More Article Directories To Bring Traffic, Because Traffic is Money

Here is a site that has a huge list of article directories, and it shows their pagerank right beside them. I recommend submitting each article you write to all of the articles with pagerank 5 and higher. A tactic I use is to focus on submitting a single article to as many worthwhile places as possible. If you submit 10 articles to 10 places (pagerank 5 or higher I'd say), and each submission brings you 10 blog visits a week. Well thats 4000 hits a month. Manage to convert even 1% of that at 10$ a piece (for example) and you just got 400$ from 10 articles. Also for a less conservative example lets do 10 articles, 10 submissions, 40 blog views a week from each. That totals at 16000 a month. Convert 2% of those at 10$ a piece and that is 3200$ a month.
ArticleTrader

Here is another list of article directories that is also good.
Best Article Directories

[Update!] Only a couple days after this post Google released their own article directory called "Google Knols". Odds are very high that this directory will quickly exceed all others because Google will make sure of that. Now is the chance to take advantage of it as soon as possible, because if you didn't already know, the first people who got in on EzineArticles when it came out were hugely successful. You can find it here. Trust me, Google Knols is soon to be the most successful directory in existance, it is growing exponentially as we speak. I have already put 25 of my articles there. The best thing about Google Knols is that since it is FROM Google the articles there will rank higher in Google on average than the other directories, meaning way more search engine traffic to your articles. And as you probably know search engine traffic is where the big money is at.

How to use Google Analytics for detailed site stats

You can register for Google Analytics here. Google Analytics is great for affiliates since a lot of the information can be used to tweak and modify your site to become more profitable.

You can see pageviews, how many of them were unique, how many left as soon as they got there, the average time spent on the site, how many of those visits were completely new people, how much of it was direct traffic (from people typing it in the address bar or from favorites), how much of it was referral traffic from other sites, and how much of it was from Google or other search engines.

So if search engine traffic was the lowest you could decide you wanted to work on that for instance, getting more backlinks or tweak keywords or something.

After registering you will see some HTML code. If your using blogger just go to Layout --> Edit HTML. Use ctrl+F to find the first head tag. And make sure you paste it directly before the head tag. The head tag will say "head" and have a "<" and ">" on the left and right side. So past it directly before the "<"

Great Video About Google and Search Engine Optimization

Man I love this video. It tells you a lot about how Google operates when judging websites. It has a lot of mention of Search Engine Optimization as well. It is about ten minutes long. It appears to be part of a Discovery Channel documentary. This is one of the best videos I have found yet, top quality.


And here is a very short video that explains the "site:" command in Google and how you can use it to view all the pages Google has indexed for your site, if any.


And a third video that tells you how you will do a lot better working with Google than trying to trick them. This may be the best of the three.

How To Choose Profitable Keywords For Your Blog

Alright. These tips are for getting your blog a good place in the search engines. Each blog has "tags" or "keywords" you can enter for each post. You should customize those to the most profitable keywords you can determine. But even tags are not the most important. The title of your blog should contain your most profitable keyword if at all possible. And you should use it as much as you can without it looking wierd, inside the content of your blog. All of this counts for blogs, websites, or anything else in a search engine for that matter.

Now the question is, how do you choose good keywords?

First go to Google Keyword Tool. Think up some words that have to do with your site. For this obviously it would probably be "make money online", "make money with blogs", "earn money online", "get rich online", "affiliate programs", "internet marketing". So forth. Don't be so generalized that it could have too many meanings, like "make money". Because thats not just making money online, but anywhere. You want to get your target audience, you don't want to have to compete against a whole bunch of other websites especially ones that have nothing to do with your subject.

Now just hit the "Go" button or whatever they call it.

Though I have my own complicated methods for searching for keywords, basically I recommend just sorting by the highest monthly volume for this month. Then looking through those and deciding what fits your blog and what doesn't. After you have a list of that, Google each one. On the search results, near the top right, check how many other pages appear for that keyword. That is how much competition you are dealing with. Under 2 million should be good for beginners, as a maximum. There is a formula you can use to figure out just about how easy it might be to get on the front page for that keyword. Just take the monthly traffic rating in the keyword tool, divide it by the number of "competition", and multiply it by 1000 so its easier to read. If that number is greater than 100, most of the time its a reasonable word you could appear on the first page for.

"make money" only has a rating of 31 going by my basic formula
"affiliate marketing program" would have a rating of 250

Another method you can combine, is once you find a good list of keywords, look them up in Google. Look at the best ranking sites for those words, see what keywords they are using, go to them and see why they are so popular. Learn from that and try to implement it yourself, or step it up and do better than them.

Here is a video from a class going over SEO. Its ten minutes long, and most of the useful information is after five minutes. Its long-winded but if you want to watch it odds are you will get something out of it

Link Directories, what they are, how they increase profitability

Link Directories are places where you can submit your link. They are designed to be completely search engine optimized and therefore form strong backlinks to your site.

There are two major free link directories.

DMOZ and Link Directory

DMOZ has the most traffic and is the most popular. Link Directory seems to have a higher Google ranking but less traffic. It is hard to figure out how to submit to DMOZ but Link Directory is much easier. Link Directory however requires you to put a link to them on your site before they will link back to you, which can be kind of annoying. Either way they both help to varying extents, only the people behind them know for sure, but many people say they get good results later on.

Yahoo also has a link directory, but at a cost of 200$, it may not be worth it to those who aren't quite rich yet.

List building - What it is, and how it helps you make more money

List building in Internet Marketing refers to mailing lists. You collect people's emails with a mailing list and are therefore able to send them resources, products, guides, or whatever it is your blog is about.

It may sound like it isn't a big deal, but it is. Because instead of only being able to profit when someone visits your site, you can build a mailing list and also potentially profit every time you send something out to them periodically. With a mailing list you build a devoted and targeted audience that is actually interested in what you have to say, there can't be a more profitable audience than that, just don't take advantage of them.

Now you can't just spam people. Well you can, but people will ignore you and you won't make many sales probably. The goal is to as always give them what they wanted when they signed up for your mailing list anyway. And by that I mean useful information or resources. It doesn't matter if its paid or free, just useful for whatever niche your in. You should make a point to mix free and paid resources together, instead of just taking advantage of their trust to get them to buy stuff. Give them a reason to join your mailing list, such as a free ebook or something. There is nothing like a free and useful product to draw people into a mailing list.

The more useful your site is, the more people will join your mailing list. The more useful your mailing list is, the less people will unsubscribe from it first thing. Now you have a permanent group you can potentially profit from while authentically helping them at the same time. (As long as you take my advice and don't just spam them or take advantage of them)

Getting a mailing list is easy. Like many things it is done through HTML code, which you copy, and paste on your site somewhere. For a blogger blog like this one just create a new HTML "page element" and put it in there.

A great free mailing list can be found at BraveNet. The page that links to has a list of many of the resources they offer, including the free mailing list. Not every resource on there is free of course. BraveNet has a lot of good resources, so I recommend remembering them for later when your more advanced and possibly need what they offer.

I always try to mention the free methods of accomplishing all of this, as long as a free method exists. But in some cases, this being one of them, a paid service called Aweber is much more fully featured and much more popular among internet marketers. Their mailing list is more advanced but it is not free, although it is cheapish.

