Using Google For Affiliate Marketing

Google is the king of the search engines right now, and a good ranking in Google searches can get you a lot of traffic.  If you are just starting out in affiliate marketing, then you need a lot of traffic to build up your initial customer base.  So, how do you leverage the immense reach of Google to help you do that?

The answer is in Web 2.0 sites.

Web 2.0 is a name used to describe the new kinds of websites that have come about in the past few years.  Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, content sharing sites like YouTube and Digg – all of these are Web 2.0 sites.  They  are enormously popular, so they get constantly indexed well by Google and other search engines.

This frequent indexing means that if you submit content to these sites and insert links back to your website, those links will be indexed quickly.

So what’s the strategy?

First thing to do is to prepare a lot of articles about the product you are selling.  You should not use the same article over and over again.  Search engines have duplicate content filters that will block some of them from results.

Once you have these articles, upload them to sites like Associated Content, Ezinearticles, and others like them.  Include a link back to your site in either the content of the article, or in the resource box (some sites have these boxes, some don’t).  Once the article is uploaded, you’ve accomplished two very important things:  you’ve spread word about your product topic on a site that gets lots of traffic every day; and you’ve created a valuable backlink from a website that has a high Page Rank.

Continue to do this (unique content every time) and you will build a lot of traffic for your site.

A Site For Example:

I have a site about Kenneth Cole Shoes and it ranks 4th in Google at time of writing this for the term, Kenneth Cole Shoes. Now that search term gets over 150,000 searches a month and the only sites that beat me out are The main site itself and a very large online shopping site.

Be sure to join my mailing list on the top left of my blog to see a followup post outlining exactly how I did it, so that you can do it too! 🙂

Author:
Colin Klinkert
Affiliate Marketing Without A Website

If you have the ability to write compelling sales copy, but can’t build a website for the life of you, it’s not really a problem, because a website isn’t required to be a successful affiliate marketer.  This is done by utilizing a variety of Web 2.0 sites,  which allows you to build an online presence using the in-place infrastructure of already popular websites.

There are a lot of content websites that are completely dependent upon user submitted content.  Sites like Associated Content and eHow are comprised almost exclusively of articles that are written and submitted by average users.  These sites get a lot of viewers and are usually at the top of many searches, so use that popularity to your advantage.  This isn’t some sort of nefarious scheme, it is an equal trade; the content sites get quality content you produce, and you get free space to promote your product.

Here’s how you can make it work:  write a bunch of articles about the product you are promoting or the about the topic in general.  Make sure that each of these are unique, because if you submit duplicate articles to many different sites, search engines like Google won’t count them and could even penalize them.  And make sure the articles are rich with the keywords related to your product.

These sites will usually allow you to place affiliate links either in the body of the content or in a special resource box on the page.  People searching for those keywords, will come across your articles on these sites (because web 2.0 sites generally achieve very high page ranks) and, if your sales copy is compelling, they will click through your affiliate link and purchase the product.

The amount of success you will have is completely dependent on the quality of your sales copy, but the beauty of this method is that it requires no start-up costs.  You don’t need to register domain names and build websites.  Just write the articles and start making money.

Author:
Colin Klinkert
Online Marketing Blogs

Blogging has become an incredibly popular way to distribute content in the past few years.  Though subjects may vary, all successful blogs have two certain things in common:  regular content updates and content that is valuable to the reader.

While many who are looking to start a career in online marketing may use a blog as an occasional medium for releasing content, many underestimate just how powerful a good blog can be for developing a “hub” presence for online marketing.

Why spend your time developing a blog instead of working on other aspects of online marketing?  There are a few reasons.

First of all, a blog helps to put a personal face to your online business.  If people are able to regularly read things you are writing, and have access to an About or Contact page where they can learn about you or get in touch with you, that makes you an actual person in their minds, instead of a faceless internet entity.  People are more likely to want to do business with “Bill Jones” instead of “productnameplus.com.”

