You've spent tons of time (and money) on your website and created a strong presence on the web. Now you start to wonder when the site that you've poured your heart and soul into is going to start paying off. Joining affiliate programs and selling ad space is a great way to bring in some cash. The key is to run these programs properly.
Common Mistakes
All too often people that are new to the web game think that they can throw together a simple webpage that is light on content, put it up on a free server, place a bunch of banner ads and pop-ups on it and the cash will just start pouring in. This couldn't be further from the truth. Starting to advertise via affiliate programs takes a lot of time, work, and experimentation. There is no easy formula to make it work. If you come across a program making promises that seem far fetched, it is probably a scam.
When first placing ads on their sites many people choose the programs with the highest payouts. While a high payout is good, it is not the most important thing to look for. You must also take into account click thru rates, click to lead conversion ratios, and most importantly, whether or not the ad's target audience is the same as that of your site.
All too often when people design their websites they do not reserve an exclusive space that they plan to use for advertising. Do this beforehand! This way the ads will look like they belong on the site and not just something that was simply added as an afterthought.
When first starting out many people believe that more banners is better. It is far more important to show one or two ads that convert well for you site than twenty different ones that pollute your site.
DO NOT SPAM! Sending out mass unsolicited e-mails featuring your adds is one of the quickest ways to get kicked from the program. Opt-in newsletters are acceptable and convert very well if you have a strong e-mail base.
What Type of Program to Choose
There are so many different types of programs out there that it can be quite overwhelming when it comes to choosing what is best for you. Also, as with most things in affiliate marketing there is no key formula for success. The best thing is to experiment with different ones and find which one converts best for you. Below are a few general rules that you should follow:
If you have a very targeted audience, CPA (Cost Per Action) programs will probably work best for you. Since you already have a known demographic to whom you are showing your site, it will be easy to find high conversion programs to complement your site theme.
Sites with low traffic levels will have a hard time trying to earn money off of pay per impression or pay per click programs; these programs rely on high traffic levels. If you don't have high traffic, they won't be very successful.
If you are just starting out, it is very difficult to find advertisers on your own. The best thing to do is to go thru an affiliate network that acts like a broker or liaison between you and the advertisers.
Affiliate Marketing Tips
If you don't have a site that is well designed, features quality content, and has a decent amount of traffic, chances are you won't be successful selling advertising. Instead of initially spending all your time on revenue schemes, invest some solid time in developing your site!
When initially designing and laying out your site, try to plan in advance where you are going to place ads. Always make sure that your site's content has priority over the ads you display.
Use ads that fit well within your given audience. If you put an ad for online dating services on a website targeted at young children, I can guarantee that success rates will be low, if any.
Whenever possible, make your ads not seem like ads...turn them into another feature on your site. Text ads can work particularly well for this and are not as annoying as large graphic ads.
Before working on your advertising scheme, invest time in search engine placement and optimization.
Experiment with different programs! Don't be discouraged when one does not work as well as you hoped. A key process in affiliate marketing is placing the ad and then evaluating how well it has done based on real world statistics. These stats are very easy to obtain as most affiliate networks feature very in-depth statistics.
Do not plaster your site with banner ads. This will not work. All it will do is make your user leave and never come back. One or two banners should be the maximum.
Use a banner ad rotation system so that you are not showing your users the same banners over and over again. Many affiliate networks feature these or if you are fairly web savvy you can create your own system.
I hope that this article has helped. Please do not get discouraged and have fun! Affiliate marketing is a great way to make cash off of your site. Just realize that it takes time and commitment to run a successful program.
Nick Ladd,Webmaster-Affiliates.net
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization
Good search engine optimization is key to getting your website indexed properly with a good ranking. You may find it surprising, but there are a few small things you can do to really boost the rank of your site. Below we've outlined some key strategies to get you started.
Meta TagsIn the past this is one of the most important things that you needed to add to your site if you wanted any chance of getting a good ranking. Some search engines still use these to determine how your site is displayed in the search results. The most important of the meta tags are the title, description, and keyword tags.
Title Tag: This should be no more than 60 characters in length. Somewhere within the title text you should have the primary keyword that you are targeting as a description for your site.
Description Tag: This tag should be no more than 150 characters in length. It should be rich with the keywords that you are targeting and contain a well-written general description of your site.
Keyword Tag: This tag should be no more than 874 characters in length and not repeat the same word more than 3 times. The keywords should be separated with commas. Include common misspellings of keywords. Never use keywords that do not fit with your site, search engines will consider this spam and ban you. Instead of using individual keywords try instead to use keyphrases. Try to think of phrases that people will actually search for. Example:
Instead Of Using:web, design, tutorial, webmaster, tools, resources
Use:web design tutorial, webmaster resources, webmaster tools
Be sure to check out our easy-to-use online meta tag generator for help creating your meta tags. Click Here.
