If you offer your products or services in a particular area, it is very vital that your website is listed in Google Places.

How to optimize your Google Places listing

How your website is listed in Google Places depends on several things. For example, bakeries in Los Angeles are listed differently than Honda dealers in Knoxville. The location of your business, the industry that you’re in and the keywords that you are targeting and other things influence your listing in Google Places.

Ranking element 1: your address

If you want to get high rankings for keywords that are related to a particular city then your business should be located in that city. If you want to be found for local searches in London then your business must have a physical address in London.

Ranking element 2: your business category

You must make sure that your business is listed in the right category in Google Places. If you sell cars then your website should not be listed in the real estate category. You can specify the right category when you submit your website to Google Places (see below).

Ranking element 3: keywords in your business name

If your business name contains the keywords for which you want to be found then you increase your chance of getting listed in the Google Places results on Google’s first result page. If you have a restaurant, it will help your rankings for the keyword “restaurant” if your business name is “Peter’s Restaurant”.

Ranking element 4: citations of your business

Citations (also called “web references”) are mentions of your business name and address on other web pages, even if these web pages do not link to your website.

For example, a yellow pages directory or the local chamber of commerce might list your business without linking to your website. The more citations your business has, the more likely it is that it will be listed for local searches. Citations have a similar effect on local searches as backlinks have on regular website listings.

Try to get your website address listed on as many websites as possible to show Google that your business is real.

Ranking element 5: you should have positive reviews

Google Places is basically a recommendation search engine. It recommends local restaurants, plumbers, hotels, etc. in the search results. If the recommended businesses offer poor products and poor services then people wouldn’t continue to use Google Places.

Positive reviews and ratings help Google to gain more confidence in your company. The more positive reviews your company has, the better. Encourage your customers to write a positive review if they are satisfied with your products and services.

Ranking element 6: proximity to the searched location

If your business is located near to the searched location then it is more likely that it will be showed in the search results. If you have a hotel near the Museum of Modern Art then it’s likely that Google will show your Google Places listing for search terms such as “hotels near moma”.

You can submit your website to Google Places with IBP’s semi automatic submitter: IBP Submission Semi-automatic Directories Local Search Google Places

To make sure that your website gets found for as many relevant keywords as possible, optimize your pages with IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer. The Top 10 Optimizer helps you to get your website on the first result page of Google, Bing and other search engines.

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Who are the people behind Blekko?

Blekko cofounder and CEO Rich Skrenta was one of the founders of the Open Directory Project and cofounder of Topix. Blekko has about $20 million venture capital from well-known angel and venture investors in Silicon Valley.

What makes Blekko different?

“Blekko is a better way to search the web by using slashtags. slashtags search only the sites you want and cut out the spam sites. Use friends, experts, community or your own slashtags to slash in what you want and slash out what you don’t.”

The slashtags are Blekko’s refinement tools. You can use them to filter the results by certain criteria. For example, a search for “global warming /conservative” returns articles about global warming, but only from conservative websites.

Which slashtags does Blekko support?

Blekko supports a variety of preset slashtags. These slashtags enable you to filter the results by date, topic or content type.

You can also search certain websites by using a slashtag. For example, the search “iceland volcano /flickr” searches for images on flickr.com. The same is available for amazon.com, blogs and some other sites.

Users can also make their own slashtags. Users can limit searches to a certain set of websites and they can also cut out spam from the results.

In the long term, Blekko hopes to improve the quality of search results with user generated slashtags. This concept is similar to Wikipedia.

Is Blekko here to stay?

It’s hard to tell whether Blekko will be a success or not. Other well backed startups such as Cuil failed. The slashtag concept is rather hard to know for the average web surfer.

Google has a very large market share and it is so powerful that Yahoo chose to go out of the market and let Microsoft continue with the search business.

Do you have to act?

Blekko follows an fascinating new approach. But, the search engine has an extremely low market share at the moment and you probably won’t receive many targeted visitors from them in the near future.

Until Blekko becomes a major player, it is better to concentrate your search engine optimization activities on Google and Bing/Yahoo. Search engine optimization is not about getting listed on as many search engines as possible for as many keywords as possible.

