Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing

How to Choose an Autoresponder Service

AWeber - Email Marketing Made Easy

Autoresponders are a must have for every internet marketer. However, not all autoresponders are created equally. Some offer more than others, and some are quite expensive. If you don’t need the bells and whistles, your money is probably better spent elsewhere. Choosing the right autoresponder for your business needs is important.

How Many People Are on Your List?

Many autoresponder services are free until your list reaches a certain number. For example, they might be free to use until you have 1000 subscribers. They then charge a fee per 500 or 1000 subscribers. So you’ll pay the same amount whether you have 1100 or 1900 subscribers. Once you go over 2000, then you hit the next fee level.

While you may be comfortable with the first few fee tiers, look ahead. Make sure the fees for that large list you’re going to grow won’t be exorbitant. Make sure the per subscriber fee makes sense for your business and your budget.

How Customizable Is It?

Some autoresponder services are very basic. Others seem to be infinitely customizable. Being able to customize the look and feel of your email messages helps brand. However, you might not need all those bells and whistles. Take a look at what you really need to grow your email list and profit. Then compare services based on those features.

Does It Offer the Features You Need?

Some autoresponder services are newsletters only. Others offer the ability to deliver digital files. Outline the purpose for your AR. Make a list of the things you need it to be able to accomplish. Do you need to deliver files with your autoresponder? If so, then look for one that has that capability.

Is the Autoresponder Compliant?

It’s important for the reputation of your business to be CAN-SPAM compliant. Most AR services respect that need. They offer the email list management tools and features to ensure you’re compliant. However, it pays to double check. Make sure they offer automatic unsubscribe. Make sure they also offer a double opt-in procedure.

Is It Easy to Use?

Take a look at some autoresponder interfaces and you feel as if you need a tech degree. They can be quite confusing. Others are simple and straightforward. Make sure, before you pay good money, that the interface is easy to use. Take a free trial. Watch the video demonstrations. If you need help or have questions, call customer service.

Finally, triple check the reputation of the service. You want to make sure the autoresponder service has a good reputation. You want to make sure they have good customer service. And you want to ensure they’re going to be around ten years from now. To your success!

No list yet? Check out these quick reports to learn how to grow your list.

List Building Renegade

Easy Autoresponder Cash

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Affiliate Marketing, Free Niche Research, Website Traffic

How to Find Keywords Quickly

This week I was checking my stats for this blog to see how I was doing ( BTW, it’s been the best month since I started the blog, with 3781 unique visitors and still a few days to go).

Anyway, back to finding keywords quickly: as I was looking to see who sends me visitors, I saw this link: http://www.semrush.com/es/info/myonlinebusinessjourney.com. And since I haven’t seen this before, I thought I’d take a peek. Let me show you what I discovered:

keyword report for my online business journey
Go ahead: click on the image to see it full size

It’s showing the organic keywords I rank for, and in which position, AdWords competitors and their positions, organic competitors, and so on: lots of great information.

But what I wanted to show you is how you can quickly get a list of keywords for your niche by checking out your competition. Let’s take an example: for example, if I wanted to promote nursing necklaces, I could go to http://www.semrush.com, enter my key phrase and see what happens.

nursing necklace keyword research
Look what I got in just a few seconds

I now have information about volume search, CPC, competition, related searches, organic results and AdWords results.

What I did next, was click on sites that ranked organically to see if I spot any new key phrases. And I do. I clicked on a few of the sites from the list above, and below you’ll see what I learned.

MommyNecklaces.com

From this site, I learned about a couple of new keywords: mommy necklace & breastfeeding necklace.

SmartMomJewelry.com

More key phrases associated with my niche: teething necklace, teething bling, teething jewelry. While these key phrases are not exactly for my niche, they give me an excellent opportunity to write articles or blog posts for my audience.

I poked around some more and found nursing beads, breastfeeding jewelry, breast feeding necklace (see the different spelling), and even booby beads: all related to my niche.

So far, this took me all of 5 minutes to do. Now, I am going to take my new-found key phrases, and head over to the Google Keyword Tool and plug them in. Ta-da! I now have over 30 keywords I can work with: write blog posts, create a review, write a few articles to submit to directories, guest post, etc.

The niche I choose here is tiny, and even so I came up with lots of key phrase’s to use. Try it in your niche and you’ll be busy using your new information  for the next few months.

I’ve done all of the above with the free version, but there is a much more information if you get the paid version.

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Affiliate Marketing, How To

Article Marketing Initiation

When it comes to marketing your website, article marketing still holds a prominent and powerful place in the grand scheme of drawing online traffic. It is a valuable tool and here are some first steps you can take to get it working for you.

What is it about writing that makes some people cringe? First of all, it can seem like writing term papers in school. Relax. Writing articles is not as stressful as all that. Learn here how you can write an article in 7 minutes.

Here are some tips for writing those articles.

Write what you know – The articles need to be relevant to your online business. You wouldn’t write about gardening to promote a chocolate gift basket website, for example. Since you are creating a business that you know something about, the articles are merely an extension of that.

