Saturday, January 17, 2009

Make Extra Money With A Blog Without Spending A Dime

Posted by Alan Liew

Blog or weblog is simply a website with frequent updates on a particular subject or topic. You can write a comment, review, suggestion or tip on a subject on your blog. You can also provide educational resources and advice if you are an expert at something. For instance, If your blog is about sport cars. You can post the latest annoucements from sport cars manufacturers such as BMW, Ferrari and so on, discuss about the latest models of sport cars and the best components used for producing sport cars.

Blogger.com allows anyone to create a free blog (free domain name and hosting) without any technical knowledge. Creating a blog with Blogger.com is easy and you can have you blog published within an hours.

There are several ways you can make money with a blog:

Become a Google AdSense publisher
You can join Google AdSense program and start earning advertising revenue from your blog. It is not difficult to set up you AdSense campaign as Blogger.com also provides Adsense tool and guidances to help you start an AdSense campaign. This can be a great source of revenue, though of course the amount of income you can expect from your AdSense ads will depend on the amount of traffic (visitors) to your blog.

Sell Other People's Stuff
You can promote your affiliate programs by placing the affiliate links and banners on your blog and earn commission whenever someone clicks through an affiliate link or banner to your merchant's website made a purchase.

Sell Your Own Product
Blog can be used to promote and sell your own products too. You can write about your products' features and benefits on the blog.

Drive Visitors to You Blog
To make money you need to drive visitors or traffic to your blog. The more traffic you're getting the higher your earning will be. There are several free ways of getting traffic to your blog. Here's how ......

1) Introduce your blog to your family and friends.
2) Submit your blog to directories. You can find a list of blog directories by going to Google and entering the search term 'submit blog url'.
3) Write an article or more with a link to your blog and submit them to article directories. You can find a list of article directories by going to Google and entering the search term 'article directory'.
4) Post messages on community forums with a link to your blog on the signature of each message posted.

There are other ways (free and paid) to increase traffic for your blog. You can find a lot of free information and resources about blog promotion from search engines.

Your success in affiliate marketing part depend on the kinds of affiliate programs your are marketing.To make your affiliate marketing campaign works,

Posted by Alan Liew

Although anyone can start an affiliate marketing business but not everyone can achieve success in affiliate marketing. What is the reason? Well, there are 10 of them, actually. There are 10 affiliate mistakes that deter people from succeeding in affiliate marketing business. To avoid all these mistakes, you first need to study them and understand them thoroughly.

1. Believing that visitors would only click on their affiliate links. Although the task of an affiliate is only restricted to pre-selling, pre-selling isn’t just limited to displaying the affiliate links. It also entails enticing visitors to click on them by listing out the benefits of the affiliate products, giving positive recommendations by writing reviews to encourage readers to check out the products.

2. Promoting too many affiliate programs at the same time. If an affiliate markets 8 affiliate programs at the same time, he or she will have 8 affiliate marketing campaigns to handle. Most probably, the affiliate will find difficult to manage all his campaigns and unable to concentrate on each one of his or her affiliate programs in this situation and ends up losing money.

You should begin with one affiliate program; choose a program that you are passionate about. Then put your best effort to market the product. Test different marketing strategies to see which one works best. Once you are making a steady commission with the product, then maybe you can look for second affiliate product to sell.

3. Believing that using a single method of marketing technique is sufficient. There are people actually think that submitting a few articles to article websites will generate the amount of traffic they expected. But this is wrong. Focusing only one marketing technique will limit the number of potential buyers you can send to your affiliate merchant’s website

4. Failing to improve the performance of your marketing campaign. Many affiliates tend to concern on checking their daily commission only and have no interest on studying and analyzing their marketing campaigns performance. When their campaigns don’t work as expected or don’t generate sales, they will fail to make corresponding adjustments because they don’t know which aspects of their campaigns need to be improved. It is essential to learn every aspect of our marketing strategies. Which marketing techniques are attracted most visitors? How many unique and returning visitors generated? How long do they stay in our website? Where they come from? These are the questions that could help us enhance the performance of our affiliate marketing business.

5. Promoting affiliate products that are lacking of demand. Some affiliate programs offer extremely high sale commission to their affiliate. But the products aren’t sellable and thus earning nothing.

6. Failing to find an affiliate program with a proven record of consumer satisfaction.The trustworthiness of a company relies on how people view it. If the affiliate program has established good relationships with their customers, then it has established a brand which is recognizable for its excellent service. You will find easier to pre-selling such an affiliate product.

7. Failing to keep abreast with the latest developments in the industry. There will come a time when the marketing knowledge we know would become obsolete, more so in the field of internet marketing where everything transpires at a rapid pace. You have to constantly update yourself with the newest trends, techniques and news in this field to always keep your competitive edge.