Search engine optimization is about getting high rankings on the right search engines for the right keywords that deliver paying customers to your website. Make sure that your website is listed for the right keywords on major search engines to get as many customers as possible.

Editor’s note:

Just like Google and Bing, Blekko is already supported by IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer and IBP’s ranking checker. IBP is always up-to-date and it works with the latest ranking algorithms to keep your website at the top of the search engine result pages.

Back to table of contents – Visit Axandra.com

Step 1: What will you promote?

There are several ways to choose what you will promote or sell. Some people like to choose something they are already interested in like pet products, fishing products or even hair care products. Other people don’t care what they sell as long as it makes money. In either case, you need to know what you are going to sell first.

Step 2: Make a Webpage

While you can get a free webpage, it is not the best way to go. Eventually, you will have to pay for a site to make money. When this happens, you are left out in the lurch. All the promotion you did for your first page is wasted because now you have to promote a different site.

To make a webpage you need to:

1. Buy a domain name. You can buy domain names from many places like Godaddy or any one of hundreds of other places. Ideally, the domain name will reflect what you are selling.

2. Hosting your domain: Next, you will need to find a place to host the domain. Again, you have lots of options including Godaddy and Hostgator. Once you find someone to host your domain, you can start building your page within 24 hours.

3. Build the page: You can find tons of readymade templates and find plenty of templates to buy. Alternatively, you can buy software that allows you to make your own webpage. For newbies, I highly recommend using WordPress. You can use it free on Hostgator or you can have WordPress host your domain. Either way, it is the simplest for beginners.

Step 3: Find Affiliates

Once you have a page up, you can start applying to be an affiliate. There are two basic ways to find affiliates.

1. Individual Products – If you have a product you want to promote, you can go to their website. Then scroll to the bottom and look for a link that says affiliate. Generally, you can apply there if they have an affiliate program. Not all companies do.

2. Affiliate Group – Alternatively, you can go find a group that has hundreds of affiliates for you to apply. Places like ClickBank and Shareasale are among the most well loved, but there are many others.

When you apply, you will have to give your website URL. This is why you must have a website before you can start. With huge places like ClickBank, you apply to them and they make your account. Then each affiliate on their site will question you to apply again. But, ClickBank will be the one to pay you.

Step 4: Promote Your Site

Once you have an affiliate, they will give you links and ads to place on your webpage. When these are in place, you will need to start driving traffic to your website. This can be done through social marketing, article marketing, pay per clicks or any number of other ways.

After you complete these four steps, you will start reaping the benefits of your affiliate-marketing page. From there, you will learn more, tweak your site, and start making more money.

]]> http://seoacademics.com/4-steps-to-start-affiliate-marketing/feed 0 http://seoacademics.com/how-to-make-100-per-day-as-an-affiliate-%e2%80%93-step-by-step http://seoacademics.com/how-to-make-100-per-day-as-an-affiliate-%e2%80%93-step-by-step#comments Tue, 02 Nov 2010 09:54:53 +0000 Frank http://seoacademics.com/?p=1309 Making $100 per as an affiliate is not that hard, but it also not that simple! In this article I want to share with you 3 essential steps that you must take if you want to pull in $100 per day more more as an affiliate marketer!

The first thing that you must do in order to succeed with affiliate marketing is pick a excellent niche. Ideally, new affiliate marketers should pick a market that is not too competitive. Markets such as weight loss, general health, Work from home, etc. are not excellent niches for new affiliate marketers. While I do not reckon that experienced affiliates should shy away from these markets, there is more than enough money to be made in small niche markets, which is where affiliates should start.

You can simply go to ClickBank and search through a variety of niches. I am sure that you will find one that is in demand, yet does not have a ton of competition.

Once you have a product and a niche, it is time to setup a blog. I suggest buying a domain name and setting up a WordPress blog on your domain. It is not as hard as it sounds, and if you do a small investigating you can find people who will do this for you for around $20. If you do not want to take the time to setup a WordPress blog on your own domain, you can always you use Blogger for free (This is what I did).

