Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Marketing Strategy
New gambling affiliates often start out in this business with a big dream. While
they have the heart in the right place, the problem with most new affiliates is
that they have no clue what they’re getting into. Once you start to actively
promote poker rooms and casinos, you quickly realize that things aren’t as
easy as you thought they’d be. That’s actually a good thing. If it was too easy,
then everybody would do it. Being a successful affiliate takes a lot of hard
work. You’ve been warned!
Like many new gambling affiliates, I woke up one day and told myself I wanted
to get involved in the industry and make a quick buck. I started out by putting
together a website and which focused solely on Texas Hold’em strategy.
Having played the game for years, I figured my knowledge and experience
could be shared and benefit other players. The site eventually evolved to
something much bigger and I ended up creating more sites, but my first
challenge as a marketer was to build a traffic base. You can have the greatest
site on the web, but if no one knows about it, it’s completely worthless.
The very first valuable lesson I learned was that I could never succeed on my
own. Initially, I was reluctant to link to other sites thinking they would “steal”
my potential gamblers away. I didn’t understand how search engines worked
and clearly, I was starting off on the wrong foot. While other affiliates are
What you really want to do is take advantage of someone else’s success. Find
a website that will help you get traffic in exchange for something else. And
remember, your long term goal is to get traffic from search engines, not
necessarily from other sites. So the deals you make have to make the search
engines notice you so that they send you loads of traffic. When working with
your affiliate peers, remember that it’s not about the quantity of links, but about
their quality. That’s really the strategy you want to go for. I assume you know
about search engine optimization (SEO) so I won’t talk about it here, but if you
don’t’ know what I am talking about, search for SEO tips, SEO tutorials, or
something like it. You’ll need to align your strategy with the SEO
methodologies.
The second lesson I have learned was that I would get different results from
people depending on how I approached them, or presented myself. I want you
to remember one thing: You don’t have to be big to make big deals.
Webmasters are busy people, and when you start to get some traffic, you’ll
quickly experience this yourself. People will e-mail you every day because they
want something from you. They want you to join their affiliate program, they
want you to sell their products, and they you to purchase Viagra by the case.
Yes, spam does increase when you get popular! The point is that when you
contact another webmaster, you have to compete for their attention so what
you’re asking for has to include a benefit for them. You can be to the point, but
you can’t be rude or appear to be demanding. The idea is that you want to start
by offering them something they could be interested in. If that grabs their
interest, then they’ll consider giving you something back. It’s simple really, but
so many people just don’t get that concept.
Also keep in mind that you can’t do business with everyone, and you probably
don’t want to anyway. Many webmasters will not respond to your original e-
mail. Don’t take it personally. Give them a week or two, and then send them a
polite follow up e-mail. As a webmaster, I tend to pay more attention to
someone who makes the effort to track their messages and send me a follow
up e-mail because it shows they legitimately want to do business with me
without being pushy about it. I also get e-mails from other people which I
totally disregard because you can tell they are so generic. It’s a copy and
past/spam the poker affiliates kind of approach which I hate. Don’t be stupid
How you present yourself is very important. Image is everything online. I have
a full time job and I work on my affiliate business part time, like most affiliates
in fact. But I present myself as a serious business entity. I don’t mislead
others, I will deliver on what ever I agree to do, but I do work at emulating a
professional impression. That means try not to use hotmail accounts or free
hosting to do business. Get your own domain, and setup multiple e-mail
accounts (webmaster@mysite.com, support@mysite.com,
marketing@mysite.com, etc). I will use my personal e-mail account sometimes,
but only when I have some familiarity with the person I am dealing with. You
can get a domain for a year for less than $10, and web hosting can be as low as
$5 a month to start out. We’re not talking big expenses. Giving that
professional impression gives you credibility, and credibility gets you deals.
Think big no matter how big or small your business is. Think big, but have a
plan because delusions won’t get you anywhere. Associate yourself with
The truth is that people hate to be advertised to online. This explains the
reason why banner advertisements are not that effective when compared to
those tiny little text link ads. The latter hardly look like advertising and are seen
by many readers as the usual links designed to lead information-hungry
readers to more information and other relevant articles that will provide the
knowledge and answers they seek to solve some of their problems. Actually
contrary to what many people still think, the World Wide Web is not similar to
offline television in terms of being able to carry effective ads that yield a useful
response capable of quickly building up a new or even existing business. In
other words the web is not the next frontier after Television. It is in fact the
most advanced telephone in the world, but I digress.
Fortunately there are a number of other low budget offline advertising methods
that have proved to be hugely effective for many web businesses and even
affiliate programs. One example are bumper stickers. It seems that as folks are
idling around in those frequent traffic snarl ups, they avidly read bumper
stickers and depending on the message (if it piqued their curiosity enough)
they will tend to visit the site either right their in their cars or later when they
get to the office or wherever they are going.
Bumper stickers are relatively inexpensive to produce and the only challenge
in a bumper sticker ad campaign is how best to rapidly distribute the stickers
and to get motorists to use them. However this should not be too difficult with
a little creativity because many folks happily purchase bumper stickers. One
obvious way of getting your web affiliate program bumper stickers out there is
to use your current client base.
Did you know that your humble web stats are a gold mine capable of helping
you make money from your online business so fast that it will make you dizzy?
Yet many web sites don’t even have a way of tracking their visitors and then
those who do, hardly look at their stats on a regular basis, let alone use them
as the marketing weapon that they are.
You have heard bean counters or accountants say that numbers tell a story.
