It is more possible now than ever before for anyone to make a decent living online through Affiliate Marketing, with all of that tools, trainings, and free knowledge flitting all around the Internet. Despite the bad name of some gurus that have tainted this industry, it is possible to make a decent 4-figure income on the net. The answer lies in Affiliate Marketing, and it is by far one of the most common ways to earn a good income without being chained to a job.

Affiliate marketing is basically using various methods to drive visitors or prospects to a certain page. The “affiliate” would then be paid when an action is carried out by the prospect or a visitor, usually a cash sale. This is what makes this industry so attractive aspiring Internet marketers into the Affiliate arena, as it does not make much to learn how to make money from all of this.

With the concept in place, all that a person would actually need to do is just to find a way to drive traffic to the advertiser, and to make the visitor “convert” which means to take an action of some sort.

Affiliate marketing could thus be summarized into becoming an ongoing quest to look for more visitors to your web site. As such, what would be the best way to get traffic?

In this article I would focus on the free methods to generate traffic.

Firstly, there are the free, organic ways to procure traffic. These traffic generation methods are mostly adopted by newbies who do not have any capital to invest into their business, making them very beginner friendly, albeit being incredibly strenuous. Such no-cost methods would include utilizing search traffic, when people try to get their web sites and web pages rank higher in the search engines. When a particular term is looked for by the prospect, relevant material would show up on the search engine. Free methods to increase traffic would thus be to expose themselves to search traffic by doing search engine optimization, to increase the relevancy of their sites to increase visibility in the search engine.

The process of search engine optimization could be a long and hard process, as for Webmasters to get their sites to rank well in the search engines they do use a two-pronged approach: to increase the content relevancy on their site and to also post links back to their site on other site, which is a process known as backlinking.

Backlinks would serve as a indication to crawlers from search engines to show that such sites are more relevant to certain search results. As such with the combination of relevant content and backlinks a site could rank well, and thus draw in more traffic from search results, and when directed to a “landing page” which would direct the prospects on to the advertiser’s page to generate a action from the visitor or prospect which in turn generate an income for the affiliate.

Due to the scale of search traffic, it is more than possible for people to rely just on doing Search Engine optimization to claim a four figure or even five figure income just by directing search traffic to advertisers.

Google Wonder Wheel is the newest breakthrough launched by Google that enables us to see pertinent query search results in a one of a kind, meaningful, content-rich and well designed way. One of the main functions of Wonder Wheel is to expand link building with the use of keyword clusters just like this:

To access the Wonder Wheel, click “Show Search Tools” in the middle left portion of your Google search screen:

Afterwards, you’ll see the list of Search tools. Click on “Wonder Wheel”.

Then they’ll show you the keyword cluster for your search query. In this case, our search query was “how to make a website”:

When I clicked on “how to make your own website”, it showed me this:

Meanwhile, clicking on “how to build a website” expanded like this, which in effect minimized “how to make your own website” cluster:

Fundamentally, what Google conveys to its users is that the site is so significant and functional that they ought to exhibit their navigation within the search results. The existence of Wonder Wheel considerably reassures both users and advertisers that it can vigorously augment click through rates and probably conversions.

]]> http://makeawebsitex.com/google-tools/google-wonder-wheel-tutorial/feed/ 0 http://makeawebsitex.com/social-networking/interview-with-artyii-com-founders/ http://makeawebsitex.com/social-networking/interview-with-artyii-com-founders/#comments Sat, 22 Jan 2011 09:17:44 +0000 George Tee http://makeawebsitex.com/?p=1007

This interview was conducted over email with the Founders of Artyii.com, Shannon & Cai Lin, over the past weeks.

The Artyii idea, where did it come from?

It started off in the classrooms of the Singapore Management University where we were previously students at. We share a passion of arts, business and technology, hence marrying the 2 together was really a natural progression. As Asians, we decided to focus on Asian art, creating a sales platform for asian based artists to put up their artworks and paintings for sale for free. We market their artwork as affordable original wall paintings to first time home buyers and corporates. I mean, why get a print at the same price when you can get a gallery grade painting?

