Affiliate101.com » Affiliate 101

Stay Up to Date with Internet Marketing Industry

dennis — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:34:11 +0000

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.

Advertising
- Shoemoney Show – A successful internet marketer that discusses many topics related to making money on the web.
- Net Income – Shoemoneys show before he became big enough to name a show after himself. Go Shoemoney.
Affiliate Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing Insider
- Affiliate Thing
Search Engine Optimization
- SEO 101 – Excellent show about some of the basics of SEO and news.
- SEO Rockstars – Good archives of shows that talk about some advanced topics.
- The Daily Search Cast – Daily SEO news
Internet Marketing
- Domain Masters – If you are interested in buying domains, this is your show.

Blogs/Newsletters/RSS Feeds

Matt Cutts – Googles resident SEO guy. Gives some valuable insight.
many more to come.

What is PPC?

dennis — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:24:11 +0000

You’ve probably heard of PPC by now. If you haven’t, it stands for Pay Per Click. The name really sums it up. It’s a form of internet advertising where the advertiser pays somebody for the action of a click. There are other variations of this such as Pay Per Call, or Pay Per Lead. Again, the name really describes them best, so I think you can figure out what the other two are.

Why do people use PPC?

Well, why do you want traffic. If you can make money off your website, or have some kind of view you want to get across, you probably want traffic. It is like no other form of advertising. If you do a print ad, or a tv commercial, you have alot of expense to produce that ad, or tv spot, and then you probably have a hard time telling if it was successful or not. With PPC, you set your budget which could be a few dollars a day. You tell the search engine what kind of visitors you want to get, and then if they send someone to your website, you pay them an amount that you had agreed on earlier.

Where does the traffic come from?

When you buy PPC traffic, it can come from Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, or joeswidgets.com. You have control to say where you want it from, and how much you are willing to spend to be in the different places. With Google, if someone searches for Blue Widgets, and you have that keyword in your account, your ad will appear ranked against everyone else that has that same keyword in their account (no, you aren’t the only one). If you tell google that they can distribute their ad to their Content Network, your ad can also appear on joeswidgets.com, because Joe wants to make some money writing about widgets.

Why does it work?

Everyone can be a winner here. There is a very low cost to entry, and it’s an opportunity for everyone to be happy. You buy PPC, that get’s you traffic, which hopefully makes you some money (unless you are doing it wrong). Google makes some money (which allows them to dominate the world), and Joe, over at Joeswidgets.com, has an opportunity to write about something he loves. I’ve left out one important person. The CUSTOMER. None of this works without them. If you don’t know your customer and what they are looking for, they have no incentive to click on any of your ads. I can’t stress this enough, KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER, and make sure everything you do has them in mind.

Analytics Defined

dennis — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:03:25 +0000

Analytics is important to any webmaster. If you don’t know where your traffic is coming from, and what they are doing once they are there, you are missing a big opportunity to improve your traffic and improve the money you can make off your traffic

Say you are getting 1000 visitors a day to your site, but don’t know where it’s coming from. You will spend time doing very general updates to your website, or nothing at all. If you knew that 800 of those visitors were coming to the section about widgets, you might spend the bulk of your time finding partners that sell those widgets.

You then look at how people are getting there. Is it from a search engine? Is it from some article you wrote. Maybe the traffic is because you had a few people Digg your article, and then a few more did. This traffic isn’t going to last forever. You need to repeat what you did in that scenario, and do it again and again.

If it’s all coming from one search term at google, you have to figure out where you’re ranking at, and what’s your next step. Say you are ranking number 1 for blue widgets, and that is sending you 100 visitors a month. You need to make sure you stay in that position by doing some SEO. If you are ranking number 3 for red widgets, and getting 120 visitors a month, figure out if you can move up in rank. That is a bigger opportunity than optimizing for blue widgets.

This is a very basic example of Analytics usage, for a very small website. There are a number of tools that help in all different sorts of ways. With all the opportunity for traffic optimization on your website, the good webmaster utilizes the tools available to focus on the best return on their valuable time.