Second, if you provide quality content on your blog, you are able to attract more customers.  For example, if you build a blog about pet training that provides solid resources for web users, then when you use the blog as a platform for promoting a related product, people will value you as person knows what they’re talking about and who has provided a lot of free information to them already.  Having established this credibility, they will be more inclined to try it if it is recommended by you.

You can also add an “opt-in” box where people can sign up for a newsletter or email updates.  This allows you to set up a customer list and have people ask to be on it!  A strong blog with quality content can provide a central hub for all of your online marketing ventures, and can attract quality customers.

A Good Tip:

You can signup to my Optin Box top left to see the process I use. Another good Idea would be to follow me on Twitter. Doing so will trigger a DM sent to you on Twitter from me and you can see how I handle my new twitter followers with the video I send them to and the incentive I give to optin

Author:
Colin Klinkert
What is Effective Forum Marketing?…

This is a follow-on from a post I recently made about blog commenting. Today we are looking at Effective Forum Marketing. You can watch an intro to this post:  http://viralnetworks.com/view/rVIwm

Forums are a great way to get in touch with potential customers.  There are various forums all across the internet that are devoted to an incredible range of topics.  That means that regardless of the type of product you are working with, there is likely a forum somewhere that is devoted to that field.  The people who frequent that forum are a highly targeted demographic  – they are ‘warm’ prospects, with high conversion potential.

Establish a Presence

But you need to work at establishing a presence.  Forum marketing is not about just posting a couple links and watching the sales come rolling in.  Forums have moderators and administrators who look out for marketing scams and immediately delete those posts and ban the user who posted them.

So how can you use forum marketing effectively?

Trading value for value.  The value that the forum users offer is their attention to your product and possibly buying it.  The value you provide is determined by the nature of the forum.

For example, if you are selling a how-to product that teaches people how to use Photoshop software, then look for forums for beginners to the software.  They will ask questions about how to do certain things, you find the answer and post it.  That is the value you give them.  When you post in a forum, you are usually allowed to have a link to a website either in your user profile or as a “signature” – text or images that appear automatically at the bottom of each of your posts.

Don’t Blatantly Sell

As long as you provide value to the other forum users and don’t blatantly try to sell your product, you will be allowed to stay.  And the people that you advise will often follow your link out of curiosity, or the need for more information. If they see that you have a product that solves their problem or enhances the reason they are in the forum, they are more likely to buy that product.

Forum marketing is being used more and more by internet marketers, and while it does take time to establish a credible preference in the forum, the benefits are great if it is one that is very finely targeted to your niche.

Have You Tried This Yet

Have You Used a Technique like this before or during your product launch? Maybe you have used it as an affiliate for other products… What Results have you seen from Forum traffic?

Author:
Colin Klinkert
Blog Comments Can Help Build Your List

A Short Video Into To This Post Can Be Found: http://viralnetworks.com/view/XPuSc

If you’ve ever read a blog’s comments section, then you’ve probably come across a comment that was submitted for the sole purpose of generating a backlink. The comment usually reads like gibberish, but has a whole bunch of keywords and links peppered within it.

In order to neutralize these sorts of comments, there are all sorts of spam blockers for blogs (with Akismet being one of the most used) and there are NoFollow HTML codes that prevent search engines from giving any credit for these comments.

That being said, commenting on blogs can still be a great way to build buzz and traffic for your site.

Add Value

The idea of blog commenting is to some sort of valuable contribution. For example, if you read a popular blog in your niche and you have an opinion or idea related to a post, then comment on it and feel free to leave a link to your website. When the administrator of the blog sees your comment, the value of what you wrote in advancing the blog’s community far outweighs the small favor of providing a backlink, so they will likely keep the comment live.

If you comment regularly on a certain blog (or series of blogs), then you can begin to develop a relationship with other people in your niche. These people will visit your site and may even link to you or reference you in their posts if the content you provide is worthwhile.

Commenting in this manner, helps out both parties. The blogger builds his community and makes it more likely that other readers will engage in a conversation and keep coming back, and you get a valuable backlink to your site from a blog that focuses on your niche, ensuring targeted traffic.

