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5 Simple Affiliate Marketing Directions For Qualified Traffic by Fernando Morales

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When it comes to success and profits in the field of affiliate marketing, directions must be applied in order for there to be any real results. An individual can have a visually appealing website complete with all the trimmings, bells and whistles and not turn a profit.
Outlined below are 5 simple steps that an affiliate marketer can take and see results despite the enormous amount of competition, provided the directions are followed.

Before you engage in these steps, understand that they are not magic pills and only your persistence in applying them with regularity will see you through to success. Affiliate marketing is a business like any other on or offline and a solid workable plan that is consistently carried out will win everytime.

The 5 steps that we’ll consider are as follows:

5. Forum Posting

Search Engine Optimization is a term you will continue to hear for a very long time and a subject that you must get basic knowledge of in order to compete in today’s market. A simple way to please the search engines is to strategically place your keywords on your web pages. In the title, in your subheading, and sparingly throughout your page so as to not look to obvious and still make sense to your visitor.

Link exchanges are a productive form of driving targeted visitors to your site as well as building your sites credibility with the search engines. As you get other more established sites to link to yours, you are able to benefit from their sites optimization.

Article marketing continues to be the most effective way to drive pin point laser targeted traffic to your sites, especially if you write the articles yourself. A simple trick you can employ whether you don’t like to write or know what to write is to look at other articles that have been written about the subject and respond to them through your article.

Blogging has become the newest mainstay in the affiliate marketers tool chest. Search engines and prospects love blogs simply because they are constantly updated with fresh content 2-3 times a week and can be written in a bit more of an informal or casual atmosphere. There are some excellent products on the market that can assist with automating the process of adding content to your blog.

Forum posting can help steer highly targeted traffic to your site as the individuals you are advertising your link to, already have a very serious interest in the subject or topic your posting in. By contributing in a meaningful way you can build your credibility as an authority in your field and post an ad through your signature file.

Affiliate marketing directions are abundant from many sources on the internet, however in order to have success with any of them, you must commit to applying them even if you don’t see success right away. As I mentioned before these are not magic pills and riches won’t come overnite, but if you persist, they will come.

About the Author
If you would like to receive more in-depth affiliate marketing directions and information that works Fernando Morales would like to invite you check out his newsletter at: http://www.homebiz-internet.com/newsletter.html

Making money online is easier than you think see for yourself at: http://www.homebiz-internet.com/specialoffer.html

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The Search Engine Phantom That Makes Money

There is an unknown, mystical being that lurks in the blogosphere, it is called the Search Engine Phantom. The SE Phantom has been around for about 3 years now, and urban legend has it that he makes an appearance around Memorial Day. He visits blogs who are SE optimized and keyword friendly, and graces them with traffic.

All the traffic the blogs’ servers can handle. The blog owner doesn’t know when or where the SE Phantom appeared, only that upon checking their daily traffic, they noticed a spike, a strong upward lift in visitors that could not be explained.

The blog owner wanders, whether it was the extra social media networking that did it, was the front page story on Mixx or Digg? Or did lots of Entrecard owners visit and share the link love. The questions dog the blog owners’ mind, yet answers evade him. Maybe it was the SE Phantom.

Now this is about as far as I can go with this nonsense. I was looking for something to write about today, and I noticed on Ice Rocket that searchers were actually looking for the topic, “The Search Engine Phantom That Makes Money.” Weird, and totally out of the box. This is different I’m thinking, let’s try these puppies out.

There is no SE Phantom that visits like the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. The SE Phantom is a component of the valuable content and information that is provided on your site.

However, many tools are available that can help you optimize your site or blog. Some of them are even free, like Wordtracker, which will help you come up with keywords, words you can use to create blog posts.

Then there is Web Ceo, which takes keyword analysis and website analysis one step further, providing clues to fine tuning your blog.

Blog Catalog will help you get traffic, as will Entrecard. Two other free tools that help generate visitors.

These are just a couple of things off the top of my head I can think of, things that I use.

Don’t forget to always leave substantive comments on other blog posts, that is surely a traffic generator as well.

Posted by Teasa’s Tips

10 Blog Traffic Tips

In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called "traction", which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don”t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry - it’’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important - it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have - your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

Posted by Teasa’s Tips

Tech Stories Not Dugg On Digg?

At the Digg Town Hall meeting the other night, users expressed opinions on the direction of Digg. Many were concerned that the user experience is not as gratifying as it once was. Political stories involving Barack or Hillary hold down front page prime real estate. Much to the chagrin of many users. The stories that made Digg unique, tech stories seem to be ignored.