When your mailing list builds up to about 100+ it will become worth it to occasionally send out resources to them, paid or otherwise. Many people regret not adding a mailing list from the beginning, take that into consideration if you want to skip this step.

Video Marketing, a great way to increase profit

This is so easy and great. If you can get your hands on a decent webcam, and you are good at talking, this is just great.

Youtube. Video mecha of all the internet, pretty much. Over 260'000'000 hits to their site this month alone. An average video collects at least 10'000 hits in a few months. If your making a video about something people care about and you have chosen a great title (titles are extremely important), and done some keyword research and used those keywords for the video. Then you can get hundreds of thousands of views, if the video goes viral, make that millions. Just don't jerk around in your videos, try to get straight to what the watcher wants to hear of 90% of them will leave in 3 seconds. Give the watcher what they wanted, refer them to your site or something, and your good to go. Free nearly guaranteed traffic especially if you did it right.

In addition to keyword research for your video, which almost guarantees it 10'000 hits in 3 months if you do it right, along with choosing an actually good title and topic for your video, there is a way to even further promote it, and increase the chances of possibly going viral. The method I refer to is embedding. On the same page as almost every individual video you will see an embedding link. If you copy that and put it almost anywhere (your website, whatever), then that video will appear there. People will see it, thus increasing its views, thus increasing its prominence in youtube's search results, thus increasing its prominence in Google's search results, all of that results in even more hits and more traffic.

Soon I will begin my own video series, I'll post about that when the time comes.

Submit your URL to many major directories at once

I should have shown this a while ago but oh well. This site lets you submit your URL to Google, Yahoo, MSN Live, and many other search engines and directories for free, and is very simple to use. SubmitExpress

Only submit once. This is not a very important tool but it will get your site indexed fairly quickly if it is not already. If you cannot find your site for any of your keywords in Google, this may help you get there a little bit.

Backlinking is the way to go to get higher pagerank in Google though, so don't think this is a substitute for that. In fact it pales in comparison. The only purpose of this is to get your site indexed in the major search engines if it is not already.

More on Article Directories

As I probably mentioned, EzineArticles, Buzzle, SearchWarp, and GoArticles are the four most popular Article Directories as judged by traffic ratings. But they are all different and each have their own advantages and disadvantages.

EzineArticles, has an extremely long approval process and the strictest posting requirements. Your articles may get denied a few times until you can manage to comply with their relatively strict guidelines. But it undeniably has the most traffic by far and many people swear by it for getting the most traffic to their articles.

AssociatedContent, a very little known directory with little competition in the Internet Marketing niche. This is a good thing for us, because the traffic coming through this directory is second only to EzineArticles.

Buzzle, has less traffic, but their approval is 2 days at most, sometimes next day. Personally I get more traffic to my articles from Buzzle than EzineArticles, probably because the traffic to competition ratio is better on Buzzle than EzineArticles. I highly recommend Buzzle as the primary article directory.

SearchWarp. Its alright, what can I say, the reason its on this list is because it has the 3rd most traffic per month. Worth submitting to.

GoArticles. This is good not only because it has good traffic, but there is little to no approval process. This has the fastest approval of any of the top directories.

Hopefully this helps enlighten you to the advantages and disadvantages of each.

It is important to have good writing and spelling practices when you write your own articles, but if you have some money to spare you can pay someone a little money to write one for you. But be careful, don't pay anyone more than $5, its not worth it, standard price is probably $4. And even that won't be worth it if the article is not properly SEO'd, so you should ask about that as well. And even that won't help you if your page it links to isn't converting at an average or better rate. So be careful if you consider that method. The safest way is to develop your own article marketing tactics and write your own articles, but if money is no object, go for it.

Once you have compelling affiliate programs that you really believe people will want to buy/register for, you may want to consider that method because it will return your investment on average. If you want to try getting somebody else to write your articles, I recommend going to the Warrior Forum, and talking to this guy. Request that the article be no less than 400 words and no more than 600 words. Most experienced people will tell you that 400 to 600 word articles that get straight to the point and tell the reader exactly what they want to know from the start, are the best converting articles with the highest click through rates (CTR).

"Bum Marketing" video

This video shows 5 core steps to making money without spending money. I show you this to clear up any confusion you may still have about how all of this works. It is fairly concise. This particular video shows you how to make money without a website or blog, but I don't recommend that method because more often than not you will be making ten times more money with a base of operations. And without a website or blog you can't combine your efforts with adsense or the many other methods. Just one more step to becoming an Internet Marketing Specialist

The Danger Of Link Theft, How Its Done, And How To Prevent It

I mentioned link cloaking briefly, and said it was complicated for a newbie and not something you need to focus on for some moderate success. Link theft is more common than you think, and one of the best free ways to fully cloak your link is to download The Free Link Cloaker.

There is a video tutorial that goes over most of what you need to know to professionally cloak your links, and here it is:

About Adsense, what it is, why you need it

See those ads at the top and bottom of my blog? That is adsense. Basically for anybody that clicks on one of those I get paid a small amount. Adsense is from Google, all you have to do to register is for to Google's front page and click "Advertising Programs", and register for Adsense. Beside that you will see Adwords, that is different and cost money, but I'll get to it later.

Once registered, basically you get some code that they give you, and put it where you want on your blog. If your using blogger, since blogger is owned by Google, you can link your adsense account with them from somewhere on the blogger page. Then to place the adsense on your blog just create a new adsense page element under layout.

Once logged in to adsense just go to the Adsense Setup tab. Then hit Adsense for Content. You'll go through a couple customization pages but even if you leave it at default settings it is fine, don't worry about channels for now, they are only for tracking purposes. You'll get some code, which you can use anywhere on your website. If your using blogger you don't need the code because they autogenerate it for you once your accounts are linked.

Don't click your own ads, don't get anybody else to click them either. Because they will know. They just won't tell you til payday when they suddenly cancel your account, after you have already wasted all your time.

Here is another video, a guy called Bill McIntosh, he got 3.5 million dollars in 2007 from adsense alone. But his sites are very popular and he has many of them, and he is an expert. Perhaps one day your sites will accumulate that amount of money for you. Its a pretty interesting video, definitely shows you some possibilities. Also his site apparently has some good free info.

Reach 1000 blog impressions

Once you have done enough article marketing, backlink building, and so forth, and your blog reaches 1000 page impressions, you should see some results from there. If you haven't made one commission by then with a high EPC product, then you should start looking at the layout of your page, and start looking at how what your selling is presented, and like my blog you should probably be selling multiple things throughout.

If people don't find what they are looking for right from the start, 70% of them just click right out of the page, that is why it is important to have useful content, as well as actually useful products. Don't give useful content but try to sell a crap product or a product that has nothing really to do with what your content is, because your conversion rate will be extremely bad that way as well.

You should also check if your using the right affiliate link, its rare if you aren't, but make sure you copied it correctly.

If you reach 1000 impressions and still have 0 sales, you need to look at page layout, how you've presented what your selling, and how you've presented your content and if it is useful and gives the reader what they want from the start.