This is especially true about your web site stats. They tell you how each and
every visitor found you and which article on your site is the most popular and
what kind of information they were looking for that you did not quite have yet.
There is a lot a smart webmaster can do with just that preliminary information
that will dramatically boost their site traffic and help them make money fast.
What Do You Do With Your Most Popular Online Pages To make Money Fast?
There is plenty that you can do with information from your stats on your most
popular pages. To start with you create more articles providing even more
information around the same theme that seems to be so popular on your site.
You can think link to your brand new content from your popular page. The
immediate effect of this will be that your prospects will spend more time on
your site. Research has repeatedly shown that the longer your visitors stay at
your site without leaving too fast, the more money you will make online from
your site. What that means is that this simple idea can dramatically increase
Secondly you can use the same popular information to create a special report
which you can then make available via email. This is the fastest method of
creating an opt-in email list which can end up being both a marketing tool and
a separate stand alone profit centre.
Your stats will also show you exactly how your visitors found you. If you are
the typical website then most will have found their way via a search engine
where they used a keyword phrase. Take careful note of these keywords and
then find all the possible synonyms and words that mean the same thing and
create content around it so that you completely dominate that particular
keyword phrase online so that making money from site fast will be a breeze
with all the targeted traffic you will be getting.
But even more crucial, you should pay attention to the keyword phrases used
to find your site where you are thin on information. You should then make the
effort to fill in the gaps so that you dominate those keywords as well as
ensuring that the next lot of hits that use those keywords to find your site will
not be disappointed.
The less you disappoint your niche the faster you will make money online.
The viral marketing potential of an Ebook can help you to promote your affiliate
product to a captive audience that is larger than anything you ever anticipated
in your wildest dreams.
And yet it is fairly simple to write and promote an excellent Ebook online to a
huge audience. Here is a very simple but effective way of doing it all.
The amazing thing is that you can start promoting your proposed eBook even
as you write it. The blog is the perfect medium to do this because through
comments from the people who read your regular posts you will be able to
start gauging reader response. It would be useful if you estimated how many
posts you would require to complete the entire eBook. Once you have known
The awesome power of viral marketing can begin working for you here. What
you need to do is to allow those who get your initial special report or mini-
Ebook to pass it on or even sell it as long as they retain the format exactly at it
is with the links you will have placed in it leading back to articles and pages on
your blog and also referring folks to your affiliate product.
Once you have released your main eBook, make sure that you list it at major
Ebook directories where it will get excellent exposure and allow you to reach a
much larger audience of targeted prospects.
You should also continue making posts at your blog promoting your eBook
and inviting your visitors to get it via email. In your new posts you should try
and highloight current problems that can easily be solved by those who read
your Ebook. You should also make every effort to carry testimonials from
those have read and benefited from reading your eBook.
A well written eBook is a very powerful marketing tool that will help anybody to
promote their affiliate product in a very effective manner.
Without the right favorable image, you will not be able to sell much of your
affiliate product or service. Image as they say is everything.
So how does one go about creating a favorable image on the World Wide Web?
Before You Sell Your Affiliate Product You Will Be Judged By Your Content
Content, as they say is truly king and it is the first thing that your prospects
will use to pass judgment over you. Here is a simple analogy. When you meet a
person for the very first time, assuming that they are well dressed like most
sane persons, how are you going to be able to decide what kind of people they
are. The answer is obvious. You will listen carefully to what they have to say. In
the same way folks will read carefully what is written on your web site.
But there’s more. What you have to say has to be as interesting as possible,
even controversial. This is because there is plenty of choice online and people
will just not allow themselves to be bored.
This means that you have to understand the key to attracting people’s
attention. One way is by giving away valuable tips that will help them live a
better life or solve some of their pressing problems. This will help you build a
very favorable image very quickly on the web.
Testimonials are very powerful, and they can help build a very favorable online
image for you and the affiliate product you are trying to sell, virtually overnight.
Lastly your image over time will depend heavily on your customer service and
how you deal with clients and even prospects. Do you go out of your way to
help. How quickly do you deliver orders? The way you deal without clients will
sooner or later get out there by word of mouth. You need to be very careful
because bad news and the negative always travel much faster than good news.
Just remember that if you are careful enough about cultivating a good image,
your affiliate product or service will sell itself.
There are a number of amazing free services that are invaluable to any affiliate
website. These are mostly in the form of vital services that many affiliate
websites require which would have otherwise cost them money to acquire.
One example of an extremely useful free service that is bound to be very useful
to any affiliate website can be found statcounter.com. This is a site that
provides a lot of very useful tracking information on the visitors to a site. This
will include information like the keywords that were used to get them there and
even the particular search engine that was used. Other pieces of information
include the most popular pages on your site and the duration that your visitors
took on each page they viewed as well as on your site. Actually the volume of
valuable information provided by this free tool is huge and it really is amazing
that the service is free. Naturally this is very useful free information to any
affiliate website and webmaster who can use it to lift their site to the next level
of success.
Yet another free online service that would be of great value to any affiliate
website is available at ezinearticles.com. This is no doubt the article directory
on the web that attracts the highest traffic by far. Most articles posted at this
directory will tend to attract huge amounts of traffic. So by simply placing
links, you can end up with significant traffic at your site from nothing else but
promotional articles posted here. While ezinearticles has a number of rules,
one of which is it does not accept articles that contain affiliate links, the thing
to do as an affiliate is to target your links in articles posted at this directory, to
your blog from whence you will re-direct traffic to your affiliate site.
Then there is the overture keyword tool which provides you with the exact
number of hits that a certain keyword or keyword phrase has had in a recent
month. This is invaluable information for any webmaster making a decision on
which particular keywords to target in their hunt for search engine traffic.
