The ultimate online income.(Part 3)

Creating your online presence

  Now your becoming an expert in your chosen field you need to create your online presence.

This is just a matter of using social networking and web 2.0.

There are literally thousands of sites out there to help you do this.

First create a blog (just like this one) you can create your blog as a information guide around the product you are going to promote or you can just create a blog and post a range of posts.

I prefer generally to create a random blog about anything, then if you create a second or third website you can create links to it through your blog.

Blog daily about anything you want, useful websites or funny posts usually work quite well but its up to you.

Once you create your blog get it listed at My Blog Log

I also use Feedage.com where you can also submit your blogs RSS Feed, Technorati.com  is another good site to submit your blog to. Stumbleupon.com is a good site.

All these will create an online presence for you.

Another thing to do is join Twitter.com then join GFFaster  this will help you build a good list of followers, as you grow your follower list you can use it as an advertising platform for your website.

Facebook.com , Yuwie.com  and Tumblr.com are a few other sites you can use.

There are thousands out there but don't get bogged down with too many, you can always join more later.

Post to your blog regularly and each time you create a new post use PingOMatic.com to let everyone know you just created a new post.

Creating your network will help build your authority on the net. It is better to get used to it now so your ready when your website goes live.

The ultimate online income.(Part 2)

 Content Is King

You should have a viable product by now. Something tangible to build your website around.

Before you continue any further ask yourself this question "How much do I know about this product ?"

Your website needs plenty of information to entice visitors to read and hopefully click through and buy your affiliate product. You will also need to submit articles to directories as well as coming up with some good text ads to distribute to directories. You will need to ensure you have plenty of variations of both articles and text ads as this gives your site more visibility on the net.

The reason for this is if the search engines see the same text over and over all linking back to your website then it will look like your a spammer and you have a chance that they will not bother crawling your site.

To get your site to the top of the search engines you need quality content on your website as well as quality backlinks from other sites.

The first step is designing the text for your website, this should be designed to create a good experience for the visitor and to make you look an expert in the product your trying to sell.

You also need to look at how many pages there are going to be and what is going to be on each page.

The easiest way to do this is to do a simple search and look around at websites similar to what you want to achieve. Look at the layout, design and navigation as well as just the text and pictures.

Do not copy from other peoples websites, search engines will easily spot this and not bother crawling your site.

Use the information you gather to design your website ensuring it is unique content. Do this on paper at the moment to ensure your happy with the design and text.

Ensure the keywords you identified are in your text numerous times, just don't overdo it. Make it look natural.

Next you need about 20-30 articles each should be about 450+ words long. This may sound a bit daunting but it will really help you build your authority on the product your trying to sell. The more authority you have the more sales your likely to make.

To help build your articles there are a few things you can do. First visit article directories and search for articles about your product. Don't copy them but use them as guides to write your articles.

There are also millions of blogs out there that you can search to help you gather information, just type your keyword into a search engine and use +blogspot.

If you were doing book reviews then your search would look like this "book review+blogspot.

It may seem like a lot of work but it will help take your website to the top of the search engines where you will create an endless stream of traffic and sales.

The more you put in the more you will get out.

Now you need to create some text ads. These are pretty simple to do, just think about the keywords your using and put them into a sentence relating to your website.

If you were doing book reviews a few lines you could use are :

Best online book review website.

For the best reading experience take a look at our book reviews.

Totally different descriptions but both have "book reviews" in the text.

Again this may seem like a bit of a pain but it will help build your presence online and give the search engines what they need to keep your site ranked highly.

This might seem a lot of work when you have not even got a website online yet. The french call it "mis en place" we call it "preperation in advance".

By preparing everything in advance we can get our website online and begin building our backlinks and search engine ranking immediately. The other reason to do all this now is as your building your articles, text links and website content you are also learning. This is vital in building your authority about a product or service, the more authority you have the more sales your likely to make.

 

The ultimate online income.(Part 1)

Choosing your Product

 The first and most important part of starting any business is what are you going to sell ?

You may think it is a simple task, your just going to build a website based on a product you are already promoting or one you are thinking of promoting.