How do you get started with Artyii.com?

Once we got the necessary funding from various parties, both of us left our jobs to pursue this passion and as they say, the rest is history.

What are the necessary stuff to prepare when starting a web 2.0 site?

It requires a lot of planning to start a good web 2.0 site. From the site architecture, user-interface, to the placement of action buttons, to optimizing the site for SEO and planning for future modules. Its actually a lot of effort but its rewarding when you see real users interacting with what you’ve built for them.

What are the difficulties you’ve encountered when you are starting the company?

For everyone who’s started a company before, you’d know that everyday is a challenge. You wear different hats everyday – from top level strategising, to managing operations, to being a lawyer, accountant, webmaster and HR manager all at the same time. That being said, the experience you get is truly amazing.

What are the basic cost of starting and running a web 2.0 site? What do you advise a student who has no money to start a web 2.0 site?

Well, it depends on what the objectives of your site will be. Will it be an innovative platform, social site or a simple shopping cart type site? It can range from SGD500 – 15,000.

Consider your hosting cost or ask around if you can host with a friend who already has a server. Use open source frameworks such as Joomla to build your site if you don’t require complicated and customised functions. Chances are, what you’re doing has already been done before and all it takes is finding the template for it.

Keep your costs low, you’ll definitely start spending more once you learn more. Hence, it would do well to work with someone experienced when building your site

How does Artyii differentiate from its competitors?

To our knowledge, its the only sales, information and community driven art sales site in english speaking asia. Artists are able to request an invitation for free and Artyii helps faciliate the sale all the way – logistics, framing, payment, liaising. We have art professionals that provide comments to these emerging artists’ work as well. So, if you’re looking to buy art online, Artyii is the only place in the world where you can get quality, original Asian art at great prices direct from the artist.

What are the directions of Artyii.com and where you want to go from here?

We are continuing our efforts to reach out to artists as well as to buyers in the states and U.K. We are also looking for corporate buyers here in asia that are looking for bulk orders of original art for their hotels and F&B outlets.

What is the most important element to make a web 2.0 site successful?

Everything plays a complementary role – User Interface, SEO, Efficiency, Branding, Content and the value proposition of your core product/service.

To know this takes a good team – hence I would say the people behind the site are still the greatest asset.

In this blog post, you’ll be able to find out the basic functions of WordPress and how to use it. If you are totally new to WordPress, you’ll find these videos extremely useful to help you navigate through WordPress easily.

Most of the time, you need to play and test with WordPress for sometime in order to know how it works. Hence, go and try and play with your website!

We’ll be adding more WordPress tutorials. If you have any questions regarding WordPress and it’s not in these videos, do let us know so we can create for you.

Here’s a great news for all. Hostgator has just announced its one time only Black Friday hosting deals and this offers start at 12:00 AM Friday November 26th CST (-6 GMT) and will run until 11:59PM CST (-6 GMT) 11/26/2010.

Hostgator is unleashing its crazy offer by having 50% OFF EVERYTHING between 12 AM to 5 AM (CST)! Use this coupon code 50blackfridaysale when you purchase from hostgator!

Click Here to visit this Special Offer Page

This is one of the craziest offer by hostgator and this is the only time you can get hosting so cheaply from hostgator. With the great support they provide, it’s a no brainer to get your hosting now! ‘

So what are you waiting for?

In this video tutorial, you will learn on how to transfer your NameCheap Domain DNS to your Hostgator Hosting Account.

Click Hostgator to get your account
Click NameCheap to get your Domain.

This is the first time I’m releasing my sales report to the public. Hopefully this would inspire you to really get start to make moony online. In fact, this doesn’t look possible 2-3 years ago but today, I managed to do it. So it means that if you are willing to put in the effort, it’s also possible for you.