8. Failing to invest on knowledge. Knowledge likewise evolves and you have to evolve with it. Buy noteworthy eBooks, special reports and the likes… those which would teach you the latest tactics to help you conquer your field.

9. Resting on your laurels once a semblance of success is achieved. Success is not eternal. You have to sustain it. If you leave your business alone once it shows the promise of success, you’re just setting it up for failure.

10. Though that affiliate program can help you become rich fast. No, affiliate program isn’t a “get rich quick” scheme. You have to put in a lot of effort and time, and some capital before you can make money in affiliate marketing.

Tips for Selecting a Good Affiliate Program to Promote

Posted by Alan Liew

Your success in affiliate marketing part depend on the kinds of affiliate programs your are marketing.To make your affiliate marketing campaign works, you obviously need to participate in an affiliate program that offers worthy and quality products. Below are some tips that can help you choose an affiliate program that is good for you:

1. Affiliate programs that are associated with many experts in that particular niche usually are in certain level of standard and quality. Joining one of these programs will assure you that the products of the program you will be promoting are in good standard.

2. The program that is catering to a growing target market. This will ensure you that there will be more and continuous demands for your referrals. Ask question. There are forums and discussions you can participate in to get good and reliable feedbacks.

3. A program with a compensation plan that pays out a residual income and a payout of 30% or more would be a great choice. There are some programs offering this kind of compensation. Look closely for one. Do not waste your time with programs that do not reward substantially for your efforts.

4. Be aware of the minimum quotas that you must fulfill or sales target that is too hard to achieve. Some affiliate programs imposes pre-requisites before you get your commissions. Just be sure that you are capable of attaining their requirements.

5. Ask for program recommendations in the community forum of your niche. The experienced marketers who see your question may recommend you the reliable programs they have success with. Other things you can ask about are like is the program offers a real and viable product? Does the program provide a lot of free tools and resources helpful to affiliate? and any other questions you think are essential.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

An Introduction to the Different Types of Affiliate Programs

Posted by Alan Liew

Today, affiliate marketing programs is seen as one of the most important methods by online companies and merchants to market their products and services because implementing an affiliate program doesn't cost much money and it helps generate a consistent stream of online profit.

On the other hand, the affiliates see affiliate marketing as a feasible and low cost method to make online online by promoting other people products using a website or without a website (using Google AdWords PPC advertising program).

There are many affiliate programs on the Internet and not all of them are similar. The most basic affiliate programs fall into 3 categories:

  • Pay Per Performance
  • Pay Per click
  • Residual Income Affiliate Marketing Programs
Pay Per Performance 
Pay per performance (PPP) affiliate programs are what most companies and online merchants likes to use. The companies only need to pay when an affiliate referral translates into an action. The action can be a purchase or a lead. The affiliates will spend their own money to promote the affiliated company's products, This save a lot of money for the company. PPP affiliate programs can be futher classified into 2 sub-categories:
  • Pay Per Sale (PPS) The title says it all. The company only pays the affiliate when a visitor referred by the affiliate make a purchase.
  • Pay Per Lead (PPL) PPL is a little different to PPS. PPL affiliate programs usually used by finance and insurance companies. In this type of affiliate marketing, the affiliate will be paid a fixed commission whenever a visitor referred by him/her to the merchant's website requested a quote or filled up an online application form.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Affiliate Programs
PPC affiliate programs are most popular. You should have heard them a lot. PPC programs are probably the easiest way for web publishers to make money from their websites and blogs. The affiliate gets paid a certain amount ($0.05 to $0.50 usually) whenever a visitor click a banner or text ad displaying on the affiliate's website. PPC typically used by contextual advertising companies like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Networks and much more.

Residual Income Affiliate Marketing Programs
In this type of programs, the affiliate not only compensated for every customer referred to the merchant's website, the affiliate is also paid whenever the referred customer returns to the site and buy another product.

The different types of affiliate marketing programs would deffinitely work differently for merchants and affiliates, and each would have their own advantages and drawbacks. To find out which types of programs work best for you, you'll have to know which one of them suit your need and characteristic most. And then start testing them.

Tips for Avoiding Your AdSense Account Getting Banned by Google

Posted by Alan Liew

 have seen quite a lot of AdSense publishers posted in different forums stating that their AdSense accounts were banned by Google due to fraudulent clicks. Most of these people claim that they are innocent and have never clicked on their on AdSense ads. So they have no idea why click fraud can occur on their AdSense accounts. The truth is click fraud can happen in several ways and not necessarily caused by the AdSense publisher himself/herself who accidentally clicked on his/her own AdSense.

Below are some of the tips to protect your AdSense account:

1) Do not use autosurf programs to promote your websites that contain AdSense. Autosurf programs can substantially increase your website traffic or hits, AdSense page view and ecpm but people who surf your site only to earn advertising credit or other type of incentives. So the traffic generated from autosurf programs aren't counted as real and thus against AdSense policies.