The live session was hosted online by Digg founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson. Digg users were asked to post suggestions and questions on topics they wanted covered. The top 10 comments on the thread were addressed. Kevin and Jay allowed additional live questions that were sent to a special email address given at the start of the meeting.

The comments system, the decline of tech stories and the direction of Digg were discussed. One commenter, BigManOnCampus wondered,…”if Digg itself hasn’t been completely hijacked by activists…” Kevin responded that politics is “hot” right now, and “that there never really will be the ultimate homepage that satisfies everyone.” He added that Digg is seeking to add new features that allow additional user customization.

BigManOnCampus certainly has a point. There are a lot of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama stories on the front page of Digg. It seems that if one of the candidates sneezes, it makes the front page easily.

The decline of tech stories on Digg is also a hot topic these days. Jay disagreed with user Erfus, responding that “tech content on Digg is alive and well.” His recommendation was for users like Erfus to customize their settings and go into their profiles to change the landing page.

I haven’t submitted any Tech stories to Digg yet, but in looking through the categories, tech stories are not that prevalent on Digg. Basically, Digg’s culture has changed since 2005. And change is good right?

Which brings me to the question PyroRaver had about the direction Digg has taken. PyroRaver felt that Digg has been taken over by “rude agenda driven people who have made the Digg experience less enjoyable.”

Jay agreed noting that Digg is addressing the issue of spam comments getting in and that “future changes to the algorithm” will fix this problem.

For me the rudeness comes in the form of comments. I know of at least two of my blogging frineds who have dealt with rude commenters. Just today I Dugg a story on the new Tesla sports car, and one commenter wrote, “…who gives a f**k?” Totally uncalled for. If you don’t care about what’s being submitted, then why are you reading it? No one cares that you don’t care, the story had already been made popular, this commenter was trying to get enough people to give the story a thumbs down so that it could be buried. And sure enough there four others who followed this negative commenter, however, the story survived and made the front page.

That’s my biggest problem with Digg. The quality of stories can not continue to thrive if this type of behavior is allowed. I know Jay is talking about an algorithm to fix the spam comments, but will it fix the ignorant people who have no life, no friends but the ones on the internet.

As a traffic generator, getting to the front page is an awesome experience I’ve been told. It can generate 40,000+ visits in a 2-3 day period. The key is finding out how to master Digg and getting your article to the front page.

That’s just what Ty Hurd of Ty’s Blog, Kat of Promotional Magazine, and I have been researching and working on. Breaking the Digg Code. Keep reading for updates to find out how you can break the Digg Code.

Posted by Teasa’s Tips

Affiliate Marketing, Commissions And Digg

Wow, it’s been a busy week! Let’s see…I started seeing some commissions from Pepperjam Network last week. That’s great. That means I’m doing something right. The free offer for FRS Healthy Energy Drink is generating positive response. That’s great because the payout is good. The demographics on this product is Males and Females 30+. Hmm, tells me something about my readers. In the last 7 days I made $54 from this campaign.

Another affilliate program that began paying last week was Adfish. I had never heard of them until one day I was seeking election year surveys. Once I tracked down the company behind the surveys, I joined. Their customer service is professional and helpful. My rep Jessica Parola contacts me by phone and email with suggestions on improvement and assistance. Three of their campaigns, Smoking Survey, Global Surveys and Free Flys have been pretty successful on Craigslist. My conversions using this classified ad system are difficult to measure without knowing the size of my audience. However, the things I’ve tested brought in $39.50 last week. The threshold for payout with Adfish is $50.

Then after reading “Breaking The Digg Code,” I created a focus group to dismantle this report. Ty Hurd of Ty’s Blog, Katrina (Kat) of Promotional Magazine and myself have been focused on the directives of this ebook just to find out if its true we can make front page on Digg and generate 40,000 - 70,000 visits in a 2-3 day period. Some of the things we are learning have been applicable to other social networking groups. We’ll share our successes an failures with you at the end of the trial. Subscribe to this feed, Ty’s or Kat’s for updates.

Over at Dat Money’s I had some great dialogue with Matt and a couple of other fellas about making money from porn. You can imagine their surprise when they discovered I make the majority of my online income by writing erotic short stories. Adult webmasters purchase my stories on a freelance basis. The comments there are almost good as the post.

