Affiliate Marketing Network Site

How much per day??

Posted by admin on January 23rd, 2012

If you have been thinking about how you might make money on the Internet, then you should take a look at becoming an affiliate.

For those of you who don’t know or understand what an affiliate is, then in simple terms it is someone who promotes someone else’s product or service and if that promotion results in a sale then the affiliate gets paid a commission.

So how does that work in practice, well first you must register with a company or affiliate network as an affiliate. Some good affiliate networks to start with are ClickBank and Commission Junction. ClickBank mainly deals with ebooks and software which can be downloaded as soon as they have been purchased. Commission Junction on the other hand has a much wider range of possible affiliate relationships, many with well known large companies.

Once you are registered with one or more of these networks you will be able to select which products you wish to promote. With ClickBank you can promote any product that they list. With Commission Junction however, you have to also apply to each program within Commission Junction that you select and you may or may not be approved for that program by the company concerned.

Having selected a product or service you then have to promote it using the web links that the affiliate network will provide to you for that purpose. An important part in this web link information will be your Affiliate ID which will be used by the affiliate network and the company whose product/service you are promoting to identify you as the affiliate sending them a potential customer. If that person makes a purchase the affiliate network will be notified and will allocate the appropriate commission to your affiliate account. At regular intervals the affiliate network will then send you the commission you have accumulated in your affiliate account. The web link information mentioned previously that you obtain from the affiliate network can be used on your own website or blog or possibly in email newsletters or even directly via web advertising such as AdWords. This gives you a basic overview as to how affiliate marketing works. Many people are making extra money or their living as an Internet affiliates in this way.

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Affiliate Start

Posted by admin on January 23rd, 2012

The best way to get started in internet marketing is to promote someone elses product or service. When you do this it is called affiliate marketing. You do not need to come up with your own product idea, you do not need to ship products and you do not need to contend with payments or customer service issues. It is a low cost way to start an online business and if you are successful it can prove to be quite lucrative.

Here are 3 ways you can profit by marketing affiliate products:

Blogging

You can get started blogging for free. However, I would suggest if you are going to promote products that you at least pay for a domain name and host your own blog. It can costs as little as $7.00 per domain name and you can get hosting for as little as $10.00 per month.

Becoming an affiliate is a great way to monetize a blog. If you are blogging about motorcycles for example, you can post an affiliate page to ebay and list all the motorcycle auctions that are going on or it can be as simple as reviewing a product on your blog and including a link to that product. Incorporating affiliate products into your blog is easy and can earn you some extra cash.

Email Marketing

If you dont have a list of potential customers than you should definitely start one. For those that already have subscribers to a newsletter it is easy to make recommendations to your readers. Once you have established trust with them they are more likely to take what you say to heart. This includes recommendations. If a product offers an affiliate program than it costs nothing to mention it in your email.

The one thing that is important here is to remember that the product should be of value to your readers and related to what you do. All you need to do is include a special link to the product in your newsletter and earn a nice commission. If you have a large enough list your commissions can get high very quickly. This depends on the type of product of course. Some products offer more commissions than others.

Review Websites

Its easy to start a small mini site that reviews products. You want to do your research and keep it focused of course. You can recommend anything from web hosting providers, credit cards, insurance companies to what is the best educational toys for kids. The list is endless of all the different types of products you can review.

The more value you can add to your website the better. You can add value by including a comparison chart, past customer reviews, ratings and comparing features. When people are looking to make a purchase they often do some research on the internet. What better way to provide value to a new customer than to provide them information about all the different products in one area of interest.

If you are good at writing reviews people are more inclined to click on your link. The link that they click on is a special affiliate link that goes to your affiliate website and if the person decides to make a purchase off of your recommendation than you will earn commission on the sale.

It is important to remember when marketing affiliate products to make your recommendations as stream- lined as possible. What I mean by this is, when you are putting your affiliate link on your site, blog or email make it look as though it is originating from your own site. You can do this through redirects and link cloaking software for example. It can be easy for someone to bypass your affiliate code and go straight to another website without using your affiliate link. After putting in all the hard work and research into your website or blog you would not want to lose your commission.

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How to increase your PR ranking

Posted by admin on January 12th, 2012

As you may remember, we recently launched Sports Fan 4, a sports site focused on delivering Boston sports news and opinion with the voice of a fan. We launched the site on March 31, 2009 and kept our expectations reserved. While we felt we had a great team of writers for the site and knew that there is no satiating the thirst for sports talk in the City of Boston, we also knew from past experience how tough it is to get a new site up and running.

Well, a few days ago Google updated their public Page Rank for the first time since we launched SP4 and low and behold we were ecstatic to see we were upgraded to a PageRank 5!

While we knew we had optimized the site well for our readers (which also usually corresponds to good SEO too), we weren’t quite expecting our first Page Rank update to land us with a nice juicy 5. To be honest, a 3 or a 4 would have had us high-fiving. So you can imagine how pumped we were when we saw the Google Page Rank toolbar halfway full.

How we got a Page Rank 5 in Two Months

But enough talk about how happy we were, what you’re really interested in is how we did it. As with most SEO tips, the real truth is locked inside Google’s walls but here’s five steps we took that likely helped us achieve such a nice Page Rank so soon.

