Internet Marketing Blog

They say you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket but it’s also important that you don’t bite off more than you can chew too quickly. The idea of multiple streams of passive income is a great one but success won’t happen for a newbie straight away and definitely won’t happen if you blaze a trail down too many roads at a time.

When deciding to start your affiliate marketing career, it can be tempting to sign up for everything under the sun and go crazy.  The problem with this is that it’s the equivalent of trying to juggle with not enough hands and too many balls.  Instead, consider starting slow, perfecting your skills and then adding to the mix.

Affiliate Marketing: Fine Tune Your Skills

Concentrate your efforts on one program at a time until things are kind of on autopilot. You can always come back later and tweak or improve your efforts on a money making program but until you’re making money consistency on one program, don’t be tempted to start on something new. There are so many profitable niches and programs that it can be difficult to be patient but patience and focus will pay off.

Start off With Small Goals

If you want to sign up for five different programs, you might set small goals of trying to hit specific milestones with one program before adding another to the mix.  By learning the ropes and fine tuning your skills in one area, you can move forward confidently into a new revenue stream before long.

There is a lot of information available for free when it comes to making money on the Internet. There is a lot of basic information that you’ll find on blogs and websites and some experienced marketers will even give away a lot of information for free as well. There are also things available for a fee.

When are you ready to go from learning about earning for free to paying for secrets?  The answer is simple.  When you have a thirst for more and can’t find the information for free it might be time to find an internet marketing guru.  Once you’ve started earning some commissions or hit payout with Google Adsense, you might be ready to take your internet marketing career from that of a newbie to the path of becoming a guru.

Never stop reading the free stuff as you’ll find that new information and new angles continuously develop but there may come a time when you decide you’re ready to pay some money for information. Do yourself a favour and spend time researching before you take the plunge!

Reading Product Reviews

Product review sites are all over the Internet.  Some of them offer great information on what’s available. A good product review site will have purchased the products they review and offer valuable positive and negative information as well.

It’s a good guess to assume you’ll find affiliate links on these sites but that doesn’t mean the information isn’t valuable. Take time to look at a few reviews before you make your decision about buying an affiliate marketing e-book or a membership.The reviews should do more than tell you a product is great. They should provide insight about how to use it, what features and benefits it has as well as what type of results the reviewer got.

If you’re using a niche blog to make income through various revenue streams like affiliate marketing and Google Adsense,  make sure your blog is friendly to humans and to search engine spiderbots.  Here are a few tips for making it both search engine friendly and reader-friendly.

SEO Tips For Your Blog

On your blog you’ll want to do on-page and off-page search engine optimising. This means that on the blog you do things that make search engines want to crawl you such as having blog tags, categories, using links inside your blog to other blogs posts as well as links to outside sites through your blogroll and your blog entries.

In terms of off-page SEO, you might consider visiting other blogs in your niche and linking back to your blog through blog comments.  Also use sites to catalog your blog such as Blog Catalog and MyBlogLog which can draw visitors in from other pages. Being friendly to search engines with SEO will get you more rankings and more visitors.

Visitor Tips

Once the visitors arrive, give them a warm welcome! Talk to your visitors in a friendly tone in your posts and stop by and visit their blogs to return the favour when they’ve been kind enough to comment or to link to you on their blog.  When someone leaves a comment that asks a question or compliments your site answer them and consider leaving a comment on their site as well.

Don’t overdo it on the advertisements. You may be in the blogging business for the ad revenue but if your blog doesn’t provide any value, you won’t have many visitors and you definitely won’t get any subscribers. Carefully managing your blog to appeal to the people and the search engines will help increase your chances of online success.

In internet marketing, there are two schools of thought with respect to link cloaking. Link cloaking involves making your links to affiliate websites look like regular links instead of affiliate links which many people recognise by strange letter combinations or URL names.

With school of thought number one, you might think it’s better to be up front about being an affiliate selling a product either by saying so or simply by presenting your link with your code in it without worrying about cloaking. On the other side, some  suggest people are more likely to buy your product if they don’t think they’re being sales pitched or sold to. For some reason, a lot of people don’t feel good about someone getting a commission off their purchase. Some will even try to avoid your affiliate link if they really want to buy it and you led them there. This is why many affiliate programs will credit you with the sale due to a ninety-day http cookie.

You might consider conducting experiments and seeing what bodes better for you. If you choose to cloak your links, there are free tools like Tinyurl.com that can take a long URL and turn it short as well as make it difficult to see where someone is about to click through to.  This type of tool can be useful for more than just affiliate marketing. It can be great in micro blogging environments like Twitter and Plurk or anywhere else that has a 140 character maximum.

Link Cloaking Tools

If you’ve decided that cloaking is something you want to do, there are link cloaking tools that are free and available for a fee. Do be careful you’re not cloaking beyond recognition or you could impact your ability to get paid through companies such as ClickBank.

As an Internet Marketer in the rapidly changing cyberspace landscape, you’ll want to continually evolve. Free information is everywhere! Ensure your continued progress by reading news in your niche and in online marketing as a whole. You need to be ready to be a sponge looking to sop up knowledge wherever you can so that you don’t become a dinosaur and miss the boat on new and great opportunities.

Places to Get Free Information

Blogs are free and often provide a wealth of information. Subscribe to blogs in your niche and get tips delivered to your email inbox. Look for gurus in the affiliate marketing world to follow. Many will offer a plethora of free information such as e-books.

Free e-books and reports are plentiful in the online marketing world. They’re often designed to get your e-mail address so that they can sell you something later of course, but that’s ok. You should read everything you can get your hands on pertaining to SEO, your own niche and to online marketing.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are a great free tool that enable you to tell Google to email you whenever anything gets indexed that has your desired keywords in it. This is a great way to keep on top of something specific and have alerts delivered to your e-mail as they happen or in specified time periods.

Knowledge is equal to power in term of being a guru in your industry. Keeping up on industry news and trends will be vital for your continued and increased online success.