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Those who are familiar with the internet, must have heard about affiliate marketing at some point. In an affiliate program, you have a website owner and an online merchant. They both enter into a revenue sharing agreement. On the basis of this agreement, the website owner places advertisements on his/her websites to sell the merchant’s products and services. In return for that (s)he earns a commission. Now the commission could vary from a few cents, to thousands of dollars.

Ways To Earn

Affiliate marketing can be very profitable, provided you know what it is and how it works. Let’s first discuss exactly how you earn money by joining an affiliate program. There are 3 ways in which an affiliate program can pay you. The first way is by pay per click. Under this program you’ll be paid every time a visitor on your site clicks on the link which will lead that person to the merchant’s site. Depending on the program, you can be paid anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars, for every click that leads to the merchant’s site.

Many affiliate marketing programs pay per sale. In other words, every time a visitor on your site clicks on the merchant’s link, and then goes on to make a purchase on the merchant’s site, you’ll be paid a commission. This commission will be deposited in your account.

There are affiliate marketing programs that’ll pay per lead. This means that every time a visitor from your site goes to the merchant’s site and registers, you’ll be paid a certain amount. This amount is predetermined, that means you would’ve agreed to this amount when you signed on to join the program.

It’s Not So Easy

As you can see, affiliate marketing is a great way to earn some extra money. Many people earn more than just extra money; they earn far more than they’ve ever earned before. Many even leave their jobs to focus their efforts entirely on their affiliate program(s). I must add a word of caution at this point. Affiliate marketing is indeed a great way to earn extra money, but it’s not easy. You shouldn’t be under the impression that you can earn money by doing very little or nothing at all. You’ll have to devote at least 4 to 5 hours (perhaps more) everyday. Plus, you have to be creative and innovative in your marketing techniques.

Now you know that affiliate marketing isn’t that easy. However, before you go and join an affiliate program, there are some pitfalls that you must avoid. Before joining a program, you must do some research about the merchant. There’ve been cases where merchants have simply folded up their business without informing the affiliates. Such cases are rare, but you should always be alert.

You must also understand that affiliate marketing will get the cash in your account, but you’ll have to be patient. Sometimes it takes months for the results to show. So don’t give up. Your constant efforts will earn you rich dividends sooner or later.

Charles McDuffie is an author and entrepreneur for ASB Enterprises. Click here to learn about the affiliate marketing guide.

Many people believe there are some big secrets to organic search engine optimisation and that only the internet’s elite can send web pages to the top of Googles index. This is simply not the case but the myth forms one of the main reasons small businesses are scared of venturing into the online world.

To become a successful organic search marketer you just need patience and consistency and an ability to follow the basic seo structure. This article aims to set out what that structure is and to inform those who know very little about search engine optimisation.

At the start of any new campaign you are going to want to do some keyword research, this means not only looking at keywords that are relevant to your product and service but to look at keywords which are geographically relevant to your site. These keywords should be used in your domain, title tags, meta tags and content or body tags. Try to keep the keywords in the content down to a 3 percent density and use a new keyword for each web page you create.

You will also need to check out the link structure of your site to make sure there are no broken links and that all pages of your site can be reached from your homepage. This will help Google crawl your site and hence indexing will be more effective.

When you have finished your on page optimisation you then need to turn to off page optimisation. This mainly consists of building quality inbound links to your site. To do this you need to publish articles, submit to directories and approach webmasters who control relevant content to your product or service. There are 3 aspects to a quality inbound link. It should be from a page with a high Google PageRank, it should be from a page with related content, it should be anchored with your keywords. Anchoring your links is important as it adds to the relevancy of your page and builds your keyword authority.

You could then look into PPC advertising to bring in high quality paying traffic, however this is more of a search marketing option rather than an organic search engine optimisation technique. If you stick to above you are at least following the basics of seo and remember any content you write needs to be original and up to date, duplicate content will be penalised by most of the major search engines.

Looking to learn organic search engine optimisation or pay a consultant? If so visit organic search engine optimisation

Search engine optimisation is really quite simple, all you need to do is get completely clear about 1 principal. That principle is learning how the major search engines view your pages, do this and your half way to mastering on page optimisation.

I have been an seo now for over 5 years and if there was one thing I would want any optimiser to remember it is this, search engines rank pages not sites. When you are optimising your pages don’t try and cram every single keyword into your home page. Pick a keyword and optimise one page per keyword. Also use the keyword in the url of the page. This will increase your page relevancy and push your site up the serps. When Google shows a page in it’s index it does not simply use the root domain to advertise each page, it uses the full page url.