Stop Just wait a minute and think.

Does your proposed product have a lot of competition for the keywords your going to use ?

Try searching for them and see how many results are returned.

Do you realise if you follow a high competition product you have virtually no chance of getting ranked highly in the search engines. Without a high search engine rank you will find it hard to make any money at all.

Now your thinking straight you need to start researching products that have a reasonably high search rate with a relatively low competition.

Stay away from MLM, Matrix programs and E-Books. These products will be hard to sell and are not sustainable.

To find sustainable products you will need to do a little searching.

One idea would be to join Amazon as an associate and promote their products, you could do a book review website if you enjoy reading or a music review site. ( Just some ideas, make sure you research your products against competition) Amazon pays around 5% to affiliates for sales made.

CJ.com is a company who is a third party for hundreds of companies. You can search through their directory for products to promote.

Another way to find a product is just do a search for a product and then look at the companies websites. You should see a link for affiliate or associate, just click on it and see how much they are paying.

Before you jump in and start deciding what product your going to promote you need to research it.

You should log on to Google Keyword Tool

Type in the keywords you were thinking of using. As well as giving you alternative keywords you can use it will also show you Advertiser Competition and search volume, both for local and global searches.

This tool will help you decide on products to promote. You are looking for a reasonably low advertiser competition and a good global search volume.

When looking at the keywords listed remember you can use more than one of these as your website keywords. So if you find a good set of keywords with low competition but an overall high amount of traffic your website should do well.

The keywords you choose should be able to fit into the text on your website numerous times but look natural at the same time. Think about this when choosing keywords.

Spend a couple of days identifying products or services to build your website around using these techniques.

Better to pick the right product now rather than wasting time on a product that does not gain search engine ranking and make sales.

The ultimate online income.(Introduction)

 This is not a blog trying to sell you something.
Over the next few weeks I will produce a series of blogs explaining exactly how to build your online income.
These are totally free, nothing to buy at all. The only thing you ever need to pay for is Domain Name and hosting.

If you have experienced affiliate marketing before you have probably failed to make any money. 95% of affiliate marketers never make an online income.
The fact is you are being conned into believing you can earn an income, usually that costs you anywhere between $20 and $200 to realise that.
I give you no promises and offer nothing but experience. By following simple techniques you build a business step by step.

This is not a get rich scheme and if your looking to become a millionair overnight then look somewhere else. I will show you how to build a business to earn an income not to make you a millionaire.

Most newcomers into affiliate marketing are looking for the golden nugget, none have succeeded. You buy an E-book for $67 which promises to give you the golden grail, what they are actually doing is tricking you into joining loads of affiliate sites under them.
They are good writers and make you believe joining all these sites is the way to go. The sites will be either a paid for site so you not only pay for their book your also paying them for each program you join.
The other sites will be free to join but you will join under the E-books writer and any sales you make (if any) they make about 5%-10%.
Whichever way you look at it the E-Book is a tool to get you to earn residual income for them.

This blog is different, WHY  ?
Each step is totally explained and you can see the results appearing, I do add some referral links but only to programs I feel will help you. Any links I do publish on this blog will be totally optional and most will be totally free. Paid programs will only be used where I feel it is totally necessary, there are very few of these as I prefer to use the free programs available.

Ok enough rambling just follow this blog and you will learn all the secrets you need to build an online income without splashing out.
Due to the voluntary work I do this blog will be updated 3-4 times a week.
This should be plenty as the guides will take time to complete.
Building your business should take a minimum of one month, creating a suitable income can take probably 6-12 month depending on the amount of time you can spend on your project.

These estimates are based on a person working a full time job and spending 1-2 hours a day, 4+ hours at the weekend devoted to building your income.

If your interested join me on my next blog where your firt lesson will begin.

Why people fail in affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing looks easy to do, but in reality it is a little trickier than people realize. One of the main reasons for failure to make profits in Affiliate marketing is lack of dedication and work. Affiliate marketing is like any other business. It takes hard work and dedication to make a successful business.

