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One of the easiest and fastest way to make money online in through affiliate marketing. This is when you send visitors to someone else’s product sales page, they make the sale and deliver the product, and you get a percentage of the sale price as you commission (usually 50% or more for digital products).

The benefits of this are

1. You can get started almost immediately because you don’t have to create a product, write the sales page, design the website, develop marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
2. You have almost no investment of time because you don’t have to do the customer support or deal with billing or technical issues.
3. You have nearly zero risk because you already know the product sells. So if you send visitors you will get paid.

Looking at these benefits, it’s clear that affiliate marketing is the way to go!

The downside is…

After all your hard work of generating traffic to the sales page, you will never see any of those visitors again. Most of them will not buy on their first visit, which means you’re losing over 90% of the traffic right off the top. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.

What’s the solution?

Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you’re really on top of your game, you’ll then send to a pre-sales page in between.

Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

1. You’ll be building your own list of potential customers that you can market to again and again.
2. You’ll be pre-selling them by providing valuable information and then casually linking to the product sales page in the context of this information.

In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following affiliate marketing tools:

1. A Video Squeeze Page (with video)
2. One or more content-rich Pre-Selling Pages
3. At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

The video squeeze page is where you’ll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. It captures the name and email of your visitors and puts them into your autoresponder, which then begins sending out the 5-part email series. Then it redirects them to your pre-selling pages after they subscribe to your email series.

All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it’s well worth the effort of setting it up. And once it’s set up, it runs automatically - you just keep sending visitors to the squeeze page.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something like Affiliate Silver Bullet. Services like this design the enter system (the video, the video squeeze page, the email series, the content pages, etc). The benefit is that it’s much less expensive then you could do it yourself, and it’s instantly set up. The downside is that other people will be using the same affiliate tools as you. But the internet is pretty big, so this isn’t much of a concern.

The other route you can take is to hire people on Elance to create and implement the various aspects for you. Either way, it’s an important step that you need to take if you’re going to be serious about your business.

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Getting traffic to a web site is always the hard part of web marketing. There are probably reams of pages to wade through full of advice on this. However, at the end of the day, it simply boils down to exposing your link to your targets eyes.

First find where their eyes are. Usually reading or skimming forums. Surfing the net. Your job is to drop your link where they will see it (obviously). So look at what your prospects interests are and what you are selling. There is usually a forum or two that talk about your subject, usually many more. Do a search on Google and you’ll probably turn up loads.

Check them all out – visit and join the most promising ones. Check out their popularity – there is no point posting your efforts to a forum that has no traffic. Check them out on Alexa.

When you find a relevant forum with good traffic, start posting. Hang around and get a name for yourself for being helpful and offering good, useful advice. Don’t be pushy and don’t push your site. Simply incorporate your link as a signature at the end of your posts.

Search engines love forums and visit them regularly, so you will start to get links back to your site from them. This will help with indexing your pages. In addition people will naturally click on your signature to see what is there. Try to make sure that what they see captures their attention straight away. You only have about 2 seconds before they click off again!

Many more useful pointers are to found in my newsletter with bonus reports, and optional daily web marketing training videos.

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Web 2.0 is simply the name given to a multitude of sites often also described as Social Networking sites. These sites are based on the idea of people contributing content and making friends. The sites are not under the control of commercial interests and many people regard them as the sites of the people - made, run and built by the public. It is a phenomenon that has taken over the internet in many ways.

Users number in the millions. More page accesses are made through these sites than the old classic web “1.0″ such as Google and Yahoo. Recent research shows that more traffic would be found in web 2.0 than the old search engine traffic. So web 2.0 is very important to anyone wanting to generate traffic, find new leads or promote their web sites.

The most important sites in this web 2.0 phenomenon are;

Facebook.
A very large group with a lot of followers. When you join you can buils a group of friends and join interest groups. All of which leads you to find useful contacts and the ability to post to your friends interesting links and offers. As with all these social networking sites, you have to be careful not to simply sell. You need to contribute helpful information and not be seen as a salesman.

Digg.
Another very large group that is worth joining and cultivating.

Stumbleupon.
This is quite a neat site where you can add a link to any sites you come across that will e of interest to other visitors.

Squidoo.
This is a place where you can make web pages, or lenses as they are called here, and on any subject you want. The advantage of this is that the search engines love these sites and will crawl you fairly quickly. Its a great way to give your sites a boost.

Hubpages.
Similar to Squidoo inthat you can make web pages that will again, get searched rapidly by the search engines. Another essential means of boosting traffic to your sites.

These are only a few of the many sites you really need to master to get anywhere in web 2.0 marketing. To learn more I can  recommend an excellent training series that really explains it all and positions you to boost your traffic levels from a few per day to hundreds. Web 2.0 can do this for you once you know how.