Actually the online business model of offering free services is more powerful
than most people realize. Let’s take the example of Google, one of the most
profitable corporations in the world which did not even exist 10 years ago.
Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed an amazingly powerful and
efficient search engine and then proceeded to provide to the world for free. It
was not until the search engine was receiving tens of millions of visitors before
they started trying o figure out a way to monetize their innovative creation. This
is very different from the conventional wisdom that has ruled offline
businesses for many years, which is that you don’t dare roll out a service until
you have carefully worked out how it is going to raise revenue for you.
One of the huge advantages of offering something for free is the fact that it
enables you to build a huge audience and once this is achieved, earning
revenue is not too difficult.
This powerful principle of offering free services and products can be used to
tremendously boost the marketing of any affiliate program. For example free
software can be offered to your target market in return for their email
addresses so that you quickly build a database of prospects for your affiliate
After software the next desirable thing that prospects will yearn for are well
written e-Books packed with hot tips and valuable information. Again these can
be offered for free and in exchange of the prospects’ email address. The
amazing thing about e-Books is the fact that they usually tend to go viral
meaning that they get passed on a lot so that from a minimal initial distribution
they end up being seen by a huge audience of your potential prospects for
your affiliate program and this is very powerful and effective marketing.
Using these few examples, you can continue to explore ways and means of
bringing a tremendous impact into your affiliate program marketing using the
power of the free offer.
As a business owner, you have set some goals for yourself. They may be quite
aggressive and you’ve made plans on how you’re going to reach them. Now
you have to get to work to make them real.
What motivates you personally can be entirely different than what motivates
someone else but many entrepreneurs like you are motivated by winning the
game and by making money.
To win the game and make good money as an Affiliate, you need to identify
what motivates you. Maybe it’s not the money itself; maybe it’s what the money
can buy you and your family. Only you can define it.
One thing for certain, setting up a website and/or adding some banners to your
existing site will not lead to any measure of success. So set yourself up for
success.
Once you have identified what motivates you, re-check your business and
marketing plan to make sure it fits with your vision for success. Maybe it’s
unrealistic, which can be a de-motivator. Or maybe it doesn’t allow for you to
make as much money as you want in your planned time frame. Or maybe it’s
not aggressive enough – you want more from the business than you originally
planned.
If the fit isn’t right, change your plan and then start working towards it.
Sometimes it feels like hard work to measure your results against your plans
but if you don’t do this daily, weekly, monthly, -- or on some regular basis, you
won’t know where you’re going. It is essential that you bite the bullet and get
into the habit of looking at your results, whether it’s the number of players,
earnings, costs, etc.
Now, you will find that you are motivated to work at your business because you
have clear goals and you have things under control. You know that with hard
work and persistence you will get where you want to go.
There are a lot of books and articles on the web and at your bookstore about
motivating yourself.
That’s right – they can earn a lot of money; that is to say, the affiliates who
understand the value of marketing. You can have the best affiliate program
network in place but what’s the point if nobody knows you’re out there?
Affiliate programs are a partnership. You need each other to build a profitable
business.
Marketing and promotions are keys to success in all business (the other
important key is financial management) and maybe more so in internet
enterprises. Building a site and then hoping someone will happen across it just
doesn’t make good business sense. Even is someone does “happen” across
your site, they may not be at all interested in internet gambling.
Getting Started
You’ve got your affiliate program in place. The gaming sites have provided you
with some marketing materials. Now you need to get known and differentiate
yourself from all the others out there.
First think about your target audience. Put yourself in their shoes and research
other sites. What do you want your customers to see when they visit your site?
What would make you want to click through to play on a particular online
gaming site?
Keep in mind that your target customer may not be just like you. You might
want to research some demographic stats. For instance, the general
impression is that the bulk of players are between 19 and 34 and male but that
may be an outdated stat.
Ok, now you know who your ideal visitor is. How is he or she going to know
you’re even out there?
You need to create awareness by promoting your site in unique ways, building
credibility, a buzz, and excitement. Examples could be:
* Direct mail
* Word of mouth
* Incentives
* Website optimization
* Sponsorships
Be creative and don’t forget to measure the level of success of each of your
marketing tactics. It’s work but it’s worth it. Don’t waste time and money on a
tactic that just doesn’t give you the return.
And don’t forget to use ideas you see on other sites. Why try to reinvent the
wheel?
Content is very important for any website and yet most affiliates with limited
finances need plenty of it, naturally the answer is to find a way to get it free.
One of the ways that content can be free is if you generate it yourself. So what
happens when the webmaster or affiliate cannot write anything more complex
that a shopping list? How can they get their affiliate website content for free?
Actually every problem has a solution and this one is no exception. There is a
way that virtually anybody can generate useful articles and content for their
websites.
The way to do this is by putting together list articles. List articles as the name
suggests are articles that are created out of a lists. For example if you want to
do an article on the advantages and disadvantages of writing your own free
affiliate website content, you simply start of with a list. First you write down the
heading or title of the article and then you move on o the sub-heading. For
instance you can start off with; disadvantages of writing your own website
content. After the subheading you can list the various disadvantages like the
fact that it is very time consuming and that most webmasters tend to postpone
the writing chores for so long that their sites suffer from not having new fresh
content for a long time.
When you are done, you will have what is called a simple list article. However it
can be developed a little further by briefly explaining each point and ensuring
that you have inserted the keyword phrases required.
