting. When you do post, make sure your message is not a blatant advertisement for your site.

Some general guidelines that will help you from being banned from most forums.

Ensure that your topics are in the correct forum.
• Many forums have many different topic sections. Be sure to post your messages and questions in the right section.

Have something to say:
• A message such as, “anyone in here?” wastes time when the number of viewers who read the post is taken into consideration. Make intelligent posts that have a purpose.

Obey copyright rules:
• Respect the law and do not post copyrighted work unless you have written permission from its owner.

Do not promote your own site, unless:
• It is specifically permitted by the forum rules;

Do not post spam:
• Spam includes advertisements, content deemed inappropriate or illegal, and flooding of the
boards (repeated and/or multiple – read “unnecessary” – postings);

Ensure that your signature file:
• Remains a reasonable size;
• Does not contain excessively large images or annoying animations;
• Follows all the rules applying to the posts themselves.

Don’t invade others’ privacy:
• Don’t post private addresses or phone numbers, including your own.

Do not make needless use of:
• Emoticons;
• Line breaks or ALL-CAPS;
• Nested quotes;
• Giant fonts;
• Swearing, derogatory terms, hate-speech, obscene or vulgar comments. (Probably the most
effective way to receive a permanent or temporary ban).

Enjoy the Forums!
• If you have any problems, just make a post in the appropriate forum, and somebody will almost certainly be glad to help you.

Link Trading, FFA’s & Banner Exchanges

Link trading, link exchange, or reciprocal linking is a web promotion strategy used by webmasters and site owners to increase “link popularity” as well as qualified traffic to their sites.

Link Trading

Generally, the directory owner is also an affiliate of all the same programs that you are, and you can be sure that their affiliate links are encoded in the banners at the top, middle and bottom of their pages.

FFA’s

FFA’s are nothing more than rotating lists of links.
Each and every time a site is submitted, the FFA site owner sends a confirmation email to the contact address provided by the listing webmaster.

The FFA owner collects email addresses so he can send out his advertising message. He already knows that you, the listing webmaster, are interested in getting traffic to your web site, so he targets his message in that direction.

]]> http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/search-engine-crawler-listings-link-trading-group-and-forum-postings-ffas-banner-exchanges/feed/ 0 jinkazama23 1220444004856_search-engines_t forums 007_Link_Exchange_Easy 565880579_93e20586fe http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/site-submission-services-software-9-ways-to-get-traffic-to-your-site-for-free/ http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/site-submission-services-software-9-ways-to-get-traffic-to-your-site-for-free/#comments Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:59:08 +0000 Concordio III Diel http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/?p=133 ]]> Site Submission Services & Software

A keyword search on ‘website submission’ or ‘submission services’ at Google or Yahoo yields hundreds of companies offering to submit your site to the search engines for a fee.  Many of these services say they’ll hand-submit your site to hundreds of engines all for the unbelievably low price of $9 – or for incredibly good value at $999.

9 Ways To Get Traffic To Your Site For Free

Joint Ventures

These joint venture partners reach out to others who are interested in
affiliate marketing, who in turn become partners and affiliates who sell more books, and reach more potential partners, and so on.

Write Ezine Articles

If you don’t have much money to spend advertising your online business, writing ezine articles is one of the most effective and least costly way to attract visitors to your site.

More people are using the Internet everyday to find information. To satisfy this growing quest, ezine owners who don’t have time to write their own material are always looking for fresh articles to publish in their newsletters.

You may be cringing at the idea of writing articles, or writing – period.

The most compelling reason to write articles for submission to ezines is the amount you save in advertising. A single ezine ad can cost anywhere from a few dollars to thousands of dollars.

You can add your byline at the end of each article, along with your personal bio and your site’s clickable URL. Publishers who use your article are obliged to publish all of your information as submitted. Now, that’s powerful free advertising for you.

Free Directory Listings

Look for directories that include categories relevant to your site’s topic. Some may require a reciprocal link in exchange for your listing, while those that are still building their databases may list it for free. By all means, submit your site to the Open Directory Project, which bills itself as the largest human-edited directory’ on the Web.

]]> http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/site-submission-services-software-9-ways-to-get-traffic-to-your-site-for-free/feed/ 0 jinkazama23 knowboform_website_submission_tool-73989-1 Ezine Articles php-directory-listing http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/google%e2%80%99s-premium-sponsorships/ http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/google%e2%80%99s-premium-sponsorships/#comments Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:49:21 +0000 Concordio III Diel http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/?p=131 ]]> Google’s Premium Sponsorships

Google’s Premium Sponsorships are truly ‘premium’. The current minimum investment is $15,000 over a 3-month campaign.