Sales and Profits For October 2010

Clickbank – $4960
Affiliate comms – $1065.14
Adsense – $732
Amazon comms – $801.30

Total Sales: USD $7558.44

If you have not been keeping a record of your accounts, please do so as it is very important for you to understand your sales statistics and growth.

When you post your results, it will motivate you even more to reach even higher results.

So I welcome you here to post your results below.

Here’s how:

1) Your Name:
2) Your Business: (just give a brief one would do)
3) The Amount You’ve Made For October
4) Your Target Amount For The Next Month

For me, I’m aiming to maintain at this amount of $7000 as I sense a drop due to holidays season coming. Usually when holidays are coming, you need to target christmas products in order to profit from the season.

But I don’t really have much toys or gifts niche, hence I’m sensing a drop there.

What about you? Look forward to hear from you and share your experiences with us.

It has come to the part of the year where I made over $700 on autopilot. And that’s because of Halloween – One of the biggest festival every year besides Christmas.

This year October 2010, I’ve made another $792 so far from halloween costumes without doing a single thing. That’s because I created the halloween site last year June. Cool isn’t it?

Actually it isn’t that cool. In other niches, if you rank in the search engines, you usually can get quite decent sales every week and every month. But for halloween, you can only make most of the money during September and October.

Here are some tips for you to start making money on autopilot via Amazon easily.

1. Find a good niche or product that has a decent search volume and doesn’t have too much competition. The niche or product you are targeting must also be a product that people are used to buying online. When you choose the niche correctly, you are able to make more money online. Choosing the right niche differentiates people who makes a lot of money from who’s not.
2. Create a website on the niche or product. It is recommended to buy a website rather than using a free website like squidoo, blogger, wordpress etc. I can’t emphasize how important. NEVER SAVE MONEY ON WEBSITES. Treat buying domains and websites like eating a meal. It’s a everyday thing.
3. Build links to your website and rank it. I’m driving traffic to your website is through search engine optimization. And I usually do it by building links back to my site. There are multiple ways that you can drive links to your website. The most common and effective way is by doing articles marketing. Of course, there are many other ways to do so – press release, directories, social network, forums etc. My preference is doing articles marketing at the current moment because I have a system in place to multiple the number of backlinks through my articles.

Once you’ve ranked #1 in some keywords, it is most probably that you will start to make some money. The best thing is sometimes even your visitors don’t buy what you are promoting, they can still buy other products from amazon.

You may want to repeat and rinse this entire system as much as you can in order to make more sales.

As an online marketer, you probably know that there are various ways that you can advertise your site. One could expose their products to thousands with a few simple steps or target individual potential customers to increase their site traffic.

Some of these techniques you may already know. Methods like utilizing keywords and climbing up the search engine rank is one of those styles. Tools like Google AdWords helps make this task easier, providing a list of keywords with corresponding hits. Usually, the words with the least hits are the ones recommended for newer sites so that they can get higher rankings at search engine results.

Another method is by exchanging banners and accumulating back links with different websites. Since the Google search engine uses the amount of back links one has to determine page ranking, this can also be an excellent way to get your website on top.

Another age-old method is getting yourself a reliable mailing list that you can send updates to at least once a week. Since it’s personal and is delivered directly to a person’s inbox, it yields higher chances of being noticed and thus making a sale.

Social sites like Facebook and Twitter are also being utilized nowadays for marketing purposes. Features like Fan Pages or Groups are excellent way to get your business through a wide range of people. Pay-per-click options are of course, always there.

Among these methods, there’s probably one that you haven’t tried yet but probably should. This style is done by being member of forums and discussion sites that gets lots of visits from your target market.

How to Start

Join forums or message boards that discuss the products you are trying to sell. You can do this by typing your product name followed by the word “forum” on the search engine. Pick the highest result since this is the one that has people coming in it in droves.