Your blog or website is like the root of your operation, like the foundation of a house, without a good foundation, everything else suffers.

Keywords and Articles

It is important to do some keyword research when choosing keywords for your articles. Google Keyword Tool is just fine for that task.

Simply enter a few keywords about your article, submit it, and Google will return many results. Sort them by average traffic ranking per month, choose only keywords that have a traffic ranking, but yet still have as low of competition as possible. If you do that you should do fairly good, you have to really worry about the competition, because if competition outweighs traffic you still won't get hardly anything.

Keyword research, if you haven't learned already, is important for just about anything that you want to be found on the internet, including articles submitted to article directories. Articles with proper SEO can rake in 100s of views a day. But you should not expect this, as even for a professional there is a highly random aspect with each article, some flop, some go viral.

The Warrior Forum

I've been holding out on this until you learned some basic knowledge of Internet Marketing, because I didn't want to confuse you with everything contained on what I'm about to show you. You shouldn't expect to understand everything there, but this is the Google of Internet Marketers, and when you finally do have the understanding, this forum will be invaluable to you. It contains every secret and method known to man, it has 1000s of members, everyone helps everyone.

I will continue to post more guides and resources here, but there are many more to be found at The Warrior Forum

More Ways To Build Quality Backlinks

This is an article I wrote on Buzzle earlier. I thought it was better than my old article so I'm posting it here. Perhaps it will give further insight. You can never know too much and IM is about putting your knowledge into action.

"The idea behind backlinks is that if your site is providing quality information, then other sites will link to yours, thus increasing your popularity and ranking among the search engines, particularly Google, thus boosting your traffic.

There is more to building backlinks than just spamming your URL across the internet. Google compares titles and keywords and content of sites that contain your URL, if they seem irrelevant then Google will give very little consideration to that backlink. On the other hand the more relevant it deems each site, the stronger the backlink becomes. Another consideration is the popularity of the site containing your URL, if the site is not popular at all, the backlink won’t do much at all. On the other hand the more popular it is, the stronger your backlink is. Relevance and popularity combined form a very strong backlink, and the more backlinks you get the more popular your site becomes and the higher you show up in the search results. Backlinks are said to be the prime factor in how Google determines the placement of your site, so you should not ignore them.

Method 1: The natural way. I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but have useful quality content on your site, that way people will link to it naturally. But of course this helps none if you’re a beginner or your site has no popularity at all yet. It won’t just take off on its own of course, but this is a very powerful method later on once your better established.

Method 2: Site Directories. DMOZ and Yahoo Directory are the most popular and form the strongest backlinks. If you want to get known on the web it is essential that you register with both directories. Just Google DMOZ and Yahoo Directory they’ll be the first results. Getting registered with these directories takes time, months, but it’s free worth it.

Method 3: Forum and Blog comments. Perhaps you know of a forum or blog that has the same general category as yours. Put your blog in your forum signature and respond to a couple posts in those forums. For blogs, just post a comment on the most popular ones and somehow include your URL. Google indexes forums and blog comments, so these backlinks are valuable as long as the forum or blog you posted in is relevant and popular.

Method 4: Articles. There are article directories all over the internet. The 3 most popular are EzineArticles.com, Buzzle.com, and SearchWarp.com. They have 8’000’000, 1’300’00, and 800’000 views respectively this month alone. Basically what you do, is register at each, write an article that has something to do with the same category as your website or blog, this can be a review, or whatever. Just make sure your reader will find it interesting, that’s the most important part. Once done, you will usually see some sort of “resource box” where you can leave a link to your website or blog, you should include some incentive at the end of the article to go there, or at least let the reader know it exists. This is a very powerful method to build traffic and backlinks. Even a very poor article will get a minimum of 30 hits in a week, and each article is another backlink to your site. A well Search Engine Optimized article with a well chosen niche can get hundreds of views a day, with over 40% click through rate.

The power of building backlinks should not be ignored. If you ignore it, you ignore it at your own peril. Backlinks are one of the most important factors in long-term permanent traffic, perhaps the most important. Combined with the other aspects such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) you can have a very popular, and profitable site."

Best place to register and host domains for affiliates

The best place to get a domain registered for affiliates, as many successful affiliates will tell you, is HostGator.com

It starts at $8 a month with unlimited domain hosting, and is really all you need. As I have mentioned to make even more money you will need an actual domain, and a good place for it to be hosted. The reason Host Gator is a great choice is because its low cost and pretty fully featured, without being overcomplicated. Basically it just outshines the competition.

With a real domain and web hosting in your arsenal, your money making potential is much higher than with a blog. You have full customization over the name of your URL, site organization, keywords and other SEO stuff. All of this, especially having a catchy, relevant URL is extremely important to success and higher search engine rankings.

[Update] In fact it seems Host Gator now has a $5 hosting plan, I don't know how long that will last but if you want to take advantage of it, well, you know where it is. Good luck.

EPC, what it is, what it does, and why you should care

As I mentioned briefly before, EPC stands for Earnings per 100 Clicks. I'll try to explain it as simply as possible but it can be hard to understand. EPC is a stat listed on most individual affiliate programs, if not, it can be figured manually. Basically, it is conversion rate combined with commission in a certain way, to show you what you can expect to earn when a certain amount of people see your link. One thing that confused me, is I thought that they PAID me that amount for every 100 clicks, boy was I wrong. So don't get confused and think that, because thats not what it means.

So lets say a program gives a commission of 20$. Its Earnings per 100 Clicks is also 20$. That means on average, the people selling this product got 1 full sale for every 100 clicks. 1 sale in 100 clicks is 1% conversion rate. If you can remember that a product having the same EPC as its commmission means 1% conversion rate, your already doing good.

Lets say your still confused and you see some freaky product that gives 15$ commission, and the EPC is 1$. That is a 0.067% conversion rate. Terrible.

The math for figuring out conversion rate from just commission and EPC is this:
EPC/Commission = Conversion%. "EPC divided by Commission = Conversion%". So 20/20 = 1%. 20/5 = 0.25%.

To figure out EPC from Commission and Conversion, since some programs don't list EPC, you can find it out like:
Commission*Conversion%. "Commission multiplied by Conversion%". So a program that pays 20$ commission and has a conversion of 5%, has an EPC of 20*5, or 100$. A program like that would be great, if it exists. This formula for figuring out EPC when none is listed is VERY important. EPC is the main criteria for determining how much money that program is making others, and most likely how much it will make you.

What we should have done by now

By now, you should have registered at an affiliate directory, get familiar with how they work. There is only one way to do that, practice of course. You should choose a nice program to promote, if you chose Clickbooth I recommend you sort by EPC, since it pretty much represents the profit potential for the least amount of effort, and high demand, and conversion rate. You should do some slight research on that program, find keywords for it using the keyword tool, and use those keywords on your blog. This will also tell you how much overall competition you may be dealing with in your niche.

Then you should have a blog atleast. Most likely a review or how-to blog. You should practice with the systems to familiarize yourself with your chosen blog platform. Make your blog nice. Try to integrate as seamlessly as possible your review, or how-to guide, with your affiliate program link. You must actually provide useful content, and at the end give them the program that will solve all their problems, and make sure they KNOW it will solve their problems.