This way any broke non-writer can still be able to churn out plenty of their own
articles and website content. It is important for you to realize that even
professionals construct their articles in this way because it is ideal for the web
where many readers tend to skim through rather than read content on most of
the websites they visit. When the article has listed clear points it becomes very
easy to absorb the details very quickly. And that is exactly how even a non-
writer affiliate can succeed in generating free online website content.
Many webmasters don’t seem to realize it, but there are a number of ways in
which you can generate extra traffic for virtually any affiliate program, even if
your current website traffic is very low.
This is vital for any affiliate to be able to start earning some income even as
they work on building their own website traffic.
For affiliates who are just starting out, a useful idea is to join a traffic exchange
program. As the name suggests a traffic exchange program gives you traffic in
exchange for you visiting other sites in the program. Obviously this is not
quality traffic, but you never know whose eye will be caught by your affiliate
program and what it has to offer. Besides you will get to learn a lot about other
websites out there and what they have to offer.
So instead of sitting there very miserable at the fact that your affiliate website
has zero traffic, you can do something about kick starting traffic to your site.
Join Opt-In Email Lists To Generate Targeted Traffic To Your Affiliate Website
There is a way that you can get much more targeted traffic to your affiliate
website, but again it will involve some work. You will also require a brand new
email address as it is not advisable to use your usual one because of the high
volumes of email you will receive when you start working this program. This is
The way to keep your traffic as targeted as possible is to join groups that are
as closely related to the industry and subject matter covered by your affiliate
website.
Yahoogroups is not the only site that offers opt-in email lists. There are
actually quite a number of other sites.
Articles in High Traffic Article Directories Can Get Your Affiliate Website Plenty
Of Traffic
Yet another idea to help you generate extra traffic for your affiliate program
from outside your website is to post useful articles at high traffic article
directories and then place a link pointing directly to your affiliate site. Naturally
the more articles you write and post, the higher the amount of traffic you will
attract to your affiliate website. This is the highest quality targeted website
traffic you will be able to attract.
It is no secret that there are many small businesses out there today that have
taken on much larger companies and beaten them to submission. It is amazing
how this would have been totally impossible just a few years back but has
today become just too common place.
There are a number of things that have taken place in the small home business
sector in recent years that have made this amazing feat possible. The two that
stand out most is the Personal Computer PC and the World Wide Web. These
two factors have combined to completely change the face of business and
more so the small home business.
Not only that, various tasks that were previously undertaken by costly
machinery were now easily accomplished using a PC. Just to give one simple
example, previously pre-press work for printing like typesetting would require
a very large machine to set the type. With software like Pagemaker and
Coreldraw, the home PC was able to comfortably undertake this task and
produce high quality work that was in many respects better than what the large
machines were producing at a much higher cost.
This was quickly followed by the World Wide Web which served to dramatically
cut costs lower. For the first time a small home business run by a single
The result of all this is that today a very small home business can deliver better
service quicker and cheaper that a large Fortune 500 business. Indeed we are
now beginning to see trends where small home businesses run by the owner
and without a single employee are making millions of dollars a year. What this
means is that they are starting to compete with the huge companies in terms of
revenue and yet are being run by the owners with very little outside help. The
example we can give here is a dating site that recently announced earnings of
close to a million dollars over a two month period. And the sum total of this
came from a single affiliate program—namely the Google Adsense program.
It is no secret that there are many small businesses out there today that have
taken on much larger companies and beaten them to submission. It is amazing
how this would have been totally impossible just a few years back but has
today become just too common place.
There are a number of things that have taken place in the small home business
sector in recent years that have made this amazing feat possible. The two that
stand out most is the Personal Computer PC and the World Wide Web. These
two factors have combined to completely change the face of business and
more so the small home business.
Not only that, various tasks that were previously undertaken by costly
machinery were now easily accomplished using a PC. Just to give one simple
example, previously pre-press work for printing like typesetting would require
a very large machine to set the type. With software like Pagemaker and
Coreldraw, the home PC was able to comfortably undertake this task and
produce high quality work that was in many respects better than what the large
machines were producing at a much higher cost.
This was quickly followed by the World Wide Web which served to dramatically
cut costs lower. For the first time a small home business run by a single
entrepreneur could compete with any Fortune 500 company in terms of
communication capabilities and at a small fraction of what the cost used to be.
The result of all this is that today a very small home business can deliver better
service quicker and cheaper that a large Fortune 500 business. Indeed we are
now beginning to see trends where small home businesses run by the owner
and without a single employee are making millions of dollars a year. What this
means is that they are starting to compete with the huge companies in terms of
revenue and yet are being run by the owners with very little outside help. The
example we can give here is a dating site that recently announced earnings of
close to a million dollars over a two month period. And the sum total of this
came from a single affiliate program—namely the Google Adsense program.
Ebooks can also help increase traffic to your affiliate site. In fact it is utterly
amazing the kind of traffic that ebooks are capable of generating.
However one needs to be very skillful in the way they produce their ebook for
this to work out so that your affiliate site benefits. The truth is that most people
love useful ebooks and will hungrily take in the information contained in them.
Anybody who owns a website or even a blog has lots of information within that
can hardly be taken in at one seating by people who discover your site a little
late. So it makes plenty of sense to reorganize the information and re-package
it into desirable ebooks. Your ebook should also contain plenty of links leading
back to articles within your site.
This will often work out very well for affiliate programs where ebooks on how
to successfully work the affiliate program can have a tremendously positive
impact on affiliates.
The title of your ebook will determine how well received it will be in the market.