Once you’re in, establish a reputation. This means actually joining up and participating in conversations. If questions are asked and it is in your area of expertise, then provide answers. Let people recognize you as the one who knows a lot about a particular topic. This is the most important step since people need to know you before they can follow you outside the forum via links, but we’ll get to that later.

Anyway, if you just join a forum and start advertising like crazy, people will only ignore or worse – the admin will ban you from the site. Hence, it is important that people recognize you as someone who actually gives legitimate answers to their questions.

Now comes the advertising part. You don’t have to insert your links every time you answer a question. Some forum sites provide you with a “signature” that appears every time you make a comment or start a new post. Some people put in quotes images for this, but your signature would be a link to your site. For better results, get yourself a banner and place it there. Don’t forget to add a few phrases, put in something interesting or place in your favorite quote and then follow it up with your link or banner.

This is the reason why you need to establish a reputation. The more you give to the forum community, the more they will give back to you. If there is a special place for advertisements on the forum, make sure to utilize that as well.

Of course, aside from your signature, you can also put in a personal touch and actually mention your products when responding to certain questions. However, this must only be done when you are responding to a related post and have already established a reputation in the site.

Whenever you post a reply or create a new thread, make sure that your content is original. Posting the same ad or words over and over again is a definite way for you to be labeled as a spammer. If you want, you can create a specific phrase or sentence that you will use at the end of very post to advertise your site. However, about 95% of that post should be original content.

Keep your posts moderate. You don’t want to be labeled a spammer but instead get people to recognize you as someone who is offering products and actually know what he/she is talking about. Do not abuse forum privileges and soon enough, you’ll find yourself creating a huge customer base from this venture.

Whether you’ve been a content author for years or just starting out, there comes a point where ideas just stop coming forward. This is especially true if you’re getting 300-word information for an article that should reach 100 words. After all, there’s only so much padding you can put in an article. If this is happening to you, chances are you are not looking at the right places for your information. As a content author, here are some of the top places where you can find sources for your articles.

Search Engines

Of course, you’re likely to go to the most popular search engines like Yahoo and Google. However, you might not want to stick to just one keyword. For example, if you’re looking for “flat belly exercises” try changing that to “exercises for stomach fat” to get more hits. Just think about as many synonyms as you can and start typing. Keep in mind that search engines yield different results so make sure that you use as many as you to get lots of information regarding your chosen topic.

Article Sites

Online article publishing sites like Ezine Articles can be excellent sources for information as long as you learn how to filter what you get. I suggest that you first go to your old Ezine articles and pick the topics you love best. Don’t try to recreate the whole article and instead break them down to smaller pieces so that you won’t have too much problems thinking about the next article after the one you’re doing today. For example, if your old articles contain about 1,000 words, then divide them into 300 or 250 words to make it easier on yourself.

Your Blog Posts

Like the Ezine Articles, go for old content and recreate them. Put in a new title and start updating the information if you can before submitting the content. Since your blog is your source, put on a resource box that leads to your content and you’re ready to go. Take note however that you should not copy the whole content of your old blog posts. The same with the former advice, try to break up the pieces, add a few information or subtract a few in a manner that still makes sense. This way, you are not really just copying from your blog but rather using it as an information source.

Books

Who says all your information must be taken online? You can still go classic and search for the information you want in books that you own rights on. This could be an excellent source of endless topics especially if you approach the whole thing correctly.

Forum Posts

Before you started blogging or making a living from the internet, you must have been a member of forums and participated in various conversations. Try backtracking to these parts and stitch together 20-30 word comments you’ve made before. Fact is that you can create excellent articles just by getting ideas and information from snippets of conversation you might have had before.

One technique you might have noticed article content writers is create “top ten…” or “top three…” articles that are quick and easy to read. You can also adapt this method through the collection of various ideas you have made previously. People love articles that they can read with just a glance.

Finally, make sure that you pass your newly made article to online sites that check for plagiarism. Original content is very important if you want to keep people reading your articles. Run it through several if you can and make changes if necessary.