7 FACTORS TO LOOK FOR WHEN CHOOSING AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

 When serving the net it can be quite an arduous task, choosing the right affiliate program. The following factors should be carefully considered before a final decision is made.

• Demand – There must be a demand for the product the merchant is offering. Determine whether any sellers are bidding on keywords related to the product you want to offer. This can be done by visiting, http://www.Overture.com

• High Commission - Choose an affiliate program that pays a high commission. Try not to promote items paying a couple of dollars. You will need to make a lot of sales to reach your objective.  

• Excellent Customer Support and Service – Any questions related to your product should be dealt with immediately. This will assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of the product.

• Persuasive Sales Copy – The sales letter must be convincing enough to get people to buy the product. A good sales copy must persuade customers to take a specific action.

• Contact Details – Physical address and other contact details should be obtainable on the site.

• Statistics – You must be able to determine how many visits you are converting into sales.  Marketers rely on statistics to measure the success of any marketing campaign. Affiliate programs should provide their affiliates with real – time statistics.

• Money Back Guarantee – Customers should be refunded when not satisfied with a product or service. Should the program not make provision for refunds, consider other products to promote.

HOW TO PREVENT ADSENSE FROM TERMINATING YOUR ACCOUNT

Use hidden text on your advertisement page or text to small to read. Use text that has the same color as your background or use css for the sole purpose of loading them with rich keywords.

Make use of bot sniffers ( page cloaking or doorways ) to serve the bots of a different page other than the page your visitors will see. Doorways redirect visitors without their knowledge.

Load a page with a bot that a human will never see. The purpose of page cloaking should not be to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed. 

Submit multiple copies of your domain and pages using auto submitters or submit a URL of an Adsense as two separate URLs.

Click on your own advertisements or encourage other people to do so.

Be cautious to what site you link you adsense to.You cannot control the sites linking to your pages, but you can control to what pages you link to. Rather  put your site’s link on another quality website and allow the webmaster of that site to link to yours. Links higher than 100 on a single page can be regarded as a link farm.

There are some sites selling their page rank links or trading them with other sites. It is okay to sell ads or get the link but don’t do it on direct advertisement of your page rank.

Multiply content amply on separate pages and sub domains.

BACK LINKS, INBOUND OR INCOMING LINKS

Links also known as back links, inbound or incoming links are links that point back to your website. They are the hyper links that point towards your site from another site or forum. In other words a hyperlink is the clickable link in text or graphics on a web page that takes you to another place on the same page or a completely different site. A reciprocal link on the other hand is a mutual link between two websites to ensure mutual traffic.
Most search engines have algorithms that measure the number of back links a websites have. Web pages with good quality back links are ranked higher. The number of back links is an indication of the popularity of that specific website and is used by Google and other search engines to determine the page rank of a website. Get enough quality links and your web pages will rank for your key words. The key to link building is that it must be consistent and ongoing. Provide good content on your site that people naturally want to link to.

Where to get links:

Directories

Submit your site to web directories for inclusion. They can provide quality links to your site. Niche directories that contain categories about the topic of your site should also be considered.

Forums

This is an easy way to get back links for your site. Find forums about your particular topic. Post links in your forum signature. Participate, answer questions and submit quality posts to get traffic from other forum members.

Blog Comments

Find blogs about your topic. Add your comment. Mention other blogs in your posts. An excerpt from your post will appear as a comment if the blog owner has track backs turned on. A track back is a link back method enabling authors to keep track of who is linking to their articles.


Keyword Search

You can also find back links through searching for the back links of your competitors. Search for one of your keywords and then do a back link search on the sites on the first page. Learn if some of those sites will link to yours. This can be time consuming but excellent links can be obtained.

Article Submission

Article submission is another good method to get back links. Add a link in your bio pointing back to your site. Quality content will ensure downloads to other sites.

Press Releases

This is another excellent way to get links. Newsworthy releases can also get selected by Yahoo news. Since the content is intended to be used by the media, attempt to be accurate. Press releases are most effective when they are under 500 words.

Link Baiting

This is a natural source of getting back links. The aim is to provide newsworthy and humorous content on your site. Sustainable link bait is rooted in quality content.

RSS feeds

Find places where you can submit your blog or rss feed. Sites always need more content. Web portals provide users the facility to add rss feeds to their home pages. Submit feeds. If your information is beneficial your feeds can be added to other people sites.