You should have put into practice some of the traffic generation methods I mentioned. I recommend Article Marketing and submitting your URL to search engines and other such places atleast.

There is of course a delay in visually seeing the progress you have made. You may not notice your effort from submitting your URL for over a month, possibly more, but sometimes less. I got lucky and my blog was indexed in Google in less than a day, this seems to rarely happen. Just don't give up and think your efforts are in vain just because you don't see instant results. Most things in internet marketing have massive delays between the time that you performed the action and its results.

I will be moving onto more advanced methods soon.

GOOD LUCK!

Get a Free Hit Counter for your Blog

If you register an account at BraveNet, which is completely free, you will have access to a number of resources that they provide for webmasters. Once there click on "home" to see a list of all the things they can give you. Some of their resources are free, some aren't. The hit counter there is free. All you have to do is go through the hit counter setup process (which may be quite complex if your a newbie), at the end you will be given some HTML code. All you do is copy that code and place it somewhere inside the HTML code of your website. If your on blogger, just create a new HTML page element, under layout, and paste it there and drag it wherever you want.

Once you have this setup you will be able to track your stats for your site on BraveNet as well as see how many visitors you have on your website.

Link Cloaking - What it is, and Why you need to do it

Alright, so by now if you've signed up for any affiliate program you realize that every sale is made through some sort of link, assigning your affiliate account to that program each time someone clicks it.

So the problem? Affiliate links, sometimes, are very ugly. Especially clickbank links. A lot of people won't click it because of this, and a few other people see that it is an affiliate link and decide not to click it. You need not cloak all links, some are very pretty, such as ones from Linkshare, which is another major affiliate network. It isn't even necessary to cloak a clickbank link, but it WILL increase conversions (sales). Another reason to cloak links, particularly in clickbank's case, is what is referred to as Link Theft. Link Theft is when somebody sees your link, and replaces your clickbank ID with theirs, so they can buy the product and get the commission as a sort of "discount". This is more common than you may think.

So that is why it is important to cloak your links.
The simplest link cloaker is the Add Me Link Cloaker, its free. Basically you enter your affiliate link, below that put the text you want it to display as, such as "Click Here" or something. Then below that put pretty much the same thing. Hit the button an some red code will appear, that is your cloaked link. Paste it anywhere on your blog or whatever and it'll appear as "Click Here". This is not very advanced link cloaking and if someone knew about affiliate programs already they could easily change it. But it will look pretty and people will be more willing to click it.

Your next option is better but more complicated. The Free Link Cloaker. Basically you must download that, and upload it into the root of your domain. If you do not have a domain you cannot even use it. Basically it forms a redirect at your domain, so you can assign your very own URL to use for affiliate purposes. I wouldn't call this a necessity especially for newbies, given the choice above, but maybe later huh?

The best option though, is the paid one, which is sometimes the case in internet marketing. So if you ever find you have the funds and want to optimize your campaigns to the max, and make sure there is no way for someone to hijack your links. Visit the Official Affiliate Link Cloaker Website.

Five Best Ways to Build Backlinks

Building backlinks to your blog, or any other website for that matter, is a very important step that should not be ignored. At some point you will need to build more backlinks.

A backlink is simple a link from another website pointing to yours. They bring more traffic to your site. They are a very important factor in how Google will determine your PageRank. And they help improve your placing on every other search engine.

Now without further adieu, the five best ways to build backlinks.

1: Directory Submission. This should be one of the first steps you take in building backlinks to your site. Odds are you will not see hardly any traffic from these directories, the point is to simply build backlinks, so you basically have a higher PageRank, and that is what will bring you traffic. Make sure you only submit to directories that have a high pagerank, if its page rank is less than 8 I wouldn’t even think about it. Try to find ones with pagerank 1 through 5. A lot of directories require you to make a reciprocal link, which means in order for them to display you, you have to put a bit of code in your site to display them, I recommend staying away from these.

Here is a blog directory, scroll down to the very bottom. Blog Directory

And a general directory. Here

SEO friendly directories. Here

High PageRank directories without reciprocal links. Here

2: Social Bookmarking Sites

Sites like digg, del.icio.us, and reddit may be good for traffic, but they are also very good at building backlinks. I was surprised when I first started to, to me social networking sites were useless. But they do work, for this. This is a lot like article marketing, you submit articles on your social bookmarking account about your blog and niche. And go to AddThis.com to get social bookmarking buttons to add to your blog. If you are lucky enough to make it to the front page of any of these social networking sites you can expect to benefit greatly from it. You can find a list of social networking sites here, but the mains ones in my opinion are squidoo, delicious, and technorati.

3: Leave comments on other people’s blogs. Just make sure you pick high pagerank blogs and blogs that are similar to your blog’s content.

4: Mention your blog wherever you go on the internet. Forum signatures, myspace, youtube comments. Anything. It all helps.

5: Have quality content. If you can provide something legitimately useful or outclass the others in your field, it WILL get noticed and it WILL get spread across the internet like wildfire. Useful content is priceless.

Five Main Ways to Get Traffic Now

Hey, this is not part of the main courses. But it is useful and later you will probably refer back to it. It gives a short description of five ways to get the most traffic now, without spending any money. A friend of mine wrote this, and I thought I would display it here in my own words since it contains useful information.

1: Write articles about your site and its content and submit it to the many article directories that exist across the internet. This may sound pointless to a newbie, I know it did for me, but its one of the best free ways to get traffic. It is easy to get 100+ views just from one article. Keep in mind the best performing articles are between 400 and 600 words, so don’t overdo it or your traffic may suffer. You submit articles to the popular directories for traffic, but you submit them to smaller directories for back-links (I suggest an auto-submitter of some kind for the small directories, it isn’t worth it by hand, and it wont bring you an ounce of traffic directly). Now if your going to submit by hand, I suggest the 3 most popular (by traffic ratings) directories, they are:
EzineArticles.com (8’000’000 hits this month)
Buzzle.com (1’200’000 hits this month)
GoArticles.com (400’000 hits this month)
Ezine-Articles brings the most traffic but has the strictest submission requirements. GoArticles brings decent traffic and has little to no submission requirements. And of course Buzzle is mid-road. And to submit them to the smaller directories, I submit using ArticleSender.com, with their free service it will blast your article to over 11’000 directories. Keyword research is just as important in getting traffic to your articles as it is for getting traffic to your site, remember that if you want your articles to perform their best, but keyword research is another topic entirely.

2: Submit your site to search engines if you haven’t already. Google doesn’t just magically know your site exists, you have to manually submit it or use a program to auto-submit it. If you have a blog, pingomatic.com will submit it to many directories and they will help to build traffic and back-links in the long run. It can take over a month for Google to include your site anywhere in their listing, because they don’t re-index their search results often. This is a big one, but it can take time. To submit your URL to Google visit Google.com/AddURL.

3: Submit videos to youtube and metacafe about your site or niche. Even the least popular videos on youtube accumulate 1000 views eventually, and if you do it right you can get much more than that. It need not be anything complicated, you just need to get straight to the point, no jerking around, and give them what they wanted when they clicked your video in the first place. Youtube has had 250’000’000 views this month alone. Metacafe has had 15’000’000 and there is less competition.