In the offline world books that flop and somehow fail to sell will sometimes be
re-packaged which means simply changing the title and reprinting it. Many
times books that had previously failed to sell will start selling at high speed
after a mere change of the title. This illustrates just how important the title of a
book is and this rule applies online to ebooks as well..
The next important step is the distribution of your ebook. For starters you can
make it available on the most popular pages on your site. One thing that is
capable of causing your ebook to go viral very quickly is to allow the people
who download it to pass it on to others and even to sell it, if they so wish. The
viral effect here can be tremendous and will go a long way in helping you
You will quickly discover that in most useful ebooks everybody who reads it
will tend to click on virtually every link they come across in the ebook which
will help increase the traffic to your affiliate site considerably. Done properly
you can even recruit people very effectively into your affiliate program site by
simply placing affiliate links in the ebook and directly recommending your
affiliate program.
Without enough targeted traffic flowing to your affiliate web site it will be
impossible for you to generate any income. It does not matter how good your
affiliate program is.
Generating traffic is one of the biggest challenges for many affiliates who have
no idea what to do to increase traffic to their web sites.
The truth is that there are many creative ways to increase traffic to any web
site. Perhaps the most effective has to be viral marketing techniques. What is
viral marketing? Viral marketing gets its’ name from virus. We all know how
rapidly viruses can spread after starting in one individual or place. Actually
even the Internet grew virally from just a few computers linked to one another
to a World Wide Web of computers linked to one another. Little wonder that
some of the webs best known companies grew in the same way, virally. A good
example here is Google Inc. The search engine giant has never needed to
advertise anywhere to date and yet now has tens of millions of people all over
the world using its’ search engine every day.
Now the most effective way to improve traffic is by accumulating back links
pointing to your site. So how does one do this?
Create Valuable Articles And Post Them To High Traffic Article Directories To
Generate Back Links For Your Affiliate Web Site!
Creating interesting articles and posting them at high traffic article directories
is one way of generating quality back links pointed at your Affiliate site.
If you are careful to create engrossing articles the viral effect can be pretty
rapid and from just two or three articles posted in leading article directories,
they can easily multiply so that you find that you have accumulated tens of
thousands of back links pointing straight at your site.
This will automatically increase your daily traffic tremendously so that from a
single or double digit traffic figure, the back links can cause your affiliate
website’s traffic to shoot up to tens of thousands of hits daily. This will
automatically mean more affiliate product sales for you.
There is no other online marketing weapon that is more powerful than the
promotional article when you want to grow any web site and not just an affiliate
one. Done properly articles are capable of lifting an unknown site from oblivion
to great success within a very short period of time. And what’s more articles
are a very cost effective
promotional method.
Why is it then that we have so many folks who claim that articles don’t work?
Have you ever wondered why anybody would want to make such a ridiculous
claim when you and I know that the minute we enter a keyword phrase in a
search engine, we will end up on a page with an article? And what’s more some
of these articles receive millions of hits every month. So why would somebody
want to say that promotional articles don’t work?
The answer is simple. Most of these “experts” wrote a handful of articles and
posted them at a few article directories and when the floodgates of traffic did
not open, they declared that promotional articles do not work. What a pity,
because like everything else, you require certain skills and knowledge to use
promotional articles effectively to grow your affiliate web site. You need to
know exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it.
To Grow Your Affiliate Web Site, You Need To Find The Right Keyword Phrases
Before you even write your article to grow your affiliate web site, you will need
to carefully select your keyword phrases. Without the right keyword phrases
your article marketing campaign will go absolutely nowhere.
If You Don’t catch Them With The Headline, You Will Not Grow Your Affiliate
Website With Content
Fortunately there are many ways to attract attention and traffic on the web
which mostly hinge on how creative a webmaster can dare to be.
For example there is a way that you can cleverly use the breaking news in your
industry to attract tons of traffic to your affiliate website. Let us first define
what we mean by breaking news. Every industry and every niche on the World
Wide Web has things happening all the time. Fresh new articles are being
generated about it every other minute. New technological developments that
impact the industry are being made regularly. Not to mention new products and
gadgets being churned out all the time. It is virtually impossible for most
people to keep up with these developments and that is where you can help and
in return receive more traffic than you will be capable of handling.
Getting this information is easier than you may think because there are several
things you can do to ensure that you always have the information at your
finger tips. You can use your favorite search engine to look for sites that
Then you can also use the Google email alert service. The way this service
works is that you enter a keyword phrase (it is important to be as specific as
possible so that you get quality results). You will then receive an alert every
time anything gets indexed by Google that is related to your keywords. This
ensures that you will never miss anything, because everything will always end
up in your email inbox.
There is yet another very useful service that you can use to get all the news
you need for your affiliate web site industry. This is the Google blog search
tool. By using your most important keywords you will be able to view all the
posts starting with the very latest that have been made in blogs concerning the
subject.
Using all this information, you an specialize on posting this breaking news at
the blog you are using to generate traffic to be redirected to your affiliate
website. Done properly, you will quickly attract a lot of highly targeted traffic
and what’s more many of them will want to discuss the same topics in their
blogs and will therefore quickly link to your breaking news.
Within no time, you will have tons of targeted traffic as a result of your news
service that will help turn your affiliate website into a cash machine.
Your affiliate website content is so terribly important that it will make or break
you. Yet many affiliate web site owners have a huge problem finding
appropriate content that will keep their visitors interested. The result is that
despite the fact that many affiliates are aware of the fact that blogs can help
them build up targeted traffic to their affiliate site, they have no clue on how to
generate content for their proposed blogs, because blogs need plenty of
interesting and engrossing content.