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Websites created specifically for an affiliate marketing program have proved to be an effective method to promote what ever affiliate program you have joined. Affiliate marketing is a great way to sell other peoples products etc., while earning a commission. All that is required is a small website to promote the product or service and this can be anything from one page to something much bigger. Many new Internet Marketers start off this way with some never changing what they do as the potential income id huge.

At this point you my not have a good idea what it is you want to sell but this is not as difficult as it seems. To protect yourself, read the terms and conditions of the affiliate program you want to sign up for and if you do not agree wit them, move on to another product. This is your chance to safeguard your earnings before you lose anything for a misunderstanding of their objectives. There are many companies that will only trade with certain countries so will not pay affiliates if they live there.

Many affiliate programs pay 70 percent or more on every sale but you should really stay clear of those that pay less than fifty percent. If you have never researched affiliate marketing before you can try to free web resources to find products and they are: google.com/trends/hottrends and Clickbank.com where you can also sign up for the programs using their own payment gateway. You should always be wary of affiliate programs that require a registration or administration fee as they probably earn their income from the large number of people that sign up with them. Although you can find programs almost anywhere you look, those that use Paypal or Clickbank for their payments are he best to use and registering with both doesn’t cost anything. At a later stage, trying different companies to handle payments will be fine but your inexperience in affiliate marketing at this point could lead you to making mistakes that are unnecessary.

Marketing affiliate products is not that difficult and it is easy to obtain free ebooks on the subject if you do an online search for them or useful websites; just be careful you are not ‘bogged’ down with information. To make money from their free ebooks, many authors have affiliate links in the url’s, so if you visit some of these do not feel that you have to buy anything. Many free services exist which can help someone new to this business so why not use them while you are building up an income, there will be plenty of time to invest later. Services provided free is often a way for the person selling them to build up a trust that can generate sales later on.

For the best exposure of your affiliate marketing campaign, use alternative sources of advertising, do not restrict your efforts to purely online methods. All you need to do is show people how to learn more at your website and let it do the rest. To become a more efficient affiliate marketer you need to know where your traffic is coming from by using tracking methods and then decide which to keep and which to drop. Of course affiliate marketing allows anyone to work for as many companies as they wish which could not be realistically achieved anywhere else. While the Internet is full of information to help you, you are warned that some of it may be incorrect and out of date.

There are some great complimentary internet wealth reports up for grabs at  gain net wealth.com which may help you in developing your internet business.

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It seems that the word is spreading amongst people tired of the daily grind of working for someone else that making money online is the way to go. The problem is we all have different talents so proving the answer to ‘what the best method to achieve this is’ can be a little tricky! Therefore, it is important to assess your knowledge and skills and what area you want to focus on that is why this article only has the main two methods listed so as not to confuse. There is nothing magical about what you are doing; merely finding people that have particular needs or desires and fulfilling these.

Affiliate marketing is probably the most popular way to make money online where you become a commission only salesperson for a company which can easily have thousands of sales people (affiliates) working for them. There are many advantages to this but the most important is that the affiliate does not own the company and only has the task of finding sales to earn money. Once the affiliate has located a good company that intends to be around and continue with the program, it is easier to build up a relationship with them that profits both parties. The idea is to find a company that pays a good percentage on their commissions; seventy five percent is not unusual but try to avoid those where great efforts can be made just to secure five percent. The reason many people like affiliate marketing as a way to make money online is the fact they do not have to own or promote a product of their own so there is very little financial outlay involved.

The other main program to make money online is Google’s adsense which uses adverts which are relevant to the site content where they are placed. This is a free program to join and when these adverts that are on your website are clicked, a small percentage of the revenue generated, goes to the account owner. This is the system described very simply but you need huge numbers of visitors to your site (probably a number of sites) to generate an income. Google are very strict regarding their terms for the adverts placed on any site and can easily stop payment so check their terms and conditions regularly.

While almost anyone can join Google’s program, care is needed as they are continually updating and amending their terms and conditions which will affect your revenue. There are many reasons why people desire to make money online; it maybe for earning extra income or just to making a living from working at home. To be successful requires your site to have people visit them and buy something buy just how do you get people to your site in the first place; well the best thing you can do is do some research on the subject. Much research is available online if you just look but a trusted and respected resource is the www.warriorforum.com where most people who earn a living online go to discuss every sort of topic you can imagine about working on the internet. You do not need to be a computer expert to be able to make money online, nor do you even need a website or have a product of you won to sell, although this is a good idea at some point.

More to read at my website How To Promote Your Websites.com

To learn more there are daily videos available or newsletters that often give great advice for no charge. This one is quite comprehensive for internet marketing.