Another Place Worth Adding Value

Social Networks that have a target audence is a good place to use to add value. It is for this reason I built ViralNetworks! The idea is that you build a reputation among your peers and make those million $ ventures you hear about, as well as getting people to like and trust you. (These are the only reasons people will buy your products, if they know, like and trust you or of course, your product).

Come join me on the online business social network today!

Author:
Colin Klinkert
Facial Scanning Coming? – Scary Stuff!

An advanced facial recognition technology is coming to Facebook, Photo Finder. This application by Face.com uses facial scanning algorithms that would rival those we see on NCIS each week. It will be able to scan through your pics and those public photos of your friends and identify then suggest tags for an untagged people featured in them. Scary stuff!

The speed at which the software can scan through millions of photos appears to be its strength, and while the scan results are not immediate after adding the application, it is possible to view them while the scan is in progress. What’s more Photo Finder saves its results for future use, so that if your friends add the app as well, these photos won’t need to be rescanned.

To begin using Photo Finder, you simply add it to your profile as you would with any other Facebook app. You then click the “Get Started” button and Photo Finder will launch its scan. There’s nothing else you need to do until the scan is complete. You can leave the page to return to other parts of Facebook or even close the web page altogether – Photo Finder will continue to run as you’ve already granted it offline access when you initially added it.

The company has been at pains to address privacy issues and the app will not tag photos within Facebook itself – only within the application, meaning no one can see them unless they too are running the app.

The technology has been in alpha testing for several months among 150 users, colleagues and friends of the creators Gil Hirsch (CEO), Yaniv Taigma (CTO), Eden Shochat, and Moti Shniberg. In that time, around 20 million photos are reported to have been scanned, identifying around 30,000 people.

The company expects to be able to name a ‘launch to the public’ date later this year.

Viralize Your Twitter Account: http://viralfollowers.com/ColinKlinkert/vn/2/

Author:
Colin Klinkert
Web 2.0 Marketing

Who hasn’t heard of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, eHow, blogs and forums? The power of these social media platforms has been realized by companies, traditional news media, and individual marketers.

Internet marketers who don’t want to be left behind should have Web 2.0 strategies as part of their whole marketing push, and understanding how to use this platform properly could influence their bottom line dramatically.

With social marketing, people openly discuss products and services they have used or are interested in – and they are quick to condemn, slow to praise. And it’s no secret that your competitors could be lurking in forums quietly feeding negative comments about your products.

For those who have not yet embraced social media marketing – on sites such as ViralNetworks, YouTube, Facebook, Warrior Forum, MySpace, Twitter, and eHow, here are a few tips on its use:

  • Get educated: Understand what different platforms are out there, and see if there is one that is devoted to your niche.
  • Think strategically: Only target social media sites that are frequently used by your target audience. Don’t spend time on cat sites if you are selling a ‘how-to’ guide to making websites.
  • Get involved. You must give and take in social sites. Don’t pack your posts with sales links – you will be banned or ignored. Provide quality information in your poses, and where allowed, and a subtle website link in your signature. Join in conversations – don’t just write posts and forget them. See what others are talking about, and contribute. Valuable posts will be bookmarked and shared.
  • On your own blogs and static sites, make sure you have bookmark buttons – help your content to travel.
  • Search engines love multimedia, so use videos and podcasts as part of your Web 2.0 strategies. If you find someone asking a ‘how to’ question in a forum, reply with a video of exactly ‘how to’. Interviews are great to podcast, so why not have someone interview you about some new ‘technique’ you’ve developed?
  • As with all internet marketing strategies, measuring and monitoring is important with social media marketing too. You should be aware of how many people are reading your posts, becoming your ‘friends’ or ‘followers’, and whether comments on your products and services are negative or positive.

Social media marketing gives you the ability to convert visitors to fans to customers, and you need to allocate a certain time every day for social networking at your chosen sites. It could be as little as half an hour, but if done well, could grow your prospect and client base considerably.

If you are in Internet Marketing or any form of online business, ViralNetworks is a Business Social Network and as such is well targeted to your products and services. Follow the rules above, add value, make and share videos and watch your friends convert to fans and fans convert to buyers. If you haven’t yet, join and start networking with me today on ViralNetworks!