One thing that you must remember at all times is that whatever you do, you
cannot afford to bore visitors to your site. There is just too much choice online
and at the earliest sign of boredom, your precious traffic will just click their
way out and to other sites.
There are some interesting ways in which to ensure that you generate the sort
of content that will help you build up traffic and page views quickly.
The affiliate product or service that you deal with, solves certain problems for
its’ users. Now your captivating content has to start with ideas and to be able
to generate the right kind of ideas, you will need to focus on the target market
for your affiliate website product. Then you need to ask yourself what kind of
problems and concerns they are facing some of which can be solved by your
affiliate product.
There is a very good reason why advertising should be furthest from your mind
as you generate content for your affiliate site. And it is really simple. People do
not come online to be advertised to. Rather they are seeking for information
and if you can provide the information that they are looking for, then you will
have their attention. If you succeed in generating useful content for your
prospects, then referring them to your affiliate site for more information or
directly to your product will prove to be much more successful than if you were
to try and advertise your affiliate product directly in the article.
Customer Service
You’ve put a lot of effort into researching the correct affiliate program
partnership, figuring out how you’re going to attract players to your site,
setting goals and objectives, creating budgets, etc., etc., and now you’re
getting visitors to your site.
First Impressions
The first impression of how you treat your customers will come from the ease
of use of your site. How many times have you gone to a site where you just
couldn’t find what you wanted or it took too long to load, or ….? You just leave,
right? Realistically, you probably only have one chance to capture a customer.
Research other sites and note the features that you like and dislike and then
make sure your site encourages visitors to stick around and click through.
Make sure your navigation is easy and user friendly.
Customers today want instant gratification. Make sure you have “Help” up
front and centre on your site. If you can, have a direct line to your customer
support. Walk players through the process while you’re on the phone. At the
very least, have an email system in place and answer promptly.
A “Questions and Answers” section on your site can really help. Not everyone
will understand how affiliate programs work so be prepared to answer all
questions clearly and concisely, whether in writing or in conversation.
And never forget that customers tell everyone who will listen (blogs especially)
about a bad experience but rarely make a point of talking about a good
experience.
Life is sweet. Customers clicking through and you’re making money. But
customers are fickle -- they want change just for the sake of change.
Excellence in your customer service is a very important part of your business
strategy to keep them coming back.
Many of the biggest issues that arise in internet gambling are technical issues.
Players are not technical people and don’t understand why they could be
disconnected from a tournament or why scheduled maintenance has to be
done.
Your affiliate gambling sites will probably have 24 hour customer support but
the players will be confused about the difference between your role and the
role of the poker room. Be prepared to answer their questions and/or point
them in the right direction.
Send out emails to all your players letting them know if there is going to be any
downtime and talk to them about situations that can occur on the internet and
why they happen.
In summary, the key to great customer service is to think of how you wanted to
be treated and treat your customers in the same way.
There is really no doubt that the Adsense affiliate program from Google is by
far the most popular on the web today and this is one of the reasons why any
available tips to help improve the performance of this program are usually
wildly popular with virtually every webmaster.
The fastest way to increase your Adsense affiliate earnings is to seek tips on
high paying Adsense keywords. While the vast majority of Adsense clicks pay
a pittance in just a few cents, there are certain keywords and keyword phrases
that pay $10 or even much more than that. Now let us assume that your site
gets an average of 1000 clicks a month and the average per click is about
10cents. That would give you a monthly affiliate income of $100 from Adsense.
Now let us assume that you are able to get useful information and tips on the
highest paying Adsense keywords, that is keywords that tend to attract high
paying ads that when clicked on will give you an average of about $7 per click.
That would enable you to earn a whooping $7,000 from the same number of
clicks that gave you $100. One very reliable place where you can get the very
latest high paying Adsense keywords is in a Google Adwords account. At one
time or another you will need to place some pay per click (ppc) ads through
Adwords so it is a good idea to open an account as soon as you can.
Taking the trouble to stay updated with as many Adsense affiliate tips as you
can pick up can help you increase your monthly Adsense earnings
significantly.
Most affiliates hate selling and this is clearly portrayed in the very poor product
sales we quite often see for most affiliate products. Little do they know that
selling can be a lot of fun as long as you have the right technique and
approach to doing it right.
For example rather than just hoping that somebody will come across your
affiliate product and somehow want to purchase it, why not aggressively
position your product to solve problems? In fact anybody who can master this
simple but effective technique of positioning their product to solve problems
will always have more affiliate product sales than they can handle.
One way to go about this is to find a place on the web where a problem that
your affiliate product can solve is being discussed. For example if you have a
weight loss product, you could go to a weight loss blog and join a discussion.
Say the discussion taking place in the comments section of a post has
something to do with a new weight loss technique that is being discussed. You
should not dive in and advertise your product upfront. Rather you should
patiently make a number of useful contributions to the discussion. Remember
that whatever blog software you are using, people can still click their way back
to your site, if they really get interested in what you are saying, so avoid every
temptation to spam the blog with links pointing back to your affiliate program.
The other thing that you should do is that in the course of your leaving
comments you will have developed some very useful thoughts that should help
you turn some of your comments into fully fledged articles. If you make the
small effort required to get your articles out, you will find that what you
generate will be high quality and very useful articles.
Later on in your comments you can refer to these articles that you have done
without providing a link back to them. Another technique is to make one post
referring to your article and then provide the link in a separate post right next
to it. That way if the post with your link gets deleted by the blog administrator,
Finally you can also start referring to specific case studies involving the
affiliate product on sale at your site. Using this simple technique you will find
that within no time you will be generating the kind of high affiliate product
sales that will be the envy of everybody.
