Saturday, May 30, 2009

Affiliate Marketing – One of the Best Way to Do Internet Marketing

The economic condition that we are having nowadays is one of the worst ever. Because of this, many businesses have let go of their value employees and some even shut down. Businesses make desperate efforts to be able to carry on with their daily operations.  

One of these efforts is by incorporating internet marketing. Fundamentally, internet marketing is using the internet to do many things. Marketers intend to advertise through the internet to be able to have a global market and it is actually not costly. Primarily, internet marketing, like other marketing strategies, is made to increase to our economic situation today; the business industry has become cutthroat. a business’ level of sustainability in the industry by increasing its profits and many others. 

The objectives vary from one marketer to another. But generally, the objective of internet marketing is to generate an apparent value for the profit of a business. With this spotlight, the value scheme of the internet is not bounded to money-making transactions. To some extent, it might be, to a certain extent, enough to create awareness for new product launches or to support offline events with added internet activities 

Internet marketing converses a company’s message about itself and the products and services it offers. In short, it has the objective to create awareness. Market precision facilitates potential or existing customers to have an option from a varied selection of accessible businesses. Examining the accessible resources, a customer definitely looks for the best offer. Awareness can even be generated totally without traffic of latent partners, customers or multipliers of the website. 

Another objective of internet marketing is to accomplish research as to the nature of existing and potential consumers. This includes different market demographics, preferences, wants and needs. 

The advantages of internet marketing are endless. In fact, there are many ways to do internet marketing such as pay per click, search engine optimization and affiliate marketing which is one of the best ways to do internet marketing. What is affiliate marketing anyaway? 
 

Affiliate marketing is an internet based marketing exercise wherein a business remunerates one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliates’ effort. The affiliate marketing industry fundamentally has four core players. The first are the Merchants followed by the Network, then the Publisher and last but not the least are the consumers. The market has grown sufficiently in intricacy to necessitate a secondary stage or rank of players as well as affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors or buyers.  

Affiliate marketing goes beyond with other internet marketing methodologies to some degree for the reason that affiliates most often than not use regular or normal advertising practices. Those practices include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, electronic mail marketing and in some sense display advertisement. However, affiliates from time to time use less traditional practices and techniques like publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner. This is where article marketing and blog marketing come in. 

Article marketing is also the practice of posting many different keywords on different sites that then organize and syndicate your content. The keywords can also have links with them that when clicked by readers will lead them to another site which says more about what you are trying to promote. Most article sites allow you to post your articles free of charge. Once the articles are published, some sites review them and the review can last for a few days, once your articles are approved, they are posted live on the syndication site. Once this happens, when someone uses search engines and they type the keywords that you have written about, your articles will be one of the results when they click the “search” button. The moment your articles are published, your content becomes available for everyone to see and they can potentially be reused. When this is done properly, the posted articles on these specific sites can become link baits for other websites. 

On the other hand, blog marketing is one of the many different tools in internet marketing, is the phrase used to illustrate internet marketing through web blogs. These blogs are different from corporate websites for the reason that they feature monthly, weekly or even daily posts, frequently around the same topic. Characteristically, business establishments and marketers use blogs to generate a somewhat personal conversation or a dialog with customers and put in plain words the features of their products and services.

Affiliate marketing is a form of online marketing which is frequently ignored by many marketers. But we have to bear in mind that this kind of marketing is very useful in driving traffic to a website.  

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Outsource SEO to Make Your Business Grow

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/tpDFe)



Search engine optimization is the process of steering traffic towards your site. This is done with the use of internet marketing so that your website’s ranking increases in the Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs. This is also otherwise known as organic optimization that requires time and determination.

You must remember that there are some keywords useful for the website. Take note of the following steps employed:



    1. In the head section, Meta tags and title tags are edited to add keywords and the body section content is held with article. The technique used by SEO outsourcers is the Standard Compliant Coding.

    2. The site’s tag, file names and URLs are tweaked to the search engine spiders. The languages applied are HTML 4.01, XHTML.




SEO is the art of upholding the value and dignity of any website. With technical expertise and value loaded ideas, optimizers establish the company and work endlessly and meticulously for the site’s development. You have to find an outsourcer that possesses sufficient knowledge about the growth and development of the industry at large.

