Affiliate Marketing

Niche Affiliate Marketing

super affiliates handbook

Affiliate marketing is a great way for online business owners to boost sales. It is also a great money-making method for those of us who are interested in working from home to use. But your marketing strategy should be thoroughly researched and well thought out because if not, there is a good chance that you will end up losing more money than you will take in.

An important aspect of successful affiliate marketing is establishing what the best niche is for you.

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing tool that uses one website to drive web traffic to another and is built on the idea of revenue sharing. With this type of marketing, a business will compensate an affiliate every time a visitor or customer is driven to the website as a result of the affiliate’s marketing ventures.

The main players of the affiliate marketing industry are:

– the merchant (the retailer)

– the network

– the affiliate (the publisher)

– the customer.

The various marketing methods used by affiliates include search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and display advertising. As far as compensation goes, most affiliate programs make use of revenue sharing or cost-per-sale (CPS). Some affiliate programs also use cost-per-action (CPA) and cost-per-click (CPC).

Before you can put your affiliate marketing strategy in effect, the very first thing that you should do is brainstorm your niche. This is a vital component of having a successful affiliate business. A niche is a market subset that serves as the focal point for a particular product or service. A niche seeks to satisfy specific market needs, which include the price, production quality, and the demographics of the targeted audience. To start, it is recommended to come up with three ideas for possible niches. Try to think of niches that you are interested in or passionate about. Ask yourself the following questions: What are your hobbies? What do you enjoy talking or learning about? What subjects do you have a broad knowledge of? Once you have answered these questions, you should be able to come up with a few ideas for possible niches.

Unfortunately, however, a niche that you are passionate about isn’t necessarily going to be a niche that will be highly profitable. In order to determine which niches are most likely to generate significant income, you need to track, test & tweak your affiliate campaigns. Learn how to do that without losing money by studying the Campaign blasts guide.

If you’d like to learn more about how to succeed in affiliate marketing, you definitely want to read Rosalind Gardner’s ebook about affiliate marketing.

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Website Traffic

How to Get Targeted Website Traffic

targeted traffic

Getting started with an online business can be a stressful task. Once you’ve jumped through all the hoops and have gotten your website up and running like a well-oiled machine, you are left with the question: how am I going to get people to look at my website? It goes without saying that no matter what your business is, if you want it to succeed, you are going to have to discover a way to get people other than yourself to look at your website.

How can I increase targeted web traffic?

There are several things an online business owner can do to increase the amount of viewership to their website.

Write Articles – When writing articles for your website, you want to make sure that they are well-researched and provide your targeted viewers with factual and useful information about the given topic. You want to make sure that the content of your articles is high-quality and unique so as to encourage viewers to return to your website. Additionally, a website with quality articles is more likely to get bookmarked and passed along to other viewers. Of course, don’t just write articles for your site: write some that you’ll submit to article directories.

Guest Post – Probably one of the fastest ways to increase targeted traffic to your site is to be a guest blogger. It may seem hard to find places to guest blog in the beginning, but don’t get discouraged:  the worst that can happen would be a “no” answer. And if that happened, you just go onto the next blog owner and ask again. Sooner that you know, you’ll have your first guest blogging gig, and the second will be easier. Make sure you familiarize yourself with the blog where you want to guest post, and offer some of your best content.

Partner with someone who has a list in your niche –  and either offer a great article just for their list, or even pay for advertising. To make sure your content is appropriate for that list, sign up yourself and study every email you receive form the list before you send your advertisement.

Search Engine Optimization – Write posts for long tail keywords that you can rank for easily, even if there are only a few searches a day: it’s a lot easier than trying to rank for a highly searched for key phrase that has a lot of competition. Some of the basics for ranking well are to use relevant keywords in your title,use relates keywords in your post, add tags  and acquire links to your post.

No matter how great your online business and website are, if no one is looking at your online content, then your business is not going to be very successful. After putting all the time and labor into creating your business and website, keep the ball rolling with the above tips on generating web traffic so that the rest of the world can see what a great service or product it is that you are offering.

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Challenges

My February Traffic Challenge

I don’t know about you, but challenges, especially public ones get results. Last month, Lynn Terry challenged all her Elite Members to an office clean up. I am very happy with my results for that challenge, so this month I am challenging myself publicly to increase traffic to this blog.  How much? I am going to shoot for 75% increase in unique traffic (I was going to do 50%, but noticed I am on track for that anyway, so it wouldn’t stretch me too much). My blog is fairly new (only started it at the end of October last year), but already has a good number of daily visitors.

So, in order to keep myself accountable, here are my January stats:

January 2010 stats

This means, I need 2084 unique visitors in February in order to accomplish this challenge. I need to get to work immediately, as I only have 379 unique visitors for February as of now, so I am way behind.

I noticed that my daily visitors are dependent on my posting schedule: if I post, regularly, my visitor number grows exponentially.

So, in order to accomplish getting 2084 visitors this month, here is what I am plannign to do:

– post 5 times a week, no matter how hard that will be. I tend to write about 3 posts a week, but need to be more disciplined and post more.

– submit one article each week to EZA, Go Articles, Idea Marketers, etc

– guest post at least once

That’s yet for now. I’ll be back at the beginning of next month with my results.