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New methods of getting traffic to your site are being devised constantly but article marketing is still the best way to drive visitors without having to pay anything out. You can place these articles i.e. blogs, directories, social networking sites etc. which will help visitors who read your article find your website by using back links. For the best response, a website or blog for example that is well visited each day is the best place to submit it; seeing an increase in your website traffic should happen in a very short space of time. Large, well visited sites are generally trusted so if your content is accepted, it should improve your reputation as well; by improving your standing, you will by default, also improve the level of trust people have for you.

If you perform this article marketing and submission process on a regular basis, people will begin to search for your material and trust your work. Showing people you are knowledgeable on certain topics means they will trust whatever you write and bookmark your site. Incoming links to your site from people that trust your work will boost your ranking with the various search engines; the benefit of this is there will be an increase in people that find you through the search engines. If there are many websites which link with your website then it increases your website ranking which in turn boost up your traffic gaining. all at no charge, so free advertising is possible.

Article marketing not only allows links in the body text of the article but in the resource box at the foot of the page. The purpose of good articles is for people to use them on their site, with each having the links to your site contained in them which all helps the ranking. It is not unusual for Google and other search engines to take months before they start to list a website. During this period, the best thing to do is continue submitting your articles to a many popular sites as possible and write more because this can speed the process up.

Using article marketing to improve your website will also involve adding content regularly which will also help boost rankings. Remember that visitors do not know that your website is trying to get them to buy something. The majority of visitors are just searching for more information about something. It is once they have entered your site where you have the chance to sell to them. It is important they understand why they are buying a product so this process is important. This helps with preventing the dreaded refund request that happen on occasion.

If you want visitors to your websites then you must continue your article marketing this way; this does require you to understand that all of this cannot be achieved with just one article. The aim is to have other website owners link their site to yours in addition to using your content as well; each time your article is duplicated on other sites it increases the number of people who can use it. Never underestimate how easy it is to increase your site traffic at no cost; with relevant, quality unique articles, visitors will keep returning.

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How many times have you read that - “the money is in the list”.

Everyone under the sun says the same thing, but how can it help you if you haven’t got one? Lets look at it in a little more detail.

Obtaining a list of subscribers is certainly one of the best things you can do as a web marketer. If you have a list you can email them regularly with information and offers. Get the list to a decent size and you can almost guarantee that someone on it will take up one of your offers after every mailing. So it means money after each mailing. Sounds good? Well, its possible but you have to follow a few golden rules.

The first problem you’re probably thinking is that you haven’t got a list and if you had you wouldn’t know what to write to them.

So initially think about your niche.  What is your web site about, what are you selling. Grab news items from relevant  sources,  PLR  material  from many sources  such as  article directories,  or  even stuff off the top of your head.  If you read around your subject you will  be able to  write a surprising  amount of material.

Building your list can be done in several ways. The paid way - in other words advertising on Adwords or similar. This can be a minefield and very expensive if you are not careful. I prefer free ways - put up some ads on USfreeads for example. Try to offer a free gift or report if people sign up to your newsletter. Folk like free stuff! Try adding your link to articles, written by yourself on your niche topic. It takes a time but article marketing is a tried and trusted method of promotion. Unfortunately it takes a time to work.

The best method by far is to use forums. There are literally thousands on the web and most allow you to post with your link (or signature) after your post. Make sure you find a forum or 2 that are relevant to your subject. Make very sure that you don’t spam them. Keep your posts on subject and interesting. Above all make it interesting for readers and offer useful information. You will start to make a good name for yourself. The search engines will also be looking at forum posts so a few keywords in the post are always good.

If you do it right forum posting can start to get you visitors in the shortest possible time. Just don’t abuse the system. Think primarily helping people and secondarily pushing your links. It will pay off in the end.

Of course you don’t have to have just one list. You could have lots - all bringing in business from different niches. I am investigating something at present which is going to revolutionize list building. It will be released on Sunday 27th April and I am not allowed to reveal details yet - but I am very excited about this - it will boost your abilities to build lists ten fold. Bookmark this page and check back then and I will have fully checked it out at that stage.

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You have heard it before - “Content is King” - but getting or writing original content is not easy. It takes some work. If you want to get anywhere in internet marketing then there is no way around it - you have to be unique in your content, whether a blog or website. Recently though a program has come onto the market which will give you perfectly acceptable unique content on demand.

I have been looking into icontent robot in some depth. This is a
system that I feel will benefit many of my readers. It is a program
that will generate a unique content page in 4 seconds. OK - don’t
click off straight away! I know - we’ve all heard it before. Those
programs that churn out ‘unique’ content that is basically rubbish
and gets dropped by the search engines faster than hot cakes. Trust
me, this is not one of those.