4: Find questions in Yahoo Answers that somehow pertain to your site or niche. Answer them with a link to your site. Yahoo Answers ranks very highly in Google so this is a good way to get both traffic and back-links. A questions indicates that there is demand there for what you are offering.

5: Find blogs that appear highly in google search, and ones that are related to your site, and leave comments on them with a link to your site. This works better than you would think and builds precious back-links.

Those are the main five, but you should develop the habit of trying to mention your site, even in a passive way, everywhere you trail on the internet. Whether it be in the signature of a forum you visit often, Myspace, Facebook, Craigslist, comments that you leave on youtube, and anywhere else you can think of. It takes little effort to do these smaller steps but all together they are worthwhile and can form a considerable chunk of your traffic, but focus on the big methods first.

There are many other ways to get traffic, but if you master these 5 you will be doing well. Also you should look into keyword research, I will be writing an article for that soon enough. In the long run don’t try to do everything on your own, one of the best methods of getting traffic that I have found is working in a team with someone else who has the same goal that you do, it will increase your progress exponentially as long as you keep up with each other. These are only free ways to get traffic, PPC (Pay-per-Click) would be a likely next step once you have enough income to cover it. But that is another topic altogether.

Basics of Article Marketing - List of Directories

Article Marketing is when your write and article about anything and then submit it to any of the many article directories that exist across the internet. To do this your article must contain useful content. Something that benefits the reader in some way. It can't just be a sales letter. Now the remaining question is, how do you monetize an article while still providing useful content?

When writing an article you should have good writing skills or most of the highest traffic directories will not accept the article. Basically, good grammar.

Some article directories are used primarily for traffic, while others are used to build backlinks but probably won't draw much traffic.

If you are going to manually submit articles stick to the most popular directories so you will get lots of traffic. It isn't worth it to waste time submitting to places where you won't see any traffic, just to build backlinks.

Here are the top 3 directories in order of traffic:

EzineArticles.com - 8'000'000 views this month.
Buzzle.com - 1'200'000 views
GoArticles.com - 400'000 views

EzineArticles is the most popular hands down. But also it has the strictest posting requirements. You should learn their guidelines because an accepted post by them would draw 100s of views per day just from one article.

Buzzle is very nice because its like a balance of strictness and traffic.

GoArticles has almost no regulation on its acceptance so its very nice to use for newbies.

I suggest to use all 3, no matter how advanced you get.

Now when you submit articles you will see a "resource box", you can post 2, or at some, 3 links in your resource box. The first link should be to your blog. For the second link, I learned a little trick for that, link them to an URL that contains links to all your sites, or articles that you have ever written. This will form backlinks for everything else you have ever written on every new article you post. Some of your traffic to your article will be from people searching in the directory, if it gets on the front page of the directory it will give a lot more traffic, if a popular site uses your article on their site it will provide even more substantial traffic. But the most important thing is to have your articles show up highly in Google for the keywords and title you have chosen. A good way to do this is to form backlinks to your articles, since that is the main criteria Google currently uses to judge the placement of your site. If you can submit a 3rd site, make something up, as long as its relevant and benefits you and your reader in some way.

To be successful you must devote yourself to writing one article a day for the next 30 days, 400 to 600 words each, and submitting them to the top 3, if not top 5 directories (which I have now made a post about further up). Personally I recommend that you get used to writing 2 to 3 articles per day, but 1 is manageable and if you have written and submitted 30 articles in 30 days to 3 places each, you will see traffic and sales on your site by the end of those 30 days which should then provide you the motivation you need to continue.

In the worst case scenario each of your articles should get 50 views each that month (That is a very conservative estimate, I'd actually be very surprised if an article only got 50 views in 1 month). Out of those 50 views at least 10 people should click through to your blog, assuming you made the article actually provide useful information (If you did not, then don't expect hardly any clicks to your blog). So at the end of those 30 days you have written 30 articles to 3 directories, with 50 views on each. 30x3x50 = 4500. You should have gotten at least 4500 total combined article views. If 20% of those clicked through to your blog, that is 900 blog views. Assuming once more that you have provided just as useful information on your blog as the reader expected from your article (which is why they clicked through in the first place), then you should convert about 1% of those as long as you properly utilized your affiliate link and were convincing enough while still providing useful information and-or resources. So if you converted 1% of 900 you made 9 sales. Lets say you get 10$ per sale (Thats also a very cheapo estimate), then you made 90$. 90$ isn't a lot, but this are -extremely- conservative estimates, AND remember this would theoretically be just your first month. In the second month with just as much work sales and traffic would quadruple.

Now lets take some professional estimates. A professional who has been at this 6 months or more writes 1 article a day for 30 days. Because this professional has knowledge of SEO, Keyword, and niche research he is able to get 600 views a month from 1 article. So with his 30 articles combined he has 18'000 views. Because he provides very useful content in his articles and has become great at writing them and shows the reader what they wanted to see in the first place, he is able to get 40% of readers to click through to his blog. So he would get 7'200 blog views combined after all his articles ran for 1 month (I forgot to mention in the paragraph before this but these statistics are considering every single article ran for one month, which couldn't happen in 30 days because you only wrote 1 a day for 30 days so the last 10 you wrote couldn't have possibly ran for more than 10 days). Now because his blog is so good and written in a way that makes it not only easy and convenient, but enticing to purchase whatever affiliate program he is going on about, he is able to convert 3% of the people who visit. And his affiliate programs pay an average commission of 20$ for this example. 3% of 7'200 is 216. 216 multiplied by 20$ is 4'300$. From these statistics after he left all 30 articles running for 30 days each, combined those articles would have generated 4'300$ for this guy. These are average estimates for those with the knowledge, professionals can have a new blog up and running and making thousands of dollars by the time their first month ends. By the time that blog is 6 months old it would be making at least 10'000$ a month. If he left it to work on another blog or was working on multiple ones simultaneously, and made his way up to 10 blogs. He would be a millionaire by the time the year ended.

If you work 2 hours for the next year. And as long as you possess at least average learning ability combined with the will to stand up and take action, and never give up, never slack. You will be making six figure income by the time those 12 months end. If you dedicate those 2 hours a day for the next 4 months you should be able to calculate a 5 figure income of at least 20'000$ a year from your current statistics, depending on a combination of luck combined with intelligence combined with determination, you could reach that goal on the 2nd or 3rd month and be able to calculate 20'000$ per year income, because 4 months was a conservative estimate. Every estimate I make is conservative from now on, just remember that.

It is also important to remember that 90% of your past efforts will continue to work for you for at least another year (conservative estimate yet again) after you did it. Articles stick around for a long time, successful ones for sometimes 5 years. So in your first month you may not make much, in your second month you will make about 4x more minimum. Next month 3x more. Then about 2x more. Then about 1.5x more. Then a little more, and a little more. In 6 months your blogs potential is at a very high point, but it can forever be improved if you want.

Backlinks explained - Keywords further explained

Backlinks and Keywords are main parts of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO's simplest definition is making a website available to search engines and making sure they rank as highly as possible.

