Where you place ads on your site can have a very big impact on the click through rate. Many people put their ads right in the header, because they will think that is the first thing that your visitor will see. That may be true for some, but that placement may have worn out its welcome. Chitika has come up with a very nice outline of the best ad placements for most websites.
One way to quickly eat away at your profit is if you get caught up in a bad hosting program. Pricing can vary greatly from provider to provider, so it’s important to find the right host. We will add new hosts to this page as we review them.
BlueHost – Web, Reseller, and Dedicated Hosting Packages starting at $6.95 a month.
If you are moving from another host, they provide free transfers. If you are new to building a site, they have a free site builder program. Check out BlueHost.
It doesn’t matter if you are building a new website, or creating a PPC Campaign, you will need to do some keyword research. I suggest you do some brainstorming first. Think about all the different things that someone could search for that could possibly lead them to you and your website. For example, if you are selling an e-book about affiliate marketing on the internet, you may come up with a few different types of keywords to look for. Here are a few examples (ranked in order of probable conversion rate).Affiliate Marketing E-Book – obviously
Affiliate marketing - may not looking for an e-book, but could be persuaded
Internet marketing – someone that knows about internet marketing, but may not understand how affiliates work.
Work from home – Affiliate marketers can work from home, so this applies to them.
There are tons of others, but for the sake of time, I’m cutting it there.
There are a number of tools available to help you with your keyword research. Some are free, but some are paid.
Paid Services (some have free trials)
Free Tools
SEO Book – Go to the tools link
This is not a complete list. I will add others as time goes on.
A very important step in rising to the top of the Search Engines, is to have a good link building campaign. Links to your site benefit you in a couple ways.
Find Quality – The better the link to you site, the greater the impact to your ranking. The reverse of that can work also. If you get a lot of links from bad sites, it can impact you negatively.
Deep Linking- Get the links to the page you want to improve the ranking. If you have a product on your site, get the link to point directly to that, along with the search term being the link text.
Take Your Time – If the search engine sees a site go from 3 links to 3000 links overnight, the engines may think that something is up. Spread it out over time and you will benefit.
There are many ways to get links to your site, and you need to get a campaign going early on.
If you are just getting started with SEO, it’s important to know the basics first. There are 100s of different factors that go into ranking a website in the search engine, and it can take you years to master them. For those that want to get started now, you can do alot with little effort to greatly improve your rankings.
Most Important SEO Factors
Most Important things to Avoid
A good resource that goes into more detail, and discusses the less important factors can be found below.
15 Minute SEO List – Learn how to SEO
Here is a checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, MSN, Yahoo and the other search engines. The list contains positive, negative and neutral factors because all of them exist.
From the creators of Affiliate Classroom, comes the Blog Classroom. They are offering on online course in Blogging and making money doing it. I took a quick look at a few of the videos, and it looks really helpful.
Free Pre-Course: Start Your Blog and Get Traffic in 10 Minutes!
In a perfect world, you would be able to go to a domain registrar, type in the best domain that fits your site, pay your $8, and begin building your dream. Well, this isn’t a perfect world. Hasn’t really been since the late 90s (or in some cases alot earlier). So, here’s what you can do to secure a domain that you are going to be happy building a new site with.
Pick another Domain Name
You can give up on having a really good domain, and just pick things until you find something that is available. Do a Domain Search at DomainTools.com. You can also check your desired domains, and see if they are for sale. DT will list the price above it, or say if they are taking offers. You may also want to go to the domain to see if they have any information there.
Previously Registered
Another way to find a good one that is available, is to do a suggestion search. If someone registered it before, that means someone liked it enough to spend some time and money to register it. There are alot of crap domains registered, but there are some good ones too.
Auction and For Sale
There are a number of websites that auction domains off, or display for sale prices. You can search those on DomainTools also.
Domain Search Tools
There are some new sites out there that help you try to find names you hadn’t thought of. DT can help with that, but there are a handful of others also. Try a site called Bust a Name. You can enter a few keywords in, and they will try them in different order, different combinations, and offer suggestions for other words. Very cool site.
In this always changing environment, you can’t just sit back and think that you know everything there is to know about what you are doing. The internet, and especially internet marketing, is in its infancy. As it grows at light speed, you’ll see changes that can knock you out of the game, or make you rich. If you want the latter result, you need to stay up to date. This site will be a good source, but by no means is it the only source. I will update this page with valuable resources as I come across them.
Listen – Podcasts
I described podcasts to a friend the other day as “a radio station that is programmed by me, that discusses topics that only a small group of people would possibly listen to”. The site that makes that possible is WebmasterRadio.fm. It is probably the best source for a variety of subjects in the area of internet marketing, and beyond. I will listen to a few a day by going through the archives. I recommend the following channels for any budding affiliate/internet marketer.
Blogs/Newsletters/RSS Feeds
Matt Cutts – Googles resident SEO guy. Gives some valuable insight.
many more to come.
Do you have an idea for a Facebook or MySpace Website? If so, there is some free (Open Source) software to get started with. You can customize this to your specific needs.