I finally got my domain name! Whoo Hoo!! Teasa’s Tips Techniques Dot Blogspot Dot Com is now teasastips.com. I struggled with it in the beginning, not knowing if I should make the name more keyword friendly, but I’m known as Teasa around the blogosphere, so I decided to keep it that way. I redirected the blogger account to the domain name. And as a result I noticed my Alexa Rank went away. That’s ok, because with the results of our Digg study my Alexa and my PR will be back soon.

This week is going to be just as busy. I’ve got a lot of reading to do on a couple of income making ideas I have. And I plan on spending more time commenting this week on substantive posts.

That’s all for now, see you around.

Posted by Teasa’s Tips

Time Is Running Out, Revolution Money Exchange Handing Out $25

When friends send me emails requesting my presence at this website or that website, I am usually skeptical. No matter, it’s natural for me to wonder if this thing is a scam or not. So, when Ann sent me an invitation to get $25 from Revolution Money Exchange, I didn’t believe her at first.
Why?

Because Ann joins more social network group than anyone I know. And I thought this was just another one I didn’t have time for.

But, it wasn’t.

Revolution Money Exchange is in Beta and until May 15th they are giving away bundles of $25 just for opening up a free account. Actually I signed up for it 2 weeks ago and had not activated the account. Dohh!

I wanted to wait until they actually paid me before I told anyone about it.

As I was checking my email….I received this message:

Dear LaTease Rikard:

Your RevolutionMoneyExchange account has been credited in the amount of $ 25.00 courtesy of Revolution MoneyExchange.

Transaction Details

Cool! Gas money.

If you need a couple of dollars for your tank without leaving your house, this is the way to do it.

Here’s the thing: you have to open a free account by May 15th in order to qualify for the $25. And they’ll only let me refer 50 people. This offer is only available to the 1st 50 people who click on the Revolution Money Exchange Button above.

Get your $25 before it’s gone.

Posted by Teasa’s Tips

Using FaceBook Marketplace Can Be Lucrative

When I use Facebook, I use it for close friends. These are usually people I know personally or have met. The level of relationship is deeper than associations found online. So, they know what I do for a living and are oftentimes among my readers. Their support is priceless.

While at Java Hut Café one Sunday, I met a friend who was using Facebook to make money.

At first I thought he was going give me an urban legend. Something he heard through a MySpace friend of his that he was sharing with me deep down the communication pipeline. So I made sure I asked all possible questions. I wanted to truly understand how if he was indeed making money.

While promoting his numerous offline social events, he managed to gain a huge following. Wanting to take advantage of his huge response, he made some really nice glossy business cards that looked the size of postcards. On these postcards, were his email address, his name and all his online affiliations. Obviously, he wasn’t trying to sell his guests anything, although he could and some of them would have bought.

Instead, he was establishing a relationship, several relationships.

His guests, enjoyed themselves and believed my friend to host fun, safe things to do that complement their lifestyles. Instantly, Mr. Friendly becomes the person people want to align themselves with, he becomes the man, a celebrity.

His credibility has shot up like a Technorati Ranking and now, those people who have become his online friends on Facebook wait patiently for my friend’s next move. They come to his parties, support his projects. The point is the time he spent building his relationships.

After watching his friendship requests swell, his popularity grows virally. So, he decides to post an ad in the Facebook Marketplace. This is where it gets interesting. There are two types of ad placement in the Marketplace: free and paid.

Free ads are like announcements on the supermarket bulletin board: you gotta be looking for it. However, Mr. Friendly uses the free ads as a trial, to see how much success he’ll have by informing his base of friends. He does and gets a 20% return on 1630 friends: 326 of his friends joined his affiliate program.

Taking into consideration that 20% is an awesome number; he dials down his expectations on the paid crowd. These will all be strangers, and the rate of return is around 1%.

His first ad he allowed a $10 budget. This would reach 220,000 unknowns. Here’s the thing, if it worked, he’d get 2,000 conversions, well worth the investment.

Well, he didn’t get the 2,000, but he managed 400 sales. Racking up a cool $7,200 (his commission was $18 per sale.)

The key wasn’t in just placing an ad in the Marketplace, he made sure his copy was tight and his message created desire and culminated in action. Simple as that. He hit the proper market, getting the right message to the right people at the right time.

Don’t give up on Facebook, utilize the Marketplace. Play around with the free ad posting first, then fine tune and tweak your message until it brings optimal results.

I’m going to be toying around with some copy this week myself. I’ll be trying this out next week.

Have a great weekend all!