One of the most common reasons for failure is lack of knowledge about promoting. Affiliate marketing depends on getting a lot of targeted traffic to your website. Only then can you hope to achieve a substantial click through and sales conversion. Many new affiliates are not aware of the amount of work they will have to put in to drive this traffic to their websites.

The other mistake is not to have your own website. This prevents you from doing your own website promotions and does not allow you to capture the email addresses of your visitors. When you do this you will only be building your sponsor’s business and not your own. You will also be decreasing your sales conversions.

Not knowing how to advertise and where you should be doing your direct marketing is also another mistake. Advertising must be towards your targeted market and not in unrelated publications and websites.

Selling, not pre selling: Too many affiliates try to sell their sponsor’s products instead of getting the click through. If you try to sell to your visitors and then send them through to your sponsor’s sales page they are in effect being double sold and will not be very inclined to buy.

If you pre sell to your visitors and warm them for the sale they will be ready for your sponsor’s sales page and be inclined to buy. This will increase sales conversions and your commission.

Whats your website worth.

 I recently came across a website with a little button on it saying "my website is worth $xxx, whats yours worth ?"
Of course we all want to know what our website is worth. I clicked the link and put in my details and voila my websites value in $$$.
I decided to check out other website valuation sites and was surprised by the differences in what they said my sites were worth.
Below are the overviews of 2 not so fantastic sites I ran through 3 different website valuation sites.

The first is http://www.art-decoantiques.com
I bought this website about a month ago but have done little to it at the moment. I registered it as a niche site with little competition, it has a .com domain name which gives it a boost.
So far I have installed wordpress on it with a couple of posts, I plugged it into Free Traffic System hoping other posts would appear from there, 2 posts appeared.  I have also added links of related products from Amazon.
I have done a little backlinking to the website and at the moment have around 250 backlinks although the website has been listed with numerous directories which should show up in a month or two.
The site is listed in major search engines for related keywords, Yahoo and MSN favour it and list it highly although Google has been slow on the uptake.
So a pretty basic website with a reasonable search engine ranking and reasonable amount of backlinks. So what is it worth ?
http://www.websitevaluecalculator.com/  Values it at $78, rather low was hoping for more.

http://www.yourwebsitevalue.com/          Values it at $541, a lot better.

http://www.websiteoutlook.com/             Value has gone up to $963.60, getting better

http://bizinformation.org/                          Value is now $32,000 , Sold to the nearest bidder.

Site 2 is  http://www.affiliategenius.ws
This site is a few months old, I joined http://www.website.ws
I joined them due to the earning potential of their affiliate program, the site didn't have much on it for a while until I joined High Profits  , these supplied a ready made website which I just plugged in. I added a few pages and a couple of banner ads then uploaded it.
Just like my other site it has numerous backlinks and directory listings. Search engine ranking has been harder due to the high competition for affiliate marketing keywords.
So for a plug and play website how much can I earn ?
In the same order as above...............................
Value is $78, rather consistent.
Value is now $234, getting higher.
Value is now $1,124.20, I love the 20 cents LOL.
Value now is now $13,400 , anyone want it ? I'll accept $10,000 for cash.

All website valuation sites are not the same.
Be careful if you come across one of these sites thats saying your website is worth thousands.
Your website is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

Breaking the rules.

I am always breaking my own rules when it comes to website enhancement and promotion.
I set up 2 websites and 2 blogs (this is one of them), I know my job was to spend a maximum of 1 hour per day finding at least 10 backlinks for each of the sites. These backlinks should be a mix of forum posts, blog comments, directory submissions and link swapping. Another 1 hour a day producing posts for my blogs and building pages on my websites. I like to try to post at least once a day on my blog and have at least 1 page a week added to my websites.

I know time management is the key to effective website promotion so why do I always get sucked in to reading and following links in posts or websites. Totally breaking my own rules.

These disturbances have meant my website promotions have suffered dramatically.
From now on I am going to bookmark any site I find interesting is automatically bookmarked and looked at only after I have finished my work for the day.

This is a lesson to affiliate marketers and website promoters old and new, The number 1 rule of of successful website promotion is time management. Don't get caught out like I did stick to your tactics and ensure your primary business is promoted effectively.