If your advertising budget permits, Google’s Premium Sponsorships allow you to purchase highly targeted advertising on the most relevant search engine on the Web. No more than two enhanced text links appear at the top of the Google results page whenever the keywords or phrases you have purchased are searched for by a Google user.

Ezine Advertising

There are hundreds of thousands of ezines published on the Internet. Placing advertising in ezines is a low-cost and extremely effective way to bring qualified traffic to your site.

The Directory of Ezines is an excellent resource for quickly finding ezines targeted to your audience.

Build an Opt-In Subscriber List

Permission email marketing works. Building an opt-in list is the most cost-effective and valuable method of marketing on the Internet.

Studies have shown that permission email yields response rates that are ten times better than banners.

Publish an Ezine, eCourse or Both

Many Internet marketers invite visitors to join their mailing lists by offering a free newsletter.

Published regularly, a good newsletter brings visitors back to your site over and over again, exposing them to all the wonderful products and services you have to offer.

How to Use Auctions to Sell Affiliate Products

Since 1995, eBay has hosted over 2 billion auctions. The site receives over 1.8 billion page views per week, has products selling in over 7,800 categories and over 40 million registered users. About 10 million eBay users visit eBay at least once per week.

]]> http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/google%e2%80%99s-premium-sponsorships/feed/ 0 jinkazama23 images 12 21 http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/29-ways-to-promote-your-affiliate-business-9-ways-to-get-traffic-fast/ http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/29-ways-to-promote-your-affiliate-business-9-ways-to-get-traffic-fast/#comments Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:39:56 +0000 Concordio III Diel http://jinkazama23.wordpress.com/?p=129 ]]> 29 Ways to Promote Your Affiliate Business

‘Build it and They Will Come’ doesn’t work on the web. You have to actively
market your site to get the word out and attract visitors.

list of methods that you can use to market your affiliate sites.

• Google Adwords
• Pay Per Click Search Engines
• Paid Yahoo! Listing
• Google Premium Sponsorships
• Ezine Advertising
• Build an Opt-In Mailing List
• Publish an Electronic Newsletter
• Use Auctions to Promote Your Affiliate Products
• Site Submission Services & Software
• Joint Ventures
• Free Directory Listings
• Write Ezine Articles
• Search Engine Listings
• Group and Forum Postings
• Link Trading & Posting
• Use an Email Signature
• Start Page Traffic Network
• Refer-a-Friend
• Car Decals
• Business Cards
• Personalized Stationery
• Speaking Engagements
• Classified Ads
• Press Releases
• Trade Publications
• Wear Your URL
• Promotional Items
• Tell Your Friends and Family
• Happy Customers

9 Ways to Get Traffic Fast

Google AdWords

The fastest way to get exposure online is by advertising with Google Adwords. Ads start running within minutes after you submit your billing information.

With more than 150 million searches on Google each day and millions more on Google’s partner sites, Google is the #1 search engine used by surfers, and more importantly – online shoppers.

Pay Per Click Search Engines

The second fastest way to gain exposure on the Internet is to buy keyword listings on Pay Per Click Search Engines.

Advertisers bid on relevant keywords and pay the bid amount each time someone clicks on the link through to their site.

Pay for a Yahoo! Listing

As the time of writing, Yahoo! charges $299 (non-refundable) for their ‘Yahoo! Express’ expedited listing service, and $600 for adult-oriented sites.

Payment does not guarantee inclusion in the directory. Payment guarantees that a member of Yahoo!’s editorial staff will look at your site, consider your suggestion to include the site in the directory, and respond to you within seven business days from the date that you submit your site for onsideration. Payment also guarantees that Yahoo! will respond to your suggestion within
seven business days, by either adding or denying the site.

The average visitor-to-sales conversion for a good affiliate program is between half and one percent.

How to Write Compelling Product Endorsements

The best way to promote your affiliate program products is to endorse them, honestly and sincerely.

In order for your endorsement to be persuasive, you should have personal experience with the product and be enthusiastic about it. Given those two factors, writing the endorsement then becomes easy.

Learn the Art of Copywriting

As an affiliate, your job is NOT about selling. It is all about ‘pre-selling’ as Internet guru Ken Evoy refers to it. To pre-sell effectively you have to use your words to capture and keep your visitors interest in the products you offer.

Credibility Pays

The biggest obstacle to selling online is lack of consumer trust, and judging by the amount of spam and scams flying about cyberspace, surfers are right to be wary.
Savvy online shoppers, however, know how to determine a merchant’s credibility by assessing onsite information and asking pertinent questions.

Here are 10 ways you can increase your conversion rates by building trust in your sites.

1. Honesty: Visitors should know exactly what to expect before they get to your site. Dishonest advertising wastes their time and your money.