The right SEO provider optimizes the inbound and outbound linkage with sites related to the business to make sure that ranking increases. A good company knows how to concentrate on the product, service, and customers. Here are what they should be capable of doing:



    1. The service providers must focus on ecommerce, content management system, and online branding.

    2. They must rework and steadily monitor websites in case search engines change their algorithms.

    3. They increase the site’s search engine relevance by using keywords and Meta tags.

    4. They apply the organic SEO techniques.




Why should you outsource? There are insufficient numbers of qualified and talented professionals within a country. Also the price of qualified labor can vary from place to place. Outsourcing allows business owners to seek assistance elsewhere. Especially when it comes to optimizing your site, you need someone with skills and experience. This can only come from a person with a wide internet experience. Moreover, budget for resources and overhead expenses are altogether removed simply because the outsource provider should already have the materials needed to fulfill their duties. Owners no longer need to worry about constructing a new wing and paying someone to complete the task while using the company’s energy and supplies.

Friday, May 22, 2009

Less Common Ways To Convert Customers

(My Original Blog Post: http://remoteworkmate.com/less-common-ways-to-convert-customers)
There are many ways to capture a customers information so to begin their process through your marketing funnel, however their are a few many people tend to forget ... here they are:

  1. Becoming an affiliate and link to great products: the important thing to remember with this is that you have to create links with websites that are related to yours. Otherwise, all the links you create will be futile and useless. This won’t help steer your target audience towards your page simply because you don’t meet their needs.  The secret here is to talk to sites that you admire. Seek out the provider and create a very interesting proposal, one that does not simply talk about how great your product is. Give them a sort of an x-deal, which simply means that they also get something out of it. After all, this is how businesses are run.

  2. Subscribe to RSS feeds via other options: Remember, you can’t put limits on your readers. Giving them options is what will make them go back to you. Let them have options for reading your material.  For instance, you can have an email account, a twitter post, and an IE & FF plugin.  It is also imperative that you make a landing page for your feed.  Promote this page via online & offline advertising. You’d be surprised how many people will subscribe through these various tactics.

  3. Email Newsletter: have a sign up form for your email on your landing page.  Group these people that share related posts.  Just keep in mind that they know that there are no spam mails involved.  Protect their privacy and value their right to withhold information.  See your signups increase by 10% if you do this.

  4. Share This (not to be confused with the wordpress widget): this is the most undervalued tool.  For upcoming SEO webinars, 10% of subscribers used this link. Just imagine if you had 100,000 people on your landing page and only 1% shared the link, that’s an additional 1,000-3,000 people seeing your landing page for no extra charge.  To apply this, don’t limit yourself with ‘share-this’ widget in wordpress. You can add the link throughout the post. If you make a solid point, make sure to end the paragraph with ‘recommend this page.’ Just make it available to people outside of the “share this” link at the bottom of the post.  By doing this, you make this optional, and they won’t feel that you are trying to make money out of everything in your site.

  5. PPC Link: when your page is ranked for a short-tail keyword, use PPC. The point behind all these is brand recall. Links from your homepage or landing paConversion Rate Increase from eCommerce UX Engagement
    Creative Commons License photo credit: Andre CharlandConversion Rate Increase from eCommerce UX Engagement
    Creative Commons License photo credit: Andre CharlandConversion Rate Increase from eCommerce UX Engagement
    Creative Commons License photo credit: Andre Charland
    ge is also important for other websites. The bottom-line here is that everyone wants their business remembered.  The trick here is to bid for the top sponsored listing.


The point in all these is that you sometimes have to step out of the box and look beyond SEO.  Yes, this may be any website’s main foundation.  There are, however, many other ways to supplement all your efforts.  Much like a well-balanced diet, these other methods provide for a complete meal.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Beginners Guide To Link Building

(My Original Blog Post: http://remoteworkmate.com/beginners-guide-link-building)
First and foremost, it is important to note that link building on its down does not help a website’s ranking in the search engine results page.  For a site to be at the top tier of the page, SEO and link building have to work hand-in-hand.

On the Internet, SEO is the most important marketing strategy to improve any business. Organic and ethical optimisation methods are used for off page and on page optimisation. Its services include keyword building, content writing, link building, HTML code optimisation and more.

Why build links?


It is important to establish links to your site from other related websites because this will help your site to get top placements in search engine listings. Basically, browsers and crawlers consider your site to be more popular when more people click on it.  The more visitors you have, the higher you climb to the top of the tier.  Depending on your budget, you can opt for one way linking, reciprocal linking, or three way linking.

What are the types of links?


The first type of link is the reciprocal link.  This is where you literally exchange a link with another web site.  You each put a link that connects your sites together.   This creates a symbiotic relationship where the sites do greatly benefit from each other.