The thing about this program is that the content is written
uniquely by a human in the first place and then processed in some
way to make every page from 60% to 98% different, Thats enough to
enable you to use the articles in any directory, web site, blog etc
without penalty. You can request what keywords you would like copy
for.

As I said, I’ve been looking into this and the articles are great -
readable and make sense for human readers as well as search
engines. I am so blown over by it that I have subscribed myself. As
you know unique content - and lots of it, is what ultimately pushes
traffic to you site. It’s time that stops most of us writing it all
ourselves.

I can’t recommend a program more than joining myself, so with that
I’ll leave you to read the sites info and decide for yourself.

If you want to check it out click this link - Unique Content on Demand.

If you want to see for yourself, checkout this video;

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Web marketing is a vast subject and can cover a multitude of topics. It’s something that we all have to do in our internet marketing lives. The hard part is knowing where to start. The more you read, the more confusing it all seems to get. The basic point is that you want to promote your websites.

What do you need to know to do that? The most effective way is to have your basic website and a series of blogs that lead back to it. This funnelling effect can be very efficient in drawing traffic to you. These blogs can be set up for free at Blogger or Wordpress. You could also set up other blog style sites at the web 2.0 social networking sites.

Hubpages and Squidoo are both search engine friendly and free to join. Go and set up accounts at these two and post a short article or two. Link them back to your website and you have another couple of funnels working for you. Imagine your set up as a lot of funnels sucking in traffic (visitors) from lots of different places. The more you can set up the better.

For ideas on other web 2.0 sites and techniques for drawing more people to your sites, you will need to delve a little deeper.

There are a couple of suggestions I can make here.

First another free one. Try joining this newsletter - IMGenius - You get lots of information and some brilliant tips and ideas on internet marketing. I have discovered a few invaluable tips after reading this. No cost newsletters with something to say - I like!

My second suggestion is the Marketing Minesweeper Membership. They send out a video every day showing and explaining a new topic on everything from web 2.0, niche finding, traffic generation, web promotion, internet earning, etc, etc. The list goes on. This one isn’t free but the cost is low and the training videos are high quality and worth watching, so worth subscribing for a while anyway.

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There are many free tools available on the net. Useful tools that can be utilized for finding niches, keyword research, setting up websites/blogs and promoting your sites. Here are a few that I have found useful.

Initially you need to find keywords to use with you chosen niche. Try Google Adwords: Keyword Tool first. Type in a keyword and it churns out a list of relevant and related keywords. Its a great place to find new niches as you get an indication of how many people search for it and how many other people compete for that keyword. Keep typing different words in until you start to unearth the ones with a high to medium search level but a low competition level. Its hard for the popular terms but try the more unusual ones and its surprising what you can find.

Another one that all the experts seem to use is Wordtracker. I use this after initially running terms through Google’s tool. Here you type in a keyword and it offers you 100 variations of that term. It is free but there is a paid version that gives much more detail. However they let you sign up for a trial to get the more detailed results. The cool thing here is that you can keep on signing up for a trial as long as you like - so take advantage of it while it lasts!

Having found some promising keywords, we need to move onto building a site. If you feel a little confident you could try NVU.  Here’s what they say about it;
*  WYSIWYG editing of pages, making web creation as easy as typing a letter with your word processor.
* Integrated file management via FTP. Simply login to your web site and navigate through your files, editing web pages on the fly, directly from your site.
* Reliable HTML code creation that will work with all of today’s most popular browsers.
* Jump between WYSIWYG Editing Mode and HTML using tabs.
* Tabbed editing to make working on multiple pages a snap.
* Powerful support for forms, tables, and templates.
* The easiest-to-use, most powerful Web Authoring System available for Desktop Linux, Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh users.

I’ve used this to make websites and the results are excellent. Its open source, so its free to download and use.

However, its not for everyone. If you want to avoid any tinkering and want a site made up in the simplest and fastest way, you cannot go wrong using a blog. A blog will make a site up which is really search engine friendly and you can put what you like into it.

Blogger will give you a free blog - or as many as you want, and lead you through building it. The whole procedure is really simple.

Wordpress is by far the most famous blog arena, and the one I prefer. I think it is better and more effective than Blogger. Again, you can get  free blogs hosted by them.

Finally we need to look at ways to promote your site. Two that I find useful are USfreeads and Article Marketer.

USfreeads allow you to put up free ads linking back to your site. The bonus is that Google love them so this helps bring traffic and boosts your popularity.

Article Marketer allow you to submit articles which they then distribute to their list of article directories. This saves you having to submit articles to lots of different directories manually. The free version will send your article to 29 sites, so gives you a good start. Submitting articles is by far the most effective way to advertise your site and boost traffic. Its a slow but sure way to get on the web earning ladder. Just keep at it.

I’ll be returning to several of these topics in future posts.

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