Blogs are very powerful tools that can have a tremendous impact on your
affiliate program sales. That is if you know how to use them.
There are two types of search engine optimization, namely onsite and offsite.
Firstly let us appreciate the fact that chances of you successfully using onsite
optimization techniques to boost your affiliate program site so that it appears
high in the rankings are very slim indeed. Your chances are much higher with
offsite optimization.
The Real Power And Impact A Blog Can Have On Affiliate Program Sales
Blogs are real special in the eyes of search engines. To start with they tend to
have plenty of content unlike conventional sites. The result is that a blog will
almost always outrank a conventional site. This is a powerful advantage that
can be used o capture huge chunks of targeted traffic and to then direct it to
your affiliate program sales site.
But there is something about blogs that is even more powerful and valuable.
Bloggers who specialize on a certain subject area are quite often considered
experts in their fields. Imagine what would happen to your affiliate sales if you
positioned yourself as an expert in affiliate programs and then referred or
recommended your prospects to particular affiliate programs? Your affiliate
sales would literally explode.
Setting up a blog is easy. I would recommend that you start off with a free
hosted blog. It may be a good idea to go with blogger.com for several reasons.
One of them is the fact that it is owned by Google and good search engine
rankings should be at the top of your list of priorities. Select a niche related to
your affiliate program sales that you know well and then use the overture
keyword tool to research the most popular keywords related to your subject.
You can then include that keyword in your domain name address. This will help
you a lot with search engine rankings for that particular keyword phrase.
One other huge advantage that you will have with blogger is the fact that there
is an increasingly popular blog search tool that indexes and lists blogger.com
blog very highly. This means even more traffic for you, especially if you can
manage to make posts on a daily basis.
Not many people know that you can use other people’s high traffic blogs to
promote your own blog and even your affiliate program sales. You can easily
do this by leaving comments. However I do not mean spam messages which
everybody loathes. Since you are an expert on the subject it will be easy for
you to leave intelligent comments. And make sure that you DO NOT link back
to your site or affiliate program. Instead if it is blogger just make sure that you
update your profile to include both a link to your blog and the affiliate program
whose sales you want to promote. Other types of blog software automatically
link every comment you make back to the site or blog you choose.
Using this comments facility, you can quickly grow the popularity of your blog
literally overnight, which will give you much more ability to really promote your
affiliate program sales.
Many affiliate programs include very colorful and well designed banner
advertisements in their marketing arsenal to be used for promotional activities
by those who join the program. Many enthusiastic affiliates who join these
programs try out these banner ads with very high expectations only to be
greatly disappointed.
Actually banner ads are not a bad idea and can in fact be highly effective if you
know how to use them properly and mostly to combine them with other types
of ads to get the best results.
The big question that we need to answer first is if banner ads are capable of
selling. The answer to that question is that although they can, they are not
really good at that task and one will need to receive millions of page views
before their banner ads can receive a reasonably amount of clicks to make a
sizeable amount of affiliate sales. It is important to understand the fact that
people hate to be advertised to on the web and will go to great lengths to avoid
advertisements. The problem with a colorful banner is the fact that it has the
word “advertisement” written all over it.
On the other hand seemingly ugly, tiny text ads in one or two colors tend to
achieve many more clicks and ultimately a lot more affiliate sales. This clearly
tells you that text links are much more effective in selling and marketing an
affiliate program.
The Correct Way To Use Banner Ads In The Marketing Of Your Affiliate
Program
The effective way to use banner ads is to use them to enhance the image of the
affiliate product that your are marketing on the web, you can then go ahead
Actually you will be able to accomplish a lot more with this effective
combination of banner ads and text ads in your affiliate program marketing. Do
not accept to fall into the trap that many ignorant online entrepreneurs usually
fall into of totally relying on banner ads for all their affiliate program marketing
sales because chances are high that you will end up extremely disappointed.
It may surprise you to learn that on of the fastest ways to get an Internet
business, including an affiliate program opportunity, to really take off, is with
the help of an opt-in email list. After all, those who have tried know how
difficult it is to build up a sizeable opt-in email list these days.
The facts are that email has many issues, mainly stemming from the menace of
spam email which continues to be a major problem. Because of this there are
many people who do not even want to hear the phrase email marketing.
How Does One Quickly Build An Opt-In Email List For Their Internet Affiliate
Program?
Creativity still works and it is still the best way to solve all those knotty
problems. You can use your existing content to create really useful special
reports. The way to do this is to focus on the questions that your content
answers and the problems it solves. Alternatively you can easily use your
special knowledge to create such a special report. Once your report is ready,
offer it via email to visitors who drop in at your website. To speed up the rate at
which you grow your email list, you can split the special report into two and
offer the second part in return for referrals. This should set off the kind of viral
effect that will enable you to grow your email opt in list at blinding speed.
Another very effective strategy is to offer your special report for sale and then
give your prospects the option of giving you referrals in exchange for the
special report. Naturally to be able to do this you special report will have o
Yet another brilliant idea to help you grow your email opt-in list very fast to
help you effectively market your Internet affiliate program is to offer valuable
new products to your existing subscribers and then give them the option of
paying fro them by referring others to register as subscribers to your list.
Assume that your list has about 1000 names and the information product you
want to sell is worth 5 referrals, you will easily be able to double your list if just
200 people successfully deliver their 5 referrals. That is how powerful this kind
of viral marketing can be in helping you to market your Internet affiliate
program.