Link exchange companies

Link exchange companies can add your link to a lot of different websites. The links that they provide however, are limited to two types. It is not recommended since Google will penalize you when using paid links. The pattern with which links increase is one of the factors that the search engines monitor to check sites that are artificially inflating their search engine position. Use yahoo site explorer and google sitemaps to make sure your link exchange relationships are still intact.

Automated link exchange

Be aware of automated link exchange software and webmaster quality control for both your site and for your link exchangers' sites. Links to or from link farms can harm a website page rank, as well as the website's visibility on Google.

How to check your links

Visit http:// siteexplorer to determine who is linking to you. Enter your url and click  ‘explore’ url. Click on the ‘inlinks’ button. You should be able to see all the back links pointing to your site. When you get a link to your site use proper wording to describe your site. Don’t use the ‘click here’ phrase, rather let them link to one of your keywords using anchor text.

Summary

Trusted links are rare. The higher the authority of the linking pages, the higher is the authority passed to your pages. When rating the quality of back links google looks at the quality of the linking site, text around the link and the anchor text. Ensure that links are search engines friendly. The websites using the most back links are considered far more authoritative and will ultimately rank larger inside the search engines for their selected search phrases. Promote your website link only on websites that are equal or greater in popularity than yours. Don't submit to low ranking websites. You will not improve your page rank.

ARTICLE MARKETING

Why article marketing?

The purpose of article marketing is to attract visitors to your website or blog by means of the back link of a submitted article. The aim is not to submit hundreds of articles hoping that people find your back link or improve search engine rankings.

People are looking for quality information that they can use straight away. Try to give solutions to problems people experience. If the reader reads the article and clicks the url then the aim of the article marketer is achieved.

Essentials of Article Marketing

By simply implementing the following strategies, you will ensure  that you get targeted traffic:

Place your articles where they can be easily viewed.

Write headlines that catch the eye.                          

Generate interest in the article body.

Get people to click the back link located in resource box.

Arrange your Articles using Keywords

Keywords are phrases that people use to search for stuff online. ‘Keyword density’ is the amount of a certain keyword per 100 words. Position your articles in the relevant searches so that they are found by the right people. You need at least a 1% keyword density, but not more than 3%. Enrich your article with keywords, don't stuff it. Search engines detect it easily.

Keyword Research

The best keyword research tool is Google adwords tool.

1. Number of searches    

This is the number of searches per month. Check for

 terms with higher searches. Many people are looking

 for it.

2. Competition

Compare the results of your keyword searches on Google. If there are 13,500,000 results a lot of people are competing for that keyword. Assuming you only get 2000 results, there are very few competing sites. Your chances are much better showing up on the first page of the search results. Once there your views will increase drastically.

3. Profitability

Not all traffic is rewarding. Traffic attained for certain keywords sometimes don’t convert. When searching for a keyword, look for ads. If they do appear someone is spending money on that particular keyword.

Your aim is to get low competition, profitable keywords with enough searches per month in order to position your articles well.

Grabbing Attention with Headlines

When searching for your article the first thing people see is the title or headline. Since the headline is an attention grabber it is imperative that it attracts attention.

Examples of headlines:

Lists :  Top 10 Ways to Train a Cat for Competitions

Questions:  Do You Want to Learn How to Train a Cat?

Commands:  Start to Learn to Train a Cat, Now!

Article content

Article Body

The body must create and maintain interest throughout, so that the reader doesn’t stop reading. Apart from that, a good article body can also act as a ‘pre-sell’ of the back link.    

Relevancy

For long keywords, it is simple to know what people want.

Someone searching for ‘best places in Canada to fish’ is probably looking for just that. On the other hand someone searching for ‘Canada fishing’ could be looking for places to fish or information about the fishing industry in Canada.

It is difficult to get your article to be relevant for all the individual keywords. Attempt to give your following exactly what they want.

Creating interest

There are no rigid rules about creating interest. Give your reader content that is appealing to them. Never conclude the article in its body.

Resource Box

The resource box is the conclusion of the article and the place where the back link is located. Content of resource box should motivate the users to click on the link.

It should contain incentives to spur people on i.e. “Need more information, Free e-book info never revealed before. etc. 

Further Promotion

Once an article is published you can built back links to get higher up the listings. However building back links is time consuming and you don’t want to waste time building links to a site that is not yours.

Social book marking is an excellent way to increase traffic to your article.

You can also resubmit your article to other directories. Change the back link to point to your original article.

Best Article Sites

The most popular article directory is Ezinearticles.com. It has a high page rank and outperforms most of the other directories.