Another aspect of search engine optimisation that people struggle with is the aspect of images and how the major search engines use them to rank pages. Search engines do not read images as a rule, however if your image is in html simply use the ALT tag to tell the search spider what text the image represents. No search spider can read javascript so keep these images to an absolute minimum or use a subdomain to host the image.

As a rule search spiders will only read a certain amount of anyone page. For example googlebot will only read 100kb of any page. It is useful to know this when filling your header tag. Do not over load it with code, as this may mean the spiders miss some keyword rich content from the bottom of your page. Remember a search spider is simply a computer program and has to guess the topic of your site based on the information it can gather.

When it comes to your keywords you have to keep two things in mind, proximity and frequency. These two elements fight against each other and you have to try and find the right balance. If the words are of close proximity in the content, it will look unnatural and Google may think your site is spam, however if your keyword is not used enough the program will have trouble understanding the general theme of your site.

This is a very basic understanding of how search engines rank your pages and how to optimise your pages for the main engines. You will have to apply all elements of seo to see major results.

If you are looking for free search engine optimisation training please visit search engine optimisation training

Affiliate marketing, MLM networks, network marketing, multi-tier affiliate marketing. If you’re confused about the differences between them, reading this article will give you a better understanding of what each of these terms mean, and which one is better for your business.

A lot of people wonder if they should go with affiliate marketing or network marketing. If you ask an affiliate marketer, he’ll most likely convince you that affiliate marketing is the best way to go. If you talk to network marketer, he’ll probably tell you that theirs is the best option to consider. Essentially each has its advantages and drawbacks, but both of them can make you richer.

What’s Affiliate Marketing?

Let’s talk about affiliate marketing first. This type of marketing involves selling products or services for someone else, and as a result of each sale you made, you’d get a commission. The commission varies with each company. All you need to do is promote or advertise their product, and you’re done with your responsibility. The owner of the product takes care of the shipping procedure, customer service and the like. You only have to worry about the sales part.

What’s Network Marketing?

Network marketing is slightly different. In network marketing, you make money not only on the sales that you make directly, but you also get compensated when the people below you sell something and so on. Now here, the number of levels varies from company to company. The idea of making money on other peoples’ work appeals to many, which explains why network marketing is such a popular industry.

Which One Is Better?

It might seem that network marketing is indeed better than affiliate marketing. However, when you consider the actual profit in both cases, you’ll find that it varies substantially. Generally, profits can be quite high in affiliate sales. If you want to make your network marketing very successful, apart from selling the product, you would need to do many more things.

You have to motivate the people working below you to make sales, and teach them to help the people under them sell more. So your role in the case of network marketing is that of salesperson, teacher and motivator. If you enjoy teaching and working with people, then network marketing is probably your area of interest.

Affiliate marketing, unlike network marketing, doesn’t depend on your ability to convince friends and family to invest their savings by joining levels below you. If you don’t want to worry about having to motivate or educate other people to make sales, then this is definitely a better choice for you. You would need to worry only about what you needed to do to make money, and motivate yourself.

Whether you choose network marketing or affiliate marketing; you’re making a decision that can make you plenty of money if you’re ready to put in the time and effort. It’s quite a win - win situation for everyone.

Charles McDuffie is an author and entrepreneur for ASB Enterprises. Click here to learn about affiliate marketing.

The definition of affiliate per Dictionary.com Unabridged is: A person, organization, or establishment associated with another as a subordinate, subsidiary, or member.

In terms of internet marketing or affiliate marketing, an affiliate is basically a sales representative for a larger concern where the affiliate makes a certain percentage of the sale price in exchange for being the one to attract attention to and direct a person to purchase an item.

A successful affiliate marketing person uses various strategies or campaigns, websites, articles, advertising forums, PayPerClick campaigns, etc. to get customers or clients to their link to purchase a product that belongs to some other company or organization. It does not happen by magic, but happens by a real knowledge of how this affiliate system works and setting up these strategies and campaigns with the tools to hand.

At one point affiliates were basically websites, but at this stage of the game a website is not necessary and people with blogs can be one or members of forums can be as well. The advantage of this kind of income source is that you do not have to create a product nor do you have to store it and distribute it. This is all handled by the company that you are working for as an affiliate. Your main concern is driving traffic to your links and having people purchase there.