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Posted by Teasa’s Tips

Wall St Unable To Engage Social Media

We baffle them. There are so many of us, networking, twittering, blogging. It’s a way of life for us. With disposable income in the billions, Wall Street advertisers are willing to knock down the walls clamoring for our attention and wallets.

What is it that they want?

The last couple of years Web 2.0 has been invaded with advertising. Major corporate players began showing up on MySpace. Movie trailers are now commonplace for the over 100 million registered users of the social networking group.

Corporate America is so fascinated with all our disposable income so that they’ve increased online spending.

$920 million was spent in 2007 just to get products in front of bloggers, social networkers and other Web 2.0 participants. This according to btobonline.com. The magazine even reports that 2008 will see an even bigger increase in advertising spending of 12% over 2007.

All of this just on social media advertising.

Look around you; big business wants to be more engaging, they just haven’t figured out the most direct route yet.

Can you imagine Verizon Wireless ads on Twitter?

Right now, I love Twitter. It’s as addictive as blogging and it’s cool. A Wall Street invasion would make it uncool, like MySpace is now.

On the other hand, a corporate invasion may be welcomed by the owners of these social mega-networks. Their sites are businesses too, and businesses are sold everyday.

So what does this mean for the Web 2.0’ers?

Do we seek out the next latest and greatest thing, and keep it a secret for as long as we can? Or do we just roll with the flow and watch social networks become ad laden and junk filled?

Corporate giants are aware that growth means money, that’s why there is more talk daily about the potential sale of other social media upstarts (Facebook included).

Advertisers come bearing chests of gold for the chance to get in front of gadget equipped-educated-flexible to change social media audiences like ours. A lot of people will stand to make a lot of money when advertisers figure out how to market to social media.

When they do, it will be like selling your subscriber lists back in the golden days of internet marketing. Only now, those lists may be worth millions.

Posted by Teasa’s Tips

Breaking The Digg Code Trial

I recently read “Breaking The Digg Code” by Khalid of Invesp Blog. And my eyes were opened to a social bookmarking technique that many of us are not using. If we used this technique, we would all have the traffic we desire. Here’s some info I picked up:

(I’m applying this to Digg and StumbleUpon, although Khalid did not.)

Reciprocal Diggs & Stumbles don’t carry much weight. It’s like your family giving you a good job recommendation, of course they’ll say good things about you. So they don’t count.

That’s why when we request reciprocal Diggs & Stumbles they don’t get us very far. At least not as far as we would like to go. We want traffic in the 40,000-70,000 range on a daily basis. Many of us are using lots of social bookmarking sites to accomplish this task.

But, did you know that if you mastered the behavior of just one social bookmarking site, you could relax, post less and watch your traffic go through the roof?

That’s why I’d like to extend an invitation to one blogger who would like to participate in a 30 day study. A study that will reveal if Khalid’s and my techniques yield similar results. The blogger selected will use a tracking system via a spreadsheet, we’ll report back to you letting you know of our findings, and what’s better, you’ll have first hand knowledge of a cutting edge web/blog traffic technique.

Unraveling Digg and or StumbleUpon is as popular as discovering the Google algorithm. All three use algorithm, so our findings will be as successful as our efforts.

If you’re interested in participating in this study, reply to this post.

You’ll need to dedicate 1.5 hours per day, 4 days a week for 4 weeks to the project. In addition, at the end of each week, we’ll need to do an IM recap of our efforts, findings, etc.

There is no blog requirement as far as PR, Alexa, IZEA Rank goes. Just a genuine interest in the project and seeing what it yields. The worst thing that could happen is nothing gained nothing lost. However, if this experiment holds true, you may yield 40,000-70,000 visitors every 3 days.

Reply back if you’d like to be considered for the assignment.

Posted by Teasa’s Tips

Top 10 EntreCard Droppers In April

Drum Roll Please!!!

Here are my top 10 EC Droppers for the month of April. These Entrecard users dropped their card on this site the most in the last 30 days. Entrecard accounts for a huge portion of my traffic as it shows relevant, like minded users stop by the most.

Turnip Of Power
Lee Doyle — Contains Nuts
Karlonia.com
Worth The Popcorn
Technically Easy
Orangeinks
Foolsville 2.0
John’s Tech Blog
Bitter Sweet Music
Brain Stimulant

These next four sites gave me the most clicks when my EC widget was shown on their sites. I’ll definitely purchase advertising from them again!

Fruit Species
Popular Wealth
JTPratt’s Blogging Mistakes
About Blog Contests

Thanks to all of my EC Brethren!!

Posted by Teasa’s Tips