About keywords. You assign your own keywords, but search engines also filter through the articles on your site and use them for keywords as well, and they also use your sites own URL for keywords. In fact your URL as a keyword is very important. At best your URL should be relevant to what type of content your site contains, it should also not be overly complex or hard to remember or type. An URL of course, is the address of your site, like blah.com or something. Google takes your manually chosen keywords into consideration and their value should not be underestimated, but Google also considers your URL and all text on your site for keywords as well.

Backlinks are a term I have used often but have not yet explained. A backlink is any link on the internet pointing back to your site. This is good for many reasons. First it is good because anyone who sees that link may click it. A less obvious reason is because when the google "spider" "crawls" the internet, it will count links pointing back to your site, and this increases your page rank, among other good things. So the more places that have your URL listed, the better.

The basic methods to gain traffic for your blog

Note that these are not the only ways to get traffic, in fact there are much more. But these are what I believe to be the most basic methods.

1) Make sure the information on your site is actually useful. Because the more useful it is, the further it will spread by "word of mouth", which causes a chain reaction. One person mentions it on the internet, atleast 10 other people see it, and it just keeps branching off. At this stage you do not really have to worry about this, just make sure that you have the content as quality as YOU can get it. I mention this stage because although it isn't really "basic", it is core. So later on remember this, when you can provide more useful content. Do it.

2) Article Marketing. There is an entire branch of marketing in which you write articles about something, then post it in what is called an "Article Directory". This is the best free traffic you can get, and I will give details on this in another post. You can get between hundreds and thousands of hits for one article depending on what your skill is. Some of the real pros have over 10'000 views from 1 article. You can get over 100 in just one day. This will require its own seperate post. This is the most important method to gain traffic that I have mentioned here.

3) If you are a member of any forum, include a link to your blog in your signatures. This will bring little traffic PROBABLY but it is worth it because it is easy, as long as your an active member in that forum.

4) Do mention your blog in a post on craigslist. Just make sure to adhere to craigslist's rules.

5) On Yahoo answers, if possible, search for questions that are relevant to your site, answer them and include a link to your site. Yahoo answers has a very high page ranking.

6) Leave comments on blogs that you know of and blogs that rank high in google search, leave a link to your site.

7) Submit your site to Google and other search engines. Google does not have your site listed with them automatically, you have to manually add it. But that is not the case with blogger.com, since it is owned by google your blog is automatically submitted. But for future reference, remember this. If you move away from blogger (and eventually you will have to if you want to increase your profits) you will need to submit your URL of your site monthly for best results. There is a service that does this automatically for you, faster and better than what can be done by hand. It submits it monthly for you to many search engines and directories. If you ever decide you need it, you can find it here.

There are many other ways to get traffic but these should be plenty to keep you busy for a while. I recommend you read the upcoming post on Article Marketing.

Also number 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 all build backlinks. This will be explained in a short upcoming post.

A useful free tool for submitting your blog to blog directories is Pingomatic.com. Basically you put the name of your blog, its address, then check all available boxes and submit it. Results are not instant but it is worth it. Remember, the rest of the internet doesn't just magically know you exist, same as google. You have to TELL them you exist. This tool will help with that.

More about niches and the importance of keywords

Things are going to start getting harder soon.

As said, a niche is basically a topic for your site. There is much more than meets the eye when considering a niche, and I will bring that to light.

*Things to consider when choosing a niche*
How much competition is in the niche
Are there actually a good amount of buyers in that niche?

You can choose a niche, and there may not be any competition, your the top of the game. But whats this? The reason there is no competition is because there are no buyers. You will barely make a dime in this niche.

Then again, you choose a niche that has so much high-ranking competition that there is no chance your blog will EVER show up with all the other big names there.

You may discover a nice niche, that is undiscovered by mainstream internet marketers, yet still has good buyers. That would be great.

Now I am sure your wondering, "How do I begin searching for a niche anyway?". Time to get to that. But first I must explain the importance of keywords.

Keywords, are any words or sentences searched by a person, in any search engine, or any website. It is how you find what you are looking for. Walmart for example, how do you think that when you type "walmart" in google, that the walmart site actually comes up? Because google searches keywords, every site has a keyword, and walmart.com along with other sites have "walmart" listed among their many keywords. Lets say you entered "walmart" in your blog's keywords (ignoring the fact that the keyword is probably completely irrelevant to your blog), it would not show up in google for that keyword because there is simply too much competition, and their pageranks outclass yours. Nobody searching for walmart in google will ever find your site, ever. That is why keywords are so important, by picking certain keywords, you improve your placing in search results, and therefore traffic.

Keywords are a key factor in finding a good niche. Here is a tool that you can use to see the traffic and competition, among other things, for keywords: Google Keyword Tool. Only the traffic and competition ratings are relevant to what we are talking about. You will see many more stats than just those when using this tool. That is because this tool is not only used for the purpose we are using it for, but many, many other things that we will get to on down the line.

It is very important that your keywords are relevant to the content of your site, while still having many keywords. It is not bad to have a keyword that has high competition, but a keyword like that would not be considered a "main" keyword at this stage in your blogs development. Rather the keywords you should pay attention to are ones that have the lowest competition possible, while still having a traffic rating.

I am not saying to exclude those keywords that have super high competition, or to exclude the ones that have hardly any traffic, I am merely saying you should not consider those to be main keywords that you focus on, as they will most likely not be ones that perform best for you later on. Basically, as long as the keywords are relevant to your site's content, use them ALL. Every single one that the keyword tool provides.

Since you are actually selling a product, you want to attract people that are actually going to buy, so if your selling "snacky smores", you could indeed have "snacky smores" as a keyword for your site. But if you use "buy snacky smores", you attract people who are actually going to buy, because they actually searched for that in google. And remember, synonyms are very important, if snacky smores were also referred to by customers as "snores" to shorten it, use that too. And since you have "buy snacky smores" use synonyms on buy, like "purchase snacky smores" "purchase snores", "get snacky smores", "purchase snacky smores", "where to find snacky smores" or whatever.

Basically when you choose a niche, you should make sure you will be able to find enough knowledge on that niche to write credible information about it. And that there is not too much competition for every keyword available, or too little traffic for every keyword available. And because of that, you end up with a blog that has at least moderately useful information combined with keywords that will draw atleast some traffic.

Do not underestimate the power of keyword research. It is very important, especially later on once you have a real grasp of what it is. Now the Google Keyword Tool is fine and all, but a paid keyword research tool like Keyword Elite is invaluable, especially later on. Because it will give you much more results, and more accurate information than a free one. And I know you may not know this, being that you are in the beginning stages of becoming an Internet Marketer, but what I just posted IS an affiliate link! Surprised? If you were to buy Keyword Elite from that link, I would make 97$. So I am even making money from this very site. Thats what you have to do, monetize every situation, but you need somebody to teach you how. Luckily that is what I am here for. Keyword Elite's landing page (Sometimes abbreviated LP, basically means the first page someone sees when coming to your site) is undeniably crappy, but affiliate marketer's stand by the usefulness of the program. So there ya go.

Next we will learn how to draw some traffic to your blog.