2) If possible, do not involve in any traffic exchange networks and programs. If you have join one or more programs or networks that can make you a steady AdSense commission, you should start worry about your AdSense account as this could mean that members of the program(s) were clicking each other AdSense ads all the while whether intentionally or unintentionally. As soon as Google detected a group of people were clicking each other AdSense, many of the members AdSense account in the program will be suspended. Also traffic exchange can be another mean to artificially generate tons of unreal website traffic or hits and boost up AdSense page view & ecpm and it is strictly prohibited by Google .

3) Do not join AdSense exchange networks. They are similar to traffic exchange programs except members are participate just for clicking each other AdSense. This should be a guaranteed way to be banned by Google.

4) Read all the Google AdSense policies at http://www.google.com/adsense to see whether you have against any policies and make the necessary modification.

5 Tips to Boost Your Adsense Revenue

Posted by Alan Liew

Google AdSense program has made it easier for webmasters to make money through a website. Webmasters who run an AdSense campaign will display Google's contextual Ads relevant to the content of their sites and thus encouraging visitors to click the ads and earn money for each ad click.

However you will earn very little AdSense revenue if you don't know how to optimize your AdSense ads on your website. Here are some tips to increase your AdSense earning:

1. Focus on one Adsense ad format. The Large Rectangle (336X280) ad format seems to work better than other ad formats because this format tends to result in higher click through rates (CTR). Another reason is that the ads will look like normal web links that visitors use to click on them. It doesn't matter whether the visitors know that they are clicking AdSense ads or not, as long as there are clicking, you earn AdSense commission.

2. Create a custom palette for your ads. Select a color that matches your website's background. If your site's background is white both, the color of ad border and background should set to be white too. Also the color of the ad title should be similar to coloe of the links in your website. This is to make your AdSense ads look like it is part of the web pages. Again, this will boost AdSense CTR.

3. Don't place your AdSense ads at the bottom of your webpages because it is proven to be less effective. Displaying your AdSense ads at the bottom is like hiding your AdSense and thus leads to low CTR and AdSense revenue. Try to put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between AdSense locations can make when you see your earnings.

4. Try to place your AdSense ads near rich content as visitors main focus usually are your content. There are several ways to insert AdSense ads into your content and one of the ways is place your AdSense just after the end of your content.

5. Try to automate the insertion of your AdSense code into the webpages using SSI (or server side included). Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your AdSense code in a text file, name it as “AdSense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then use SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.

These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites. There are other ways to optimize your AdSense that produce high CTR also. You can learn more tricks by reading in AdSense and webmaster forums.

4 Steps to Creating A Website Specifically to Earn AdSense Revenue

Posted by Alan Liew

Building a website to earn Google AdSense advertising revenue has become a popular way to make extra money online nowadays. It is easier to earn AdSense income versus generating sales by selling products or services online. However it does involve works, time and money before you start earning from Adsense program. Below are the steps to creating a content website for earning AdSense revenue.

Step 1
Decide the content of your website. You can write a topic or subject related to your interest, hobbies or experience. You can also provide educational information and advice on your website if you are expert at something.

Step 2
Use a website builder to create your website. One of the easy-to-use website builders that can help you build a website is Bluevoda website builder. Bluevoda site builder allows users to build a website without technical knowledge. You don’t need to build your site from scratch. The trick is to use a free professional template provided by the site builder and then start adding your text and links to your website. You can add some graphics and pictures to make your site look nicer. After completing your website project, your next step is register a domain name and sign up for a hosting account to publish your website on the Internet.

Step 3
Join Google AdSense program. It will usually take several days for Google AdSense team to review and approve your site. If Google accepts your application. You can start learning how to generate AdSense code for inserting to your website to generate Adsense revenue. If your site rejected by Google, don’t get upset easily. Google will let you know the reasons of the rejection. You can fix the problems and reapply again.

Step 4
You need to drive targeted Visitors/Traffic to your website to generate Adsense revenue. The higher your website’s traffic the greater your Adsense earning will be. Below are some of the ways that can help you drive some traffic to your website in short period of time.

1) Use Per-per-click (PPC) advertising. The two most popular PPC search engines are Google and Yahoo. Google and Yahoo can deliver instant traffic to your website but it is costly to advertise on Google and Yahoo. There are other alternatives like Bidvertise.com and Clicksor.com which are cheaper to advertise with.

2) Introduce your site to your family and friends.

3) Write several articles with a link to your website on the resource box and submit them to article directories. You can find a list of article directories by going to Google and entering the search term 'article directory'.

4) Post messages on community forums with a link to your site on the signature of each message posted.