Someone doing this sort of work needs to be savvy with search engines, search engine optimization, PayPerClick, blogging, RSS, email marketing and advertising forums.

This sort of marketing and sales has really only been around since about 1998 and through the years it has grown and becomes more and more refined. Tricks used by the unscrupulous in the past to make money are not so easy to do currently as more rules and regulations are put in place and which are difficult to get around. Although not the first affiliate program, the first widely known one was with Amazon.com.

So what do you do if you want to be a successful affiliate? These days it is not necessarily as easy as it may seem. It takes educating yourself and making yourself knowledgeable in all the aspects of a successful website that can draw in traffic and make potential customers interested in product that is not yours. Then, you are selling someone elses product, so you are not making the amount of income that you would be if you were selling your own product. So you need to be effective in your strategy. You need to come up with niche keywords where you can get traffic and are not paying an arm and a leg and have to do it in enough quantity so that you make some significant income. That means lots of sites promoting lots of successful products.

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If you’ve overheard people debating about SEO vs SEM, you can safely come to a very logical conclusion. These people don’t really know what SEO or SEM is. They’re by no means alone. Many people are clearing in the dark about the differences between the two terms. The fact is that SEO and SEM have a lot more in common than most people realize. To make the most out of website optimization, you need to use both these of these aspects, not just one.

Back To The Basics

The first step in clearing the air about SEO vs SEM, is to understand what these abbreviations mean. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization while SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. So aren’t these two different things? Not really, and this is exactly where most people make their mistake. SEM consists of different methods and strategies for promoting and advertising a website. In other words, SEO is a part of SEM. In fact, it’s probably one of the most important SEM methods used these days.

By now, it’s probably clear why the SEO vs SEM argument is a little silly. It’s a bit like saying which is better, the thumb or the hand? You need to have both components working together to have a successful online business. But let’s go a little deeper into the issue to get a better understanding of where SEO and SEM differ.

SEO And SEM

SEO basically refers to the tools and tactics that are used to optimize a website. The majority of these tools are focused on keywords, and how to design the website in such a way so that it’s picked up quickly by the search engines. This includes making sure that the web pages are keyword enriched and placing the keywords in the title and domain name of the website. Alt tags are also used in the naming of images on the website.

Unlike SEO, SEM focuses on other ways to market the site as a whole. In other words, it looks at ways other than the search engines to get your website noticed. This includes submitting articles to directories and magazines, as well as joining different communities and forums. Video marketing via sites like YouTube is also an important marketing method. Using Pay Per Click ads is another very popular SEM strategy.

Rather than debate about SEO vs SEM, the question should be whether you can have one without the other. Technically yes, but your overall business strategy will be one sided as a result. Focusing simply on the search engines and keyword enrichment, only reaches a portion of your potential market.

Similarly, if you bank only on articles, social networking and Pay Per Click, you won’t be exploiting your full market reach. A well-rounded business plan needs to have both SEO and SEM. Instead of looking at SEO vs SEM, you should be looking at how they can work together to make your online business better.

Charles McDuffie is an author and entrepreneur for ASB Enterprises. Click here to learn about the difference between SEO and SEM.

It’s not just the beginners who’re prone to making mistakes in affiliate marketing; experienced individuals also fall victim to their own wrongful decisions and ruin their progress.

Mistake #1: Preparing Someone Else’s List

How can you create someone else’s list at your own cost? Well, this is what exactly you do when you send clients directly to your merchant’s main website, without recording their information. What you should do is create a squeeze page where you can record information of every client whom you direct to the seller’s website. By doing so, you’re building a list for yourself for selling any number of products in future. Remember, the dollars are hidden in the list.

Mistake #2: Not Keeping In Touch With Your Prospects

How can you let go of people who bring you money? You MUST follow up with your contacts. After all, you’ve spent your precious time and effort in finding quality clients for your affiliate website. You can’t put a full stop to it just like that. A few smart ideas in following with them are: posting newsletters, articles, free reports, or valuable and updated information about your products and/or services. But remember, there’s a difference between stalking your prospects and keeping in touch with them.

Mistake #3: Pushing Sales On Your Prospects

So, you wanna make your sale at gunpoint, eh? This is affiliate marketing guys, not some mafia playing extortion games. Let’s face it, most people don’t buy the first time. Many of them will never buy, no matter how fabulous or useful you think your product is. So, it’s useless, even bad, to send e-mails asking, “Why haven’t you purchased my product yet?” or “Don’t you want to get rich?” Such e-mails put you in a bad light. They may even turn off your prospects altogether. Patience is the key to successfully building up your clientele.