Putting your blog and affiliate link together

By now you have basic knowledge of Affiliate Directories, and you have a Blog serving as your central way of selling them. Now it is time to put them together. Now I will say, it is very important to sound credible on your blog, and make sure you relate to the people in the niche you have chosen. You can't be obviously ignorant of what you are talking about or you won't make many sales. Its like some guy reviewing a plasma television saying "it has like, a big screen and like, its all flat 'n stuff, i dunno man it like fits in my bedroom all nice and junk i really like it" It doesn't really say why that TV is better than the TV that they own or anything really, your just saying you like your TV. Just don't try too hard to be selling it to them, they are human beings, just like you, they know a sales pitch when they see it. Just give them real and useful information. Another tip in everything you write, keep it relatively short, or divided into short sections. Its a proven fact that an overly long article will suffer in traffic ratings. 400 to 600 words is optimum.

So the easiest way to put your Affiliate programs and your Blog together, is to review those programs. You do not have to own those programs to review them, search google about some general information on your product, or things like your product. Like if its ringtones (I don't recommend those but its an example) you don't have to search for the exact product your advertising, but rather ringtones in general. Use whatever information you find to review that product. The only requirement is that it actually be useful to the reader.

I know this is like the 5th post and you haven't made any money yet. As I said, there is a lot to learn first. 90% of the difficulty is at the beginning, and it is mostly learning and attempting to put into practice what you have learned.

If I had to rank the difficulty of what we are learning on a scale of 1 to 10, compared to what is yet to come, we are still in the 1s. Just know what to expect.

Making a blogger.com blog

You will need to make a simple blog to begin making money. It is very important. In fact I could say it is a core aspect, and without it, your money making potential is limited.

It is better to have an actual domain registered so you can have full customization of every aspect of your site. But to keep it simple, lets use blogger.com.

But before that, I recommend you make a google account. If you already have a google account, good. But if not, go to google.com. Once their hit "Gmail". Click the big "Create an account" button. Now since blogger is owned by google, you can use that to register there as well, and have it all on one account.

It is very important to have a google account, I highly recommend you get one as it is essential to the later stages of Internet Marketing that I will teach you, the later stages are the most profitable and you will regret it if you ignore this warning. It is also recommended because it keeps many of your assets under one simple google account.

Its not important what kind of web address you choose for your blog, RIGHT NOW. But I will get to that later.

When you log into blogger. You will see 3 tabs at the top. Posting. Settings. And Layout. Layout will let you customize your blogs appearance. Settings will allow you to change stuff like the name of your blog and its address among other things. Posting is what you will use to make and edit posts. Clicking one of the 3 main tabs will open various subtabs, I recommend exploring those as well, they appear directly below the 3 main tabs once clicked.

It should be pretty straightforward.

Now you may be wondering why you need a blog. Basically you will choose a category for your blog, which is referred to as a "niche". Then you will find affiliate programs pertaining to your niche, and "review" them or something. Reviewing is the most simple way to go about it. Then at the end of your review you put the affiliate link so they can go there and actually buy the product if they were interested. There is an entire art devoted to this, and we will get into it later.

[edit] Hey, found a nice video showing you step by step, probably better than all this reading. Here ya go.

Internet Marketing terminology explained!

Affiliate - Refers to someone who sells another person's program for a cut of the sale.

Affiliate Directory - Refers to a place where you can find a bunch of programs to sell and take a cut of the sale, all in one place.

Affiliate Marketing - A subcategory of Internet Marketing referring to the art of actually selling the affiliate program you are registered with.

Internet Marketing - A broad term encompassing everything we are doing here. Everything we are doing is internet marketing. Emphasis on marketing. You are an internet marketer.

Pagerank - Websites have a pagerank, this is determined by google. The higher your pagerank the further up in search engines you will appear. Higher pagerank can increase your traffic exponentially, but don't go thinking it is the only source of traffic.

Keyword - Many things on the internet have keywords, keywords are placed in by the person who made the website/article or whatever else was placed there by a Human being to be found by another Human being on the internet. In terms of a website, you, the owner, would define keywords that you want your site to show up for. In an internet marketing (IM) sense, keywords are very important and complex. You may choose a keyword that has tons of competition, so much competition that you stand no chance of being seen on the first page of google search results. I'll get into this later.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Google is a search engine, of course. Basically this means customizing your site so that it is more "Google friendly". There are many ways to do this, one method is keyword optimization, which refers to picking many relevant keywords that are chosen to get above the competition for those keywords.

CTR (Click-through Rate). Refers to the percentage of people who saw your affiliate link, and actually clicked it.

CPA / CPC / CPS (Cost per Action, Cost per Click, Cost per Sale): These are a bit confusing, they are of no "cost" to you, instead of cost it should be replaced with the word "pay", like "pay per sale". Refers to the amount you get for either a sale, action, or click by the customer. Some affiliate programs you will find, pay you for clicks to your link, not sales (do not click your own link, they will know, you wont get caught maybe the first 3 times because they assume it was by accident, but still). Others pay you by "actions", this action could mean a number of things, they could pay you if the customer enters their email, or some other action. Most affiliate programs you will be dealing with at this early stage is per sale.

I believe those are the only relevant terms to what we are learning right now. I want to keep it simple. We will encounter more as it becomes relevant.

How to use your chosen affiliate directory

[edit] To register with an affiliate directory you may need a website/blog. With clickbooth you definitely will. Start a simple blogger.com blog, and use its address as your site for now. I will explain why you need a website later, it is a key tool for most things you will be doing. It shouldn't be too hard to set up a blogger blog, but I will make a post after this explaining.

Another basic piece of information that was so hard to find for me when I first started out. I am a teacher by nature, and when I look at all these other guides about how to make money online I see a lot of basic information going unsaid that confuses the student more than anything, and slows the learning process by at least ten fold. I will try to go out of my way to remember the things that held me up when I was a newbie, and make sure to tell them to you.

Alright, lets assume you chose Clickbank, if you didn't, skip this paragraph. Login. You will see a basic statement about how much money you made and when you made it. Not important. At the top right you will see a link that says "Marketplace", click it. You should be brought to a screen that lets you filter through affiliate programs by selecting categories and such to browse by. Choose a category, but at "Sort by:" filter them by "High Gravity". "Gravity" refers to a rating of how much money was made using that program in the last month, and is a general rating of the quality and success of that program above all others. It also means there is more competition. But overall higher gravity is better. Click "Go". You will get a bunch of results of different programs you can join, you can click the "view pitch page" link under each of them to see what your going to be selling. Now you will want to skip over anything that looks shady, because on clickbank, it probably is! That is why I actually go with clickbooth. So anyway, if you find something that you yourself are interested in, that is what is important. Now another confusing part that people neglect to tell newbies: Affiliate programs are sold by links, you take a link that is customized just for you, when people click on it and buy it from that link, you get the commission from the sale. Clickbank called their links "hoplinks", I think its stupid but, whatever haha. So anyway, if you find something you are interested in, click "Create Hoplink". Enter your user name if it asks, do not enter a tracking ID. You will see two links. The first one is a standard link. The second one is a bit of code that if inserted into websites (and some other places) will show "Click here!" instead of the actual address that is being clicked. I am guessing at this stage you want the first one. Now under each program description you will see certain stats, and here are their explanations:

1. $Earned/Sale: Average amount earned per sale.
2. %Earned/Sale: The % of the sale that you receive as a commission. This number should only vary if the publisher has changed their payout percentage over time.
3. %Referred: This is how many of the programs sales come from affiliates, as a percentage.
4. Gravity: Number of affiliates who earned a commission in the past 8 weeks or something like that. The higher the better.