Other Tags: There are a variety of other tags that you can use on your site. The only other one that I recommend is the robots tag. This tells the robots indexing your site to index your pages and follow your links. The format for this tag is:
Keyword Density
Keyword density is one factor with which many search engines rank your site. They index your entire page and then look at how frequently keywords appear. There is a fine line to be drawn when putting the keywords on your site. You want to put enough keywords on your site, but don't want to simply just list them as many search engines will consider this spamming and ban you. Do not write text on the same color background to try to increase density without your viewers being able to see it. This is blatant spamming and you will not be indexed and probably blacklisted.
Link Popularity
It has been a recent trend for search engines to rate your site based primarily on its link popularity. Link popularity is basically how many different sites contain links to you. I really recommend that you write other websites that cover similar topics as yours and ask for a reciprocal link exchange or possibly even start a special section on your site for these type of links. Google's Pagerank is a statistic that is derived primarily from your page rank. It takes into account both your incoming and outgoing links. In addition it is much more important to get few links from other sites with high page ranks than many with low page ranks. Keep in mind that it is very difficult and takes a lot of hard work to get a good page rank. Also be very weary when trying to 'trick' search engines. This is a very easy way to get banned for life!
Site Map
While often overlooked, having a site map on your site can really help to get your entire site indexed. Your goal is to get the search engine spider to your site map page. Since the site map is essentially a simple list of links, the spider can easily find and follow them, thus, indexing your entire site. Make sure the site map link is easy for the spider to find!
Robots.txt
This is a simple text file placed within the root directory of your website that spiders first look for prior to indexing your site. It basically tells them what to index and what not to index. Click here for a sample of a robots.txt file allowing the engine to index all pages.
Alt Tag
All of your images should have alt tags. This will help search engine spiders find images that are links and follow them. In addition, if you put a short description in the alt tag you can use them to help beef up your keyword density.
Search Engine SubmissionsThere are literally hundreds of companies out there that will give you incredible claims of being able to cheaply submit your page to thousands of search engines. These companies are a waste of time. They typically use scripts to submit your page and most of the thousands of engines to which they submit are FFA (Free For All) link directories that will generally bring in little, if any, traffic for your site. Also, the real engines they submit to will generally ignore your submission. The best and most fail proof method is to submit the sites yourself. Most engines are free to submit to and have a special page where you can submit. See the list below that gives you direct links to the submission pages.
Note: This list is current as of 8/4/02.
Yahoo
Go to directory under which you want to submit a site.
Click the "Suggest a Site" link.
Non-business categories are free to submit to, but it can take awhile to get listed. Business categories will cost you $299 a year.
Open Directory Project (dmoz)
Go to http://www.dmoz.org
Browse to the directory where you think your site belongs.
Click the "Add Url" link at the top of the page.
This is a key directory to get into as a graet deal of search engines use their database to show results.
Google
Go to: http://www.google.com/addurl.html
They will generally find your site to index for their database, even if you don't manually submit it.
They use the dmoz results as part of their database.
Lycos
Go to: http://searchservices.lycos.com
They allow you to submit one page for free and additional pages for a charge.
Free submission takes 4-6 weeks and is not guaranteed.
They use alltheweb for a portion of their results.
alltheweb
Go to: http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php3
NorthernLight
Go to: http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html
Altavista
Offers a variety of paid submission services as well as a free basic submit.
Go to: http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/addurl
Inktomi
A good pay for submission service. Cheap to do and very effective. They provide their site database to many major search engines.
More info: http://www.inktomi.com/services/web_search/submit.html
First URL is $39/year; additional URLs are $25/year
Excite
Uses multiple providers for their search results including: alltheweb, Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, About, Looksmart, FindWhat, and Overture.
Testing and ResubmissionOnce you submit your website, it is important to follow-up and see if you actually get indexed. If you are not indexed within a month of submission, you should go ahead and resubmit. In addition, it is important to test your rankings and massage your meta tags to ensure you get optimal placement.
With some time and work you can really improve your site's rankings in the search engines. Just remember that it takes months on end in order to get listed. Don't give up and keep at it! We hope you've enjoyed this article and found it useful.
----------------------------
Nick Ladd,Webmaster-Affiliates.net
Good search engine optimization is key to getting your website indexed properly with a good ranking. You may find it surprising, but there are a few small things you can do to really boost the rank of your site. Below we've outlined some key strategies to get you started.
Meta TagsIn the past this is one of the most important things that you needed to add to your site if you wanted any chance of getting a good ranking. Some search engines still use these to determine how your site is displayed in the search results. The most important of the meta tags are the title, description, and keyword tags.
Title Tag: This should be no more than 60 characters in length. Somewhere within the title text you should have the primary keyword that you are targeting as a description for your site.
Description Tag: This tag should be no more than 150 characters in length. It should be rich with the keywords that you are targeting and contain a well-written general description of your site.