The second type is not really an exchange at all.  A visitor to your site simply decides whether or not he or she will put a link to your site on their site. If they like the information presented, then chances will work to your favour.
The third type of link exchange is an artificial type.  The idea behind this is to create a "triangle" of links.  By its definition, it requires at least three web sites for it to work.  The web sites involved are any three sites, and they each only link to one of the other sites.   It basically goes in a direction around the triangle they form.

How do you go about the process of link-building?

You first have to ask the other site (usually via email) if they are interested to create a link back to yours. It is important to be professional about it and to give them all the necessary information.  Otherwise, they will just treat it as spam mail.

How are links helpful to your site?

Major search engines such as Google and Yahoo use link popularity as measurement to judge the quality of your website. A link is tantamount to a vote for your site. If there are 500 links, then there are 500 votes.

Are All Links Equal?

Definitely not!  A link to more popular sites is more valuable simply because they already have the reputation for outstanding service and quality products.  Search engines put more value on well-established sites.  Creating a form of connection with them increases your reputation and adds to your trust value.

What are the most ideal websites to establish links with?

Firstly, there are several factors to consider.  You can trust a website by measuring its:

  • Age:  the older it is, the better of course.

  • Page Rank: look at the Google Toolbar PR for this. It’s a number between 0 to 10, 10 being the best.

  • No. of pages indexed: if a site has thousands of pages indexed in a search engine, it means that it has gained the trust of major players in the industry. To find out how many pages are indexed, simply type www.domain.com in Google. This should show you all the pages indexed in Google.

  • No. of incoming links: type link:http://www.domainname.com in Google or Yahoo.  It will show you a list of websites that are linking to that domain.

  • Traffic: use tools such as: Google Trends for Websites, Compete, Quancast, and Alexa. However, these tools are not 100% accurate

  • Others: there are other automated applications to help you determine a site’s quality. A good example is SEOmoz Trifecta Tool.


What are the methods of link building?

There is the organic link building.  This is where you generate tons of free links naturally over time.  You first have to prove your value to the online community by doing the following:

  • Writing quality content –the actual body and text of your pages should be interesting and engaging.

  • Start a blog - reviews play a crucial role in the customer’s decision making process. You will be able to also attract a lot of natural links from other bloggers & websites who finds your content useful.

  • Use social bookmarking and other social networks – if you get popular in any of the big social bookmarking sites such as - Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Mixx - your content will get a lot of attention.  The more people will write about you, the more audience you’ll reach. Make a shout out at Twitter, Facebook, or Friendster and your article will be read by the site’s visitors.

  • Write about industry news as well – a reader might find interesting news in your site.  Once he goes to his own blog, he will likely create a link to your story.

  • Freebies - this can attract hundreds of links if the freebies are worth it. When you give something useful and important, people will naturally link to you.


Artificial Link Building basically refers to links that can be manipulated. Here are a few examples:

  • Link Requests and Exchange – spams can commonly happen here.  Tendency is that webmasters will simply delete your mail. Webmasters often ignore the following:

    • Letters that begin with “Dear Webmaster…”

    • Mentioning PR in the mail

    • You are asking to create a link with a website that is totally not related to yours

    • Awful content, with an overkill of keywords

    • Your website is not indexed by search engines

    • Your website has more outbound links than content




What are the other helpful tips in link building?

  • Directory submission: it basically refers to submitting your site to web directories.  Web directories are like yellow pages.  Note that you must submit only to those directories that are trusted.  Notable ones are: Dmoz, Yahoo Directory, Business.com, BOTW, etc.

  • Article submission: this gets you links.  Some reputable directories are: Ezine Articles, Go Articles, Article Dashboard, iSnare etc.

  • Guest blogging: you can include your author biography at the end of the article which often allows you to create a link back to your site. If the readers find your post very interesting, they are likely to follow the link to your blog.

  • Press release: this is coverage to a wider media. It’s best that you hire a professional to do this.

  • Widgets/Footer/Plugins: you have to be very careful and vigilant or you can get penalized by for overdoing this. Read what Matt Cutts has to say on widget bait for your guidance.

  • Give away award badges: if you are a company that has been given them a badge to display this award with pride, you can surely get about 80% of these companies to put it on their website.

  • Start an affiliate program: manage affiliates under your wing, while they can also create a link back to your website.

  • Sponsor links instead of paying: since you are sponsoring, the members will likely to put your logo/banner on their site. You can also donate money to the open source initiatives. For a small donation, they will list your name in their website.  Remember, search engines are continually changing their algorithm.  The natural method has proven to work best over time.


    Basically, link building does take time, but with patience and persistence, you can create a name for yourself.