Anyway that is basically all you do at an affiliate directory. Find a program, get a link. All the advertising takes place elsewhere and will be covered later.

Oh I forgot about Clickbooth, well. Login. On the front page is nothing really important. Click on Programs & Links. Don't set any categories just hit Submit. You will see a lot of programs, to the right you will see "EPC", click it to sort the programs by highest EPC. EPC is one of the most important terms in choosing a program, it means Earnings per 100 Clicks. So if a program costs $10, and its EPC is $1, then it takes about 1000 clicks to make 1 sale with that program, which comes out to a conversion rate of 0.1%, quite bad for this example haha. Yea I know, math bad. But you don't really have to worry about that, higher EPC = good. It basically means its easier to sell, and the public is more interested in it. If your not too good at math, if an EPC is the same as the amount of money you get for commission, then the conversion rate is 1%. Now I am using a lot of fancy terms here, I SHOULD have made a post before this to explain Internet Marketing terms, but I didn't. So that is what my next post will be. So after you have sorted by EPC, choose a program that you like, and click it. For some programs you must register and be approved individually by them, basically they inspect your website and may or may not accept you. But for most, you will see a bunch of banners and links. The banners and links here are harder to use than Clickbank's, but with my help it shouldn't be that bad. There are a lot of choices. Nearly all have what is called a "contextual link", this is what you will be placing on your website if you are going to advertise it there and want it to look like a direct link. Also you have multiple banners to choose from. To use any of these you copy and paste the text code it gives you. You do not need to understand this code at all, it is just html, copy it as-is to wherever you want it to be displayed. That is all you will be using affiliate directories for, choosing a program, and getting a link for that program. What to do with that link will be covered in other posts.

Register at an Affiliate Directory - First step to making anything

Q: What is an Affiliate Program?
A: An affiliate program is the primary vehicle we will be using to make money starting out. Almost every popular website that exists on the internet made by regular non-corporation people like you and me, has affiliate programs and makes money from their site using affiliate programs combined with other strategies. Many companies provide affiliate programs, less commonly called referral programs. Even Wal-Mart and Netflix have affiliate programs. An affiliate directory contains hundreds of affiliate programs from different companies in one place for convenience. Affiliate Programs usually pay upwards of 50% of the profit to you or a static price. Affiliate programs are sold through affiliate links, which the programs will provide for you. Below are some popular directories.

Clickbank.com. This is the most basic of affiliate directories. There are many programs listed, and many other Affiliates (like you) who are advertising them. Clickbank mostly has "digital products", which are usually ebooks, ebooks are usually how-to guides. Clickbank is the easiest to use of the affiliate directories. To register there you only need rudimentary information and it is free. If you want an easy place to start, this is it. This is also the most popular affiliate directory, but that doesn't mean it is the best.

Clickbooth.com. This is the one I recommend. I think it is just as easy to use as Clickbank. But the real reason I recommend this is because the programs are much better, higher quality, and higher paying. Clickbooth needs some more detailed information than Clickbank, possibly, but they are all legitimate places and nobody has had any problem out of them yet.

Those are the two best, Clickbank is easy, Clickbooth is quality. Frankly I don't recommend any other directories at this point. Its not necessary.

So basically here is what we are going to be learning in the course of this entire site in a nutshell: We will take other people's products and market them for a share of the money. To do that we must learn some of the hundreds of methods to market online, and master atleast one. Through marketing we will gain traffic, through traffic we will gain buyers, through buyers we will gain money. This is the goal. By becoming an Affiliate you are becoming a Marketer, and those skills will last you a lifetime.

Oh and about Clickbank and Clickbooth. You want to register as a PUBLISHER. Nobody told me this when I first started, it seems basic details get left in the dust in most guides and they are the most confusing part. A publisher is one who sells the affiliate programs. An advertiser is the one who owns the affiliate program and has registered it on there for others to sell for them.

All Affiliate programs are completely free and they cannot charge you in any way.

Internet Marketing - The Only Real Way to Earn Money Online

Internet Marketing refers to any real method to earn money online. Any person can do this, at no startup cost. All you need is the proper resources and guides, which are all located here. Every individual that doesn't slack and follows the methods in these guides will more than likely be making 4 figure passive incomes monthly in six months, but until then there is a lot of learning and work to be done. If you thought that becoming a millionaire online did not require initial work then you came to the wrong place. The good news is that everything you follow through with on here will work for you for years to come, as passive income.

Internet Marketing is a business, an art, and a science, not some scheme. One of the easiest, and extremely profitable free branches of Internet Marketing is called Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate Marketing a company lets you sell their product for a large cut of the profits, usually greater than 50%. This is great because instead of having to have your own product to sell, you can do it for free and still get tons of money. Making your own product can come later. Anyone can do this, it only sounds hard. On average you will receive 70% of the sales price on affiliate sales, that is the going rate. Wal-Mart, Netflix, even Best Buy all have an affiliate marketing program. Affiliate Directories contain hundreds of affiliate programs in one place from many businesses, this is great for us. You sell affiliate programs through an "affiliate link", which each program at an affiliate directory will give you. Anybody who purchases that product through that link will send the commission straight into your affiliate account, which sends you a check or whatever payment options they offer. It is extremely realistic to make 4 figures a month doing this, but you must learn the necessities first. Many people who have multiple popular websites are making 5 figure incomes, and even more rarely, 6 figure incomes per month. Overall the most common method to take advantage of affiliate programs is to get the link and place it on a blog or website then promote that website using the hundreds of methods available that you will soon learn about, because traffic is money.

Once your site's popularity reaches a certain level it will grow on its own to maximize its traffic potential, if you wanted you could then leave it for a steady large income stream, or look for ways to optimize it further. People just don't make websites for no reason anymore, almost every website you have ever been to is making money using these methods whether you knew it or not.

For fastest success you should attempt to devote two hours a day for two months, because every action you perform online has a delayed effect, and that is about the time everything begins to kick in in a big way, especially search engine traffic. What other business do you know can take off in the first two months? But think about it, would you rather work at your day-job for two more months, or use those two months to build the foundations of a guaranteed successful business? You will soon see just how serious this is.

I mentioned Affiliate Directories, you WILL need to register at one to begin, the best affiliate directory in my very experienced opinion is Clickbooth.com. All Affiliate Directories are completely free, it wouldn't make sense for them not to be. If your worried about legitimacy remember that even Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Netflix have affiliate programs. You will need to register as a "publisher", I remember how much that confused me when I first began.

Remember don't expect instant results! As I said it takes at least a week from the time you perform an action to the time that it actually kicks in, the internet is just slow like that. That is one reason why 90% of people give up, if something doesn't have instant results, no matter how profitable it is, they give up. You can't do that if you intend to succeed. There is a extremely thin line between rich and poor in internet marketing, those who didn't give up are rich, those did are not, there is no inbetween, the sky is the limit.