Do keyword research – People use certain keywords when they are looking for information on the Web. You can use free or paid keyword tools to find out the most searchable words in your niche. Use those words as the topics for your articles. Search engines do crawl website content so keep your keyword density (the number of times it appears in the article) at about 1% to 4%. Keyword stuffing is not going to net you any extra traffic.

Get to writing – An appropriate article for a website needs to be around 400 words in length. You want to give your readers valuable information without droning on and boring them. Depending on what you are writing about, it may be a couple hundred words longer to explain complicated procedures or recipes.

Create relevant content – To determine that, ask yourself a question: What do your readers want to hear about? Use that as your guide to choose topics that will be read.

Submit articles to article directories – These sites post your articles. There are free and paid sites. Both will review your submissions to see if they are relevant and comply with their guidelines. Most will give you a bio box to place a link to your site and information about you, the writer. If you are not sure what is out there, take a look at some articles on your subject in article directories. You don’t want to repeat the same old stale content.

People love to read articles. It contains information that they need. As long as you are providing it, you will have an audience. If readers know that certain sites can be relied upon to provide quality content, they will go there and search through their articles. You want them to find you there.

One click on your link in the bio box and they can be at your website reading more helpful content. These are just a few steps to get you going in the right direction with your article marketing efforts.

Resources for Article Marketing

Article Marketing 365

7 Minute Article Secrets

Article Marketing Mistakes

Article Profit Formula

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Affiliate Marketing

3 Ways to Earn Money with Article Marketing

You’ve probably heard about article marketing and maybe you’ve even used it a time or two to drive traffic to your website. Article marketing is the practice of publishing articles on article directories and other websites to promote your business. It’s a great way to drive traffic and boost credibility. However, did you know you can earn money through article marketing? You can! Here’s how:

#1 Use Article Marketing to Promote Affiliate Products or Services

If you’re an affiliate marketer you may want to look into article marketing as a tool to boost your commissions. Articles are a wonderful way to pre-sell products and services. You can write reviews, comparison articles, or simply informative or “how to” articles.

Some article directories allow embedded links in your article content. Others don’t. Take care to find directories that help you meet your goals. If you’re not allowed to embed links, make sure to link to your website or include an affiliate link in your author box.

#2 Use Article Marketing to Promote Your Own Products or Services

Just like you can use article marketing to promote affiliate products, you can use it to promote your own products as well. Take care, when writing, to not write a sales page. You want to provide informative content and to establish your credibility and authority. Link to your relevant products or services in the content to drive traffic to your sales page. Use your content to presell the product by providing information or a solution to your prospect.

#3 Use Article Marketing to Build Your Opt-In List

An opt-in list is where you transform visitors into prospects. Each prospect then has the potential to turn into a customer. Therefore, the larger your opt-in list, the more potential you have for sales and profits.

You can use article marketing to build your opt-in list. Create helpful and informative content. Motivate people to visit your website or send them to an opt-in form or squeeze page. Provide valuable content, content that solves a problem and offers a solution, and your prospects will be hungry for more. They’ll sign up for your list without hesitation and you’ll be raking in the dough.

Article marketing is a fantastic tool to build your business and increase your bottom line. Choose your article marketing sites wisely. Make sure they support your goals and objectives. Then write great content and watch your profits grow.

Resources:

Article Marketing 365

7 Minute Article Secrets

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Affiliate Marketing

Tips for Disclosing Affiliate Links

The FTC recently added bloggers to its guidelines about endorsements and testimonials in advertising. For bloggers this means any product review or endorsement that contains affiliate links must be treated with full disclosure.

Full disclosure is nothing more than transparency about the fact that a click on a link could potentially earn the blogger some money. It’s a simple process to provide the needed transparency, either in plain text or with a bit of information placed in the HTML for the link.

Plain text

A sentence or two at the beginning or the end of an article containing affiliate links will be satisfactory. This would do: The links to the product reviewed in this article are affiliate links. If you buy this product after clicking one of my links, I’ll make a small amount of money.

It wouldn’t hurt to add another sentence saying that the possibility of earning something from the affiliate link has not influenced the objectivity of the review and that your opinions are honestly offered.

It’s also a good idea to have a full out disclosure policy somewhere on your blog that explains how you get products, if you keep the product or return it after reviewing it, if you get paid for the review in some way other than by the affiliate link and anything else that might be relevant. You can add a link to this longer disclosure statement to each individual review you write.

In the link code

Use an HTML title attribute in the link to create a tooltip that the user will see when using the link. For example, say you were linking to a book at Amazon.com. You could add the title attribute to the link, like this:

<a href="somewhere.html" title="affiliate link to Amazon">Book Title</a>

If the link is an image of the product, say an image of a book cover, mention the affiliate link in both the image’s alt text and with a title attribute. Here’s how:

<img src="image.jpg" alt="affiliate link to Amazon" title="affiliate link to Amazon">

With the plain text disclosure statements and the link tooltip, you cover everything in a blanket of transparency that satisfies all the FTC requirements.

About the author: Virginia DeBolt blogs at Web Teacher about web design education, web standards, accessibility, and general technology topics.

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