The reason why most affiliates fail is because they have no clue on how best to
find the program that suits them best. The result is that they end up with a
program that they don’t like and are in fact ill-equipped to succeed in and thus
failure is inevitable even before they begin working their program.
Find Something That You Are Good At For Your Affiliate Program
Many folks forget that competition on the web is very high and you are
competing with the best in the world. It therefore makes a lot of sense to find
an affiliate program where you will bring in some special advantages and will
have an edge over your competition. For instance an affiliate program that is
closely tied to your hobby is an excellent choice. Basically it will help a great
deal of you find something that you love to do because the rule is that you are
bound to be very good at what you love to do. It could also be the sort of
affiliate program that requires skills that you picked up in earlier life.
Remember that most affiliate programs are run from the home, meaning that
whatever you opt for, you will be stuck with 24/7. All the more reason why it
had better be something that you like.
One of the huge advantages on the web is the fact that it is so easy to test
virtually anything, more so the affiliate program you find to see if it is capable
of producing a good income for you.
For instance you can paste your affiliate link at your site to drive traffic to your
affiliate site and then try to establish how many hits you need to make a single
sale. By testing two or three programs in this way, you will be able to find the
most lucrative and best affiliate program for you.
There is no denying that ever since they were first introduced by Amazon.com
at the inception of that giant website, affiliate programs have quickly emerged
as the most profitable online business ever.
The most amazing thing that affiliate programs have done for many online
businesses is to give them a source of revenue that allows many sites to be
very profitable even as they continue to provide valuable services for free.
They simply get paid for their traffic by lucrative affiliate programs that are
closely related to the website or complement its’ activities.
Just to give you an example here. We have seen cases where a barely legal
youngster launches a most profitable online business in the form of a blog
based on an electronic gadget like the iPod picking up huge traffic within a
very short space of time. Without any other form of expensive advertising other
than getting others to link to him, the site soon becomes a phenomenon. The
blogger then monetizes it by signing up for one or two highly relevant affiliate
programs. Virtually overnight the site suddenly starts bringing in a five figure
income for the owner. And yet even as the profits pour in, they can continue
doing what they enjoy most—providing information about an electronic gadget
that they really love even as they earn the kind of income that most people can
only dream about.
And as if that excitement is not enough, there is the added advantage that
there is really no limit to the kind of profits that an online business can earn.
For starters a webmaster can sign up for several affiliate programs at the same
time. If they are well organized it is possible to make substantial profits from
each individual affiliate program.
There is really no argument that affiliate programs are the most profitable and
convenient of online businesses.
1. Not Maximizing Potential Income off Existing Traffic: This is by far the
most common mistake affiliates make online. Many if not all of the super
affiliates I talk too about this issue feel they could be squeezing more money
out of their networks but want to do it without being too invasive. There are
several things I would recommend on a general level although each site and
niche is different:
* Proper Analytics – If you are not using a program like Google analytics
you can pour over your raw search logs to see exactly who is doing what on
your site and when. With this detailed info, combined with the tweaking of your
campaigns and landing pages, your conversions can dramatically increase.
* Split Testing – Split Testing is a smart way to test your site’s pages fast.
Make several variations of landing pages on your site, where the traffic is
converting. Then split your traffic up to different landing pages at a ratio you
choose, and tweak, tweak, tweak.
* Geo Targeting – Many people from various countries around the world
are not likely allowed to sign up for the same offers as your main target
audience. You should geo-target your ads or your entire site based on browser
settings or IP address of the user. I can’t tell you the number of times I have
clicked through a CPA type submission form/pay to signup type ad, and I get
redirected telling me “This offer is not available in your area”.
2. Great CPA programs will have something sweet for other countries set up
automatically on redirect AND credit you the redirect – Most do NOT so it is up
to you to drive your country-specific traffic to the proper country-specific
affiliate programs. For the record I am from Canada which is close to the USA
and many offers are not available to us – just think about the other 192
countries that could possibly visit your site.
6. Choosing The Wrong Affiliate Program: Just because “Joe’s Bait Shop
Online” is offering 75% profit share, does not mean it is the right choice for you
as an affiliate. You should read some of the major affiliate marketing blogs and
forums to find out the credibility of different affiliate programs in your niche.
There are too many “veterans” on the forums and blogs lately complaining
about affiliate programs even though they are still pushing them. I don’t care
what niche you are in there are enough affiliate program options to go around –
if there is a big problem with one then drop it and don’t waste your time or
breath on them anymore.
7. Promoting Too Many Programs at Once: Many affiliates promote too many
programs at once. It often makes more sense financially to promote the highest
converting programs only, and then trying to increase your CPA or Rev Share
because of increased volume to a particular program.
* Digg.com : Of course, Digg is the big one and hitting the coveted
homepage is a common cause for servers being down.
* Reddit.com : Digg like site that can drive very decent traffic.
2. Video + Podcasts – With every passing day, more and more of the world’s
population are upgrading their computers to be able to handle video. Podcasts
are becoming hugely popular and mainstream. To see a site with very
professional podcasts, check out WebmasterRadio - As an affiliate you’ll
probably want to stick around and listen to a few shows too. I could go on and
on about the great shows on this network, but considering SEO Rockstars will
be back later this September I promise you that alone is reason enough to tune
in.
5. More Outsourcing Options – The “I can’t work with anyone overseas b/c
they don’t understand me” is a cliché and definitely erroneous in today’s
global workforce. The best super affiliates always outsource more work then
they can handle and the options are really endless. Without even going into the
markets at various webmaster and niche forums, you can generally find any
help you need from grunt work SEO to Fully Ran Websites or Networks and
anything in between.