Keyword Tag: This tag should be no more than 874 characters in length and not repeat the same word more than 3 times. The keywords should be separated with commas. Include common misspellings of keywords. Never use keywords that do not fit with your site, search engines will consider this spam and ban you. Instead of using individual keywords try instead to use keyphrases. Try to think of phrases that people will actually search for. Example:
Instead Of Using:web, design, tutorial, webmaster, tools, resources
Use:web design tutorial, webmaster resources, webmaster tools
Be sure to check out our easy-to-use online meta tag generator for help creating your meta tags. Click Here.
Other Tags: There are a variety of other tags that you can use on your site. The only other one that I recommend is the robots tag. This tells the robots indexing your site to index your pages and follow your links. The format for this tag is:
<meta name="robots" content="INDEX, FOLLOW">
Keyword Density
Keyword density is one factor with which many search engines rank your site. They index your entire page and then look at how frequently keywords appear. There is a fine line to be drawn when putting the keywords on your site. You want to put enough keywords on your site, but don't want to simply just list them as many search engines will consider this spamming and ban you. Do not write text on the same color background to try to increase density without your viewers being able to see it. This is blatant spamming and you will not be indexed and probably blacklisted.
Link Popularity
It has been a recent trend for search engines to rate your site based primarily on its link popularity. Link popularity is basically how many different sites contain links to you. I really recommend that you write other websites that cover similar topics as yours and ask for a reciprocal link exchange or possibly even start a special section on your site for these type of links. Google's Pagerank is a statistic that is derived primarily from your page rank. It takes into account both your incoming and outgoing links. In addition it is much more important to get few links from other sites with high page ranks than many with low page ranks. Keep in mind that it is very difficult and takes a lot of hard work to get a good page rank. Also be very weary when trying to 'trick' search engines. This is a very easy way to get banned for life!
Site Map
While often overlooked, having a site map on your site can really help to get your entire site indexed. Your goal is to get the search engine spider to your site map page. Since the site map is essentially a simple list of links, the spider can easily find and follow them, thus, indexing your entire site. Make sure the site map link is easy for the spider to find!
Robots.txt
This is a simple text file placed within the root directory of your website that spiders first look for prior to indexing your site. It basically tells them what to index and what not to index. Click here for a sample of a robots.txt file allowing the engine to index all pages.
Alt Tag
All of your images should have alt tags. This will help search engine spiders find images that are links and follow them. In addition, if you put a short description in the alt tag you can use them to help beef up your keyword density.
Search Engine SubmissionsThere are literally hundreds of companies out there that will give you incredible claims of being able to cheaply submit your page to thousands of search engines. These companies are a waste of time. They typically use scripts to submit your page and most of the thousands of engines to which they submit are FFA (Free For All) link directories that will generally bring in little, if any, traffic for your site. Also, the real engines they submit to will generally ignore your submission. The best and most fail proof method is to submit the sites yourself. Most engines are free to submit to and have a special page where you can submit. See the list below that gives you direct links to the submission pages.
Note: This list is current as of 8/4/02.
Yahoo
Go to directory under which you want to submit a site.
Click the "Suggest a Site" link.
Non-business categories are free to submit to, but it can take awhile to get listed. Business categories will cost you $299 a year.
Open Directory Project (dmoz)
Go to http://www.dmoz.org
Browse to the directory where you think your site belongs.
Click the "Add Url" link at the top of the page.
This is a key directory to get into as a graet deal of search engines use their database to show results.
Go to: http://www.google.com/addurl.html
They will generally find your site to index for their database, even if you don't manually submit it.
They use the dmoz results as part of their database.
Lycos
Go to: http://searchservices.lycos.com
They allow you to submit one page for free and additional pages for a charge.
Free submission takes 4-6 weeks and is not guaranteed.
They use alltheweb for a portion of their results.
alltheweb
Go to: http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php3
NorthernLight
Go to: http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html
Altavista
Offers a variety of paid submission services as well as a free basic submit.
Go to: http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/addurl
Inktomi
A good pay for submission service. Cheap to do and very effective. They provide their site database to many major search engines.
More info: http://www.inktomi.com/services/web_search/submit.html
First URL is $39/year; additional URLs are $25/year
Excite
Uses multiple providers for their search results including: alltheweb, Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, About, Looksmart, FindWhat, and Overture.
Testing and ResubmissionOnce you submit your website, it is important to follow-up and see if you actually get indexed. If you are not indexed within a month of submission, you should go ahead and resubmit. In addition, it is important to test your rankings and massage your meta tags to ensure you get optimal placement.
With some time and work you can really improve your site's rankings in the search engines. Just remember that it takes months on end in order to get listed. Don't give up and keep at it! We hope you've enjoyed this article and found it useful.
----------------------------
Nick Ladd,Webmaster-Affiliates.net
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