Mistake #4: Putting Multiple Offers In Your E-mails

Are you teaching your prospects multi-tasking? When they’ve asked for information about your product, it’s required that you send them ONLY the required information. Clubbing them over the head with multiple offers together, will confuse your client and (s)he may drop the idea of associating with you altogether.

Mistake #5: Being Involved With Several Affiliate Marketing Programs Simultaneously

Can you date 5 women at the same time? It’s highly unlikely. This is marketing — not dating. The best way to become successful, is to concentrate on one affiliate program at a time. First things first. Get loads of experience, dexterity, and money from one program, then think about expanding your operations.

If you’ve already committed one or more of the above mistakes, don’t panic. Correct it (or them) quickly, or you’ll be out of business sooner than you think.

Charles McDuffie is an author and entrepreneur for ASB Enterprises. Click here to learn all about affiliate marketing.

Want free domain traffic? Then keep the perfect domain name! You know you’ve got the ideal domain name, when you’re automatically ranked high by one of the major search engines. Do you know that your domain alone accounts for about 20% of the vital factors that influence ranking by search engines?

Don’t lose heart if you don’t have the perfect domain name that attracts loads of free domain traffic. Read on to get some tips that’ll help you choose an influential domain name.

10 Tips To Get The Ideal Domain Name For Free Domain Traffic

Pick a dot com domain for the domain name of your chief website. This is a natural choice for online business, and ranks high among the popular search engines.

Don’t forget your county domain. If you’re based in India, you should register the version “co.in” and establish a 301 redirect to your chief website.

There’re bound to be common misspellings of your chief domain. Register them and establish a 301 redirect to your chief website. This is a wise way to get free domain traffic.

Your domain name should contain your primary keyword, which is obtained by abbreviating your business into a single word. Yes, it should be just ONE WORD; not two words or a phrase. This word should be the domain name of your chief website.

Find a domain that harbors this word and a few other letters, if possible. You should use ONLY your primary keyword, plus a few other letters; no hyphens and no numbers. You can use your primary keyword in the begining or at the end.

Search for the top ten keywords that are related to the main theme of your website. “Wordtracker” is an effective tool for this search. For each popular keyword, register a domain. Build a content rich site on each domain. Write content for sub-directories in your chief domain. Each of them will contain a theme in relation to the domain keyword. The home page of each of your content site should link to your chief website. This is a smart way of directing all related searches towards your chief domain website.

In order to obtain a high ranking in MSN, register the version “.org” of your chief website domain name. This is because MSN prefers this version of domain names.

Make use of a domain registration service. It registers domain names in real time. It also offers a 301 redirect service and a complete POP3 e-mail.

Look for expired domain names that may contain accessible backlinks. They’re the key to instant free domain traffic, as well as swift search engine listings. Finally, register domains for “key-in” traffic. Now, you’re all set to get free domain traffic.

Charles McDuffie is an author and entrepreneur for ASB Enterprises. Click here to learn about free domain traffic.

Google to date is currently the undisputed leader and is placing a high premium on the relevance and quality of its search engine. Most especially since the company it became a public property. In order for them to keep both the users and the shareholders happy, the quality of the results returned in the search engine is giving high importance.

For this same reason, doing the wrong things in the AdSense and other forms of advertisements, whether intentionally or unintentionally, will result in a severe penalty, may get you banned and even have your account terminated, nothing like a good action taken to keep wrongdoers from doing the same things over again.

For those of you, who are currently interested in pursuing a career in AdSense, don’t think solely of the strategies that you will deploy to generate revenue. Consider some of the other intricacies’ before you actually get started.

Hidden texts, this basically entails filling your AdSense page with texts that maybe to small to read, has the same colour as the page background or using a CSS style sheet for the sole purpose of stuffing them with rich keyword content will generally result in you receiving a penalty award that is given those usually given to those who are concealing links.

Page cloaking, there is a common practice of using browser or bot sniffers to serve the bots of a different page other than the page your visitors will see. Loading a page with a bot that a human user will never see is a definite no-no. This is tricking them to click on something that you want but they may not want to go to.