2. Superior Knowledge: Affiliates with high conversion rates usually own the products theysell.

3. Invite Feedback: Testimonials from happy customers are an excellent way to build trust in your product reviews.

4. Promote Only Quality Products: Complaints, refunds and charge-backs hurt your reputation, as well as your revenue levels .

5. Keep Design Simple: Gratuitous animated graphics scream “Webmaster Kindergarten”. Focus on your products, not fancy gimmicks.

6. Show Respect: Broken links, graphics and forms are frustrating. Pop-ups, music and noise are maddening.

7. Be Available: Make it easy for visitors to get in touch with you.

8. Expose Yourself: It’s a psychological fact that trust increases with exposure.

9. Go Beyond Expectations: Affiliates often receive emails better handled by the merchant partner.

10. Give Something Away: Freebies are like samples at a chocolate shop.

Optimizing your pages for the search engines is absolutely essential if you want them to appear in the top 10 – 30 positions of results.

Keyword-Rich Pages

Six per page was the maximum number of repetitions suggested.

Keyword-Rich Page Names

Name your pages using keywords relevant to the product sold on that page, or the most relevant content.

Site Map

Offer your visitors a site map with links that point to all the important pages and sections of your site. If your site consists of one hundred or more pages, you may wish to break the site map up into separate pages.

Relevant Content

Jill Whalen, a well-known search engine (SE) expert advises that you should work with at least 250 words on a page for search engine optimization purposes.

Eliminate Clutter

Search engines don’t read graphics or javascript, and they get confused when they encounter nested tables. If all that stuff precedes the first most important keyword phrases on your page, your ranking may be lowered as the SE considers that phrase less relevant, due to its low placement on the page.

Meta Tags

The 2 Meta Tags that you need to be most concerned about are the Title and Description tags.

Title Tags – The title tag is perhaps one of the most crucial factors in how a search engine will rank your site.

Description Tag – Some search engines will use the text contained in your meta description tag as your listing description.

ALT Tags – The ALT tag, which stands for ‘alternative text’, is primarily for use when the image is not being displayed.

Dynamic Pages

Dynamic pages, which deliver content based on user input or other variables, can be more useful and responsive to visitor needs than regular static HTML pages.

Avoid Tricks and Deception

• Don’t deceive your users by presenting different content to search engines than is displayed on your pages.

• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.

Those who concentrate their energy on giving their visitors a good experience through honest and fair practices, will be better rewarded than those who spend all their time trying to dupe both the engines and their visitors, just to get the clicks.

Unvisited links should conform to the standard colors and practice of being underlined.
Standard link colors are:
• Underlined Blue – unvisited
• Red – active or hover
• Purple – visited

Changing all the link colors was super-simple to accomplish by using ‘cascading style sheets’ or ‘CSS’.

Using CSS eliminates the need to hard code the font face, size and color every time you wish to make a change to a word’s appearance. Instead, all the ifferent parameters are listed within a single file, or the cascading style sheet. Then each page on the site has a link that points to the style sheet and draws its information from that.
CSS has the additional benefit of reducing page size by eliminating all that font coding.

Color Scheme

Different colors have different meanings and connotations.

White Space

White space, or negative space, describes open space between design elements.

White space is an important layout technique often overlooked by inexperienced designers. Visually appealing design is easy on the eyes. Without adequate white space, text would be unreadable, graphics would lose their emphasis, and there would be no balance between the elements on a page.

Page Width

Having to scroll right to see all the text on a page is a symptom of poor design, or lack of knowledge of standard display sizes.  Standard screen resolutions are 1024 X 768 pixels – for those with good eyesight. However,
many, many folks still use 800 X 600.

Page Backgrounds

Make your background simple and clean.

Consistent Navigation

It’s really easy to keep your site elements consistent when you use the same template for every page on your site.

Bandwidth Hogs

Bandwidth is an electronic resource that gets used up every time characters of information are downloaded from, or uploaded to, your Web site. The more bandwidth resources used, the slower the transmission of data and information.

Use of Pop-Ups

Try to limit the use of pop-ups as much as possible.

Music/Noise

Under no circumstances should a site broadcast noise and/or music without its visitors’ permission.

Frames

The biggest problem with frames is that search engine robots have hard time spidering sites that are built in frames. Although there are ways to optimize your framed site to be attractive to search engines, the reasons above should quickly negate any compulsion you feel to use frames.

Keep it Fresh

Give your visitors a reason to come back to your site by providing tons of interesting, original, and fresh content.

Web Site Building Primers & Help

HTMLGoodies.com may have started the site with just HTML tutorials, but now they offer ‘primers’ in ASP, CGI, Javascript and Perl to name just a few. One of the best sites for anyone wanting to learn how to build his or her own Web site.