Do you need more traffic to your blog/site? Why not join me in this challenge? Let me know below if you’d like to join my challenge, and we can keep each other accountable.

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Free Niche Research

Free Niche Research: Truck Accessories

free niche research

Today’s niche is one I know absolutely nothing about. But I learned that there are a lot of searches for truck accessories, and thought: why not? Someone out there will want to offer help to all these people searching for accessories for their trucks. So, here it goes.

Top 10 Highest Paying Keywords(from the Google keyword tool)pickup truck bed accessories $2.84

chevy truck accessories $2.29

chevy truck accessory $2.22

new truck accessories $2.19

commercial truck accessories $1.98

pickup truck accessories $1.87

truck and suv accessories $1.85

john deere truck accessories $1.83

buy truck accessories $1.81

semi truck accessories $1.80

Bonus Keywords

aftermarket truck accessory $1.80

suv truck accessories $1.73

work truck accessories $1.73

pick up truck accessory $1.72

 Top 10 Most Searched Keywords(all phrases are exact matches in Google)truck accessories 90,500

truck accessories store 18,100

chevy truck accessories 18,100

pickup truck accessories 5,400

truck accessory 4,400

custom truck accessories 3,600

car truck accessories 2,900

truck bed accessories 2,900

bully truck accessories 2,400

semi truck accessories 2,400

Bonus Keywords

truck parts and accessories 2,400

pick up truck accessories 1,900

4×4 truck accessories 1,600

accessories for trucks 1,600

Resources

Well, as i said: I am not at all familiar with this niche, so after a little research, I found these places that are pretty good for gathering information: The Truckers Report, The Truckers Forum. These are not specific for truck accessories, but they are forums for truckers, an d they are very active, so you could become a member and participate and ask questions.

Possible Affiliate Programs
Again, Amazon.com has everything. Here are some of the accessories you can fin there: truck bed covers, truck seat covers, radar detectors, security chains etc.

CJ.com has weathertech.com offering 5% commission, autopartswarehouse.com offering 8 – 14%, advanceautoparts.com offering 8%, and a few more.

Monetization Suggestions

AdSense payouts, while not the greatest, are not bad either, so  you could create an informative site about trucks, and use it there alone, or combine it with specific offers for accessories through pages with affilaite links.

Here are some domains available for this niche at this time:

TruckAccessoriesStore.net, .org & .info with over 18,000 exact searches/month.

TruckBedAccessories.info: with 2,900 exact monthly searches

BullyTruckAccessories.org & .info: 2,400 exact searches monthly.

TruckPartsAndAccessories.net, .org & .info, with 2,400 searches a month

4x4TruckAccessories.net, .org & .info, with 1,600 searches a month

AccessoriesForTrucks.net, .org & .info, with 1,600 exact searches a month.

Some good domains, and big possibilities.

If you need help with your keyword research  you can have it in 48 hours or less: just click on the button below.

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How To

What Is a Blacklist and How to Avoid Being Blacklisted

You may have heard the term “blacklist” and wondered what this meant. If you’re blacklisted it means you’ve been labeled as a Spammer by the internet service providers and the penalties can be stiff.

Now you’re scratching your head and thinking, “well I don’t send unsolicited emails or bulk email messages so I’m safe, right?”

Not really. There’s still more to worry about. There are actually several types of blacklists or reasons for blacklisting. It’s important to understand the difference.

Spam Blacklists are lists of mail servers or open relays known to be used by spammers to deliver unwanted email. An open relay is an SMTP server configured so that anyone on the internet can send email through it, including Spammers.

IP Blacklist blocks specific IP addresses, message senders or message recipients as determined in the blacklists. They can be temporary or permanent.

Email Blacklists include known mail servers and addresses used by spammers. With these lists in place, access to the server can be denied and unwanted email messages are discarded. Additionally your legitimate emails may also be blocked.

DNS Blacklists are usually maintained by anti-spam organizations. They include a list of IP addresses that send unsolicited emails.

Staying Off the Blacklists

To stay off the blacklists there are a few things you can do:

– The most obvious is to not send unsolicited emails or bulk e-mails – don’t SPAM.

– You’ll also want to make sure your server is correctly configured and secure, and not an open relay mail server. This is why it’s important to make sure your website is being hosted by a legitimate provider who doesn’t host to Spammers because if you’re sharing a server, then you can be labeled as SPAM too because you’re coming from the same server. My preferred host is MomWebs

– You’ll also want to make sure your subject lines and email body doesn’t trigger SPAM filters. Occasionally run your content through a SPAM checker site to make sure you’re not triggering any filters.

– And check to make sure you’re not already blacklisted: it can happen quite unintentionally. You can check if you’re listed by visiting:

– http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
– http://www.dnsstuff.com/

If you are blacklisted, de-listing isn’t easy but it’s necessary if you want to use email marketing to build and grow your business. The first step is to find out why you were listed and who listed you. Each agency has their own delisting procedure. Follow it, get back in their good graces and then follow the suggestions above to stay off the blacklists.

Getting blacklisted isn’t the end of the world but it can put a huge kink in your email marketing strategy. Best advice: stay off the blacklists by making sure everyone who receives an email from you wants it, don’t SPAM, and make sure your mail server is secure. You can also recommend whitelisting you to people who request email messages from you. This will help ensure they receive your email messages on time.

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