Multiple submissions, this is basically the process of submitting multiple copies of the same domain, it’s always best to stay away from such things. For example, submitting the URL of an AdSense page as two separate URL’s is enticing trouble and possible termination. This is why it’s always best practice to avoid using auto submitters for those of you who do. Its best you check first to see whether or not your domain as already been submitted to a certain search engine before you attempt to submit to it again. If you see it’s already in there, then move on. It’d be pointless resubmitting it again.

Link farms, be wary of who and what are you linking your AdSense to. The search engines know that you cannot control your links in. But you can certainly control what you link to. Link farming has always been a rotten apple in the eyes of search engines, especially Google. That is reason enough to try and avoid them, having a link higher than 100 on a single page will classify you as a link farm so try and not to make them higher than that.

Page rank selling, if you’ve been online for awhile now, then you’ll probably notice that there are many webmasters out there that are selling their PR links or trading them with similar websites. If your caught doing such things, then you could possibly get banned. It’s generally okay to sell links and to improve your link popularity. But doing it solely to manipulate page rank is the easiest way to get on a search engines bad side.

Doorways, This is similar to cloaking pages. The common practice of a page loaded with choice keyword ads aimed at redirecting visitors to another ‘user-friendly’ page is a big issue among search engines. There are many seo firms offering this kind of services. Now that you know what they actually are, try to avoid them at all costs.

Multiple domains having the same content, In case you are not aware of it, search engines look at domains IP’s, registry dates and many others. Having multiple domains having the same exact content is not something you can hide from them. The same goes with content multiplied many times on separate pages, sub domains and forwarding multiple domains to the same content.

Most of the techniques that I have outlined above apply to the vast majority of search engines, so it’s not exclusive to Google. By having the correct mindset that you are developing your website coupled with AdSense for the human users and not for bots, you can be assured you will achieve the best possible results. Not mentioning that you will also avoid any of the possible penalties liable to you by some search engines and maybe even getting your AdSense account terminated.

Uchenna Ani-Okoye is an internet marketing advisor and co founder of Free Affiliate Programs

Every small business owner knows the importance of a high search engine ranking. SEO experts and internet marketing professionals have built their careers around figuring out how to help their clients achieve top rankings, and small business owners draw on that expertise every day. But whether you have done your own search engine optimization or had a professional do it on your behalf, things sometimes go wrong. If search engines believe that you are spamming or using any other off-limits methods of optimization, you will be banned, often without even realizing it. Here are 5 sign that you have been penalized by Google.

1. You Have a PageRank of 0. PageRank is Google s method of ranking the popularity and relevance of websites. If Google had previously ranked you, but you noticed that your current Page Rank is 0, you can almost guarantee that Google has penalized you. Before you panic, remember that new websites always begin with a PageRank of 0, so you should only worry if you once had a PageRank above 0 and currently have a PageRank of 0.

2. Your Website Is not Indexed. If your pages no longer show up in Google s index, then chances are you have been penalized. Think of a keyword for which your site has ranked in the past and plug it into the search field on Google. Where is your site? If you have dropped from the first page of results to the second, do not panic. Just make a note of it and improve your search engine optimization. But if your site does not show up at all for that particular keyword, then there is a problem. Remember also to ensure that your homepage is not the only page appearing in the search results. A minor penalty will sometimes result in only your homepage appearing rather than your homepage plus other subpages.

3. Use Your Tools. Google s Webmaster Tools is a great way to see how often Google looks at your website. If you use Webmaster Tools and notice a red sign next to your domain name, Google has penalized you. Webmaster Tools will also tell you how many inbound links you have from other sites. Do not forget to check on all of your pages. If Google is not seeing some of them, be sure to resubmit them.

4. Use Analytics. Search the web for free analytics tools to tell you whether or not Google has banned you.

5. Google Search Your Domain. Using Google, type in site:http://www.yourdomain.com. The results you see will tell you how many pages within your website Google has indexed. When you are typing in this request, use a lowercase s since using an uppercase S will cause the request to work improperly.
Search engine optimization can be a tricky process, especially if you are not familiar with its evolution and all the reasons Google has for banning certain practices. If you are unsure of your ability to optimize your site properly, consult an SEO expert or internet marketing professional. And if you discover that you have been banned, seek the help of an SEO professional to help you determine what mistakes you might have made in your optimization process. When you are up to your eyeballs in your own webpage, it is often hard to see what you might have done wrong. Let someone else look for possible errors and problems. You will be glad you did when your site is once again receiving top rankings from Google!

Seomul Evans is a leading SEO Expert company specializing in Web Search Engines and a contributor of internet articles