Comments, comments, comments

When Josh and I were sitting down and hashing out ideas for the site, one point I made repeatedly over and over is that Josh had to take initiative and comment on other blogs. Simply put, you cannot blog on an island (figuratively) if you want to have success. A huge misconception with blogging is that it is a solo activity, where the blogger just pumps out content isolated from the outside world.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Blogging is really about building a community with your readers and fellow bloggers. Commenting is thus a great way to build backlinks, expose your brand, and connect with other bloggers.

I could easily devote a whole post to this topic, but Brett Borders already wrote a fantastic guide on creating a solid online presence by commenting. Commenting is a big reason we have over 3,000 links pointed to the Sports Fan 4 domain as of this post.

Twitter, twitter, twitter

We set Josh up with a Twitter account on May 15 and he immediately began using it to connect with other sports fans. The key here is we setup a strategy for Josh to connect and communicate via Twitter.

Promoting posts was a secondary aim. It’s been a great strategy so far as Twitter has delivered traffic, guest writers and backlinks to his site. When you approach Twitter with the goal of communicating with others, the promotion will happen organically. We also installed a Twitter widget which kept fresh content flowing to the homepage.

Thesis Theme

Out of the box, Thesis theme is relatively well tuned for SEO. We tweaked it and tweaked it until we were comfortable that it was very finely tuned. Here’s a great SEO tutorial for Thesis theme. Also check out our guide to showing all posts in a category on one page.

The quick tips I’ll give are to show only titles outside the homepage and to enable teasers on the homepage. Also, show excerpts on the homepage. These three tweaks will keep duplicate content penalties to a minimum.

Unique content

A big boost to Sports Fan 4 came when we progressed from writing game wrap ups to producing unique content not commonly found on other sports blogs. I wrote a post about Five Life Lessons From “He Hate Me”, Josh wrote a post on How to Spot Steroid Users and began producing player profiles, while Matt published a list of things to do when the Sox game is rained out.

For the most part, these posts were content you could not find elsewhere and we all know that Google loves unique content. Not only does Google love it, but other bloggers and readers do too. These were some of our most highly trafficked and linked to posts on the site.

Our Network

A tip that really only applies to some of our audience. At The 42nd Estate we have a network of sites and on all those sites we post links back to our other sites. It makes sense since all the sites are part of The 42nd Estate’s network. Most of these sites have Page Ranks of 3 or 4, which gave Sports Fan 4 quality links right from the start. In other words, utilize your existing sites when launching new sites.

As you can see, there were no black hat (nor grey hat) SEO methods used here. Neither were any of them complicated or tough to initialize. Having said that, there was a lot of time spent in producing solid, unique content, reading and commenting on hundreds of blogs, connecting with over 1,000 people on Twitter. It required time and energy, but luckily those are the only two real costs to our strategy. That means you too can implement these tips and watch your Page Rank soar!

Now there were other steps we took that played a role in our Page Rank increase, but for space considerations I’ll leave it at those five. If you enjoyed this how to post and want to hear more about how Sports Fan 4 increased its Page Rank, or you have your own Page Rank/SEO tips, leave a comment below and let us know!

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Banner Glossary

Posted by admin on January 3rd, 2012

* Banner Ad — A graphic ad linked to an advertiser’s website. These usually run across the top of the page but can also run up the page (“skyscrapers”). Banners are usually limited by size.

* Banner Views –The number of times a banner is seen by users. This is usually the same as “page views,” but counts the number of times the banner is actually downloaded rather than the number of times the page is downloaded. Some users click away before the banner finishes loading.

* Clicks/ Click Throughs — Banners are operated by clicking the cursor over them. Not too surprisingly these responses are called “clicks” or “click throughs.”

* Click Through Rate (CTR) — The percentage of users who see the banner and click on it.

* Conversion Rate –The percentage of people who visit your site and actually give you money. The higher the better!

* Cookies — Small files placed on a user’s computer. They’re used for all sorts of reasons and by all sorts of sites. Banner ads use them to make sure the user hasn’t seen the banner recently, which banner brought them to the advertiser’s site, and even which adverts they’ve seen recently.

* CPM — “Cost Per Mille.” The amount you pay for every thousand times a banner is shown–the usual way of charging for banners.

* Hits — The number of times a server receives a request for a Web page or an image. Not a great way to measure interest. One page can have lots of images and get lots of hits, even if it’s only seen once. Often, people will say “hits” when they really mean “page views” or “impressions.”

* Page Impressions or Page Views –The number of times a Web page has been requested by the server. Much more accurate than hits: each view is a potential customer looking at a page of your site. But not necessarily a different customer…

* Unique Users — The people who download a Web page, counted by IP address. You want to bring lots of users to your site so that you can create a broad customer base. The same user clicking on a banner a dozen times could cost you money without increasing your sales. Most reputable sites will check the IP address of the person clicking on a link and only count it once in a 24-hour period. If a site doesn’t do this, don’t advertise with them.
Tim Yu is the owner of providing information on Creating Your Own Business Online. To get Free “Internet Marketing Guide” & “49 Ways To Find A Profitable Niche Market Instantly!” course, go to
* Banner Ad — A graphic ad linked to an advertiser’s website. These usually run across the top of the page but can also run up the page (“skyscrapers”). Banners are usually limited by size.