Author:
Colin Klinkert
Internet Marketing Business – Beginners Tips

Watch The Video Into to this post here: http://viralnetworks.com/view/NJD56

When starting to set up your own internet marketing business, it’s important to recognize the enemies to your success:

• Being lazy – you do have to put some work into it. Don’t believe all the hype about waking up to finding more money in your account – unless you have put in the time and effort to set up your money making machine.

• Being negative – don’t put yourself down. Understand that even though you don’t know a lot about running an internet marketing business, use what you do know, and make a commitment to learn more.

• Afraid to take risks – you have to put yourself out there, tackle new concepts and embrace new learning opportunities.

Everyone will tell you that you need to find a niche to focus your energies on. Instead of looking for what you consider ‘sexy’ topics, take a look at things you know a lot about, or are passionate about. These could include sports, hobbies, cooking or health. If you have some knowledge in a particular area, chances are someone else is just learning about it, and will pay for your skills or techniques.

By starting with something about which you are passionate will make the marketing tasks, like blogs and forum posts, and writing articles, just that much easier.

Don’t expect to make millions first off – take the small profits because they will all add up. If you write an eBook about your hobby, you might only sell 4 a week at $20 each, but that’s $80 each week more than you had before, $240 a month, $2880 a year. Write another couple and watch the profits multiply. And with things like an eBook, you only need to write it once, and it can look after itself for years to come.

By collecting the contact information of your buyers, you have a ‘list’ of qualified customers who will be more open to buying another product on the same topic (yours or an affiliate product) in the future.

Join forums related to your niche, establish a presence there and be sure to contribute worthwhile posts (the ‘give’), while including a link to your site (the ‘take’) in your signature file.

A Good Place To Start is ViralNetworks – Join us in the forums and start learning & helping!

Author:
Colin Klinkert
Preview of ViralNetworks Members Area…

ViralNetworks! will launch on the 28th December 2008 and we hope that things run smoothly. The video below is a 4:30 leaked video for you to see some of the features you will have access to:

We hope that you are signed up to ViralNetworks! and will join myself and many other marketers in networking and having a good time 🙂

See you on the inside!

Subscribe to my RSS Feed – Simply Fill in the Opt-In Form on the Top Left & Get My Ebook Free

And / Or

Follow Me on Twitter – http://www.TwitterColin.com/

Author:
Colin Klinkert
StumbleUpon Part 2 – Getting Your Blog Stumbled

What Else Can You Do To Become a Pro?

social media

In a previous blog post, I spoke of taking advantage of the great resource StumbleUpon and the different types of marketing that some of the most popular Social Media Networks are looking for.

We discussed that if you are going to Digg, your posts need to appeal to the general masses, but StumbleUpon really likes the individual niches and specialty markets

So, lets go into today what you can do to make sure your posts get online.

  • Instead of having a link round up on a weekly basis, change it to a weekly themed-resource list.
  • News is great for Reddit and Digg, they love this kind of stuff, but if you are going for StumbleUpon, you need to focus on content that is not time related, something that is just as beneficial to the reader in 6 months from now as it would be today.
  • If you have a post that needs to be in context with time, then it probably won’t get picked up by SU.
  • You can make your posts short, but you need to have some good content, utilize some great tips and advice to help your readers.reader
  • Remember, when you have a new reader, you need to sell your content right from the beginning. You want something that will help them right from the beginning. You will not keep their attention with a prologue of 500 words or more, they will give up and move on to the next one. Stumble Upon will be bored, uninterested and pass you by. Make your posts clear from the very beginning.
  • Keep it simple, but leave the personal stuff out. Your personal stories may be interesting to your loyal readers, but to a brand new reader, they won’t really care.

When you are trying to get your blog noticed by Stumble Upon, don’t waste your time on the things that won’t interest them, but use the tips that will grab their attention, and you will see your traffic numbers soar.

Please Write your Review and Stumble My Blog HERE – Thank You :)

Author:
Colin Klinkert