Now that you have your blog setup, you need to drive traffic to your blog. You can do this by writing articles, submitting press releases, video marketing, document sharing, forum marketing. etc. For new marketers, I suggest forum marketing and article marketing.

So, how do you make $100 a day with this? Be persistent, and make sure that you are building a list of targeted subscribers. Just reckon if you had an email list of 5,000 people? You could do this in less than a year, and then make $5,000 or more per month just promoting affiliate offers to your list!

Do you want to see how I got started?

Learn Exactly how to seriously increase your internet marketing potential by reading my FREE report, Zero Hype Marketing. This free guide will show you step by step how to make a successful web based business and earn $1,400 or more your first month online!

Step 1: Go to Clickbank and locate a product with high sales. It helps tremendously if you know the product, so purchasing it first is not a terrible thought, but you can still sell a product if you’re intelligent enough to re-write the sales page copy.

Step 2: Make a ‘Review’ site at WordPress or Blogger. Post a reasonably fascinating review that tells people why they should buy the product – along with your affiliate link to the product’s sales page.

Step 3: Make a list of ‘long-tail’ keywords that people might use to search on Google if they were interested in this product. ‘Long-tail’ keywords are merely 3 or more word phrases. Use Google’s keyword tools to search out the keywords that have the least amount of competition – this makes it simpler to get to the first page. Be sure that the keyword phrases you use have at least 100 searches a month. It’s meaningless to be on the first page of Google if only 5 people will see you there each month! Select the best 5 keyword phrases.

Step 4: Write five articles – the keyword phrase you select will be the title of the article, and you should use the phrase at least once or twice within the article. The article should be no more than 250-350 words long, and should have a resource box with the link to your review site.

Step 5: Post the articles to Article Directories. Be sure to follow all submission guidelines to ensure your articles are accepted.

Step 6: Submit your articles to a number of social book marking sites to draw more traffic.

Step 7: Sit back – watch the traffic and money start to flow in, and repeat this entire process with another product.

This is, of necessity, a highly abbreviated blueprint, further information is readily available. Affiliate schemes work – you can earn extra money if you simply apply the simple 7 step plot for success!

Landing page templates make all the difference between a terrible affiliate marketer and a excellent one, and a excellent one a fantastic one. When you use them, you have a powerful tool at your hands that will enable you to instantly make the most vital pages on your site. You’ll also be able to instantly make entire websites, without any aggravation, wasted time or hassle.

For the people who feel that landing pages don’t make that huge of a difference, how about you just take a minute to answer two questions. First, what’s the bounce rate of your website? Every visitor that bounces – sees one page and doesn’t visit any others – is somebody who was turned off by one reason or another by your landing page. It’s a whole lot of wasted opportunity and money left on the table. If it’s a one-page landing page, then why are you spending hours coding and making a HTML base that’s tedious to modify? WordPress allows you to make on-site changes quickly and instantly so that you can really test and define the money-makers that work for you.

Secondly, have you ever visited a website and immediately clicked on the back button because the information isn’t what you expected, something wasn’t simple to find or the site didn’t look appealing? If so, then you know from personal experience as well that landing pages make a huge difference. How many sites would you have spent more time on if only they had done a better job luring you in? It’s too many to count, to be sure, so don’t let your own websites fall into that category for anyone else.

With landing page templates you’ll be able to quickly expand your business, and you’ll also be able to make it more successful by converting a higher percentage of the traffic you see. It is something that simply makes sense, and overlooking it will only cost you seriously in the long run. You can literally make a landing page template from your blog in under 5 minutes, all you have to do it set your theme and add the content – then wait for the revenue to start rolling.

Would you rather use landing page templates that are designed for success or would you rather try your own thing and end up wasting your time and money? Landing page templates will make all of the difference for you, and that holds right whether you rely on organic search traffic, PPC marketing or both. Give the visitors what they want, make it simple on them and make it simple on yourself by taking the coding off your task list. As Internet marketers we have to find the balance between the work we do, and the management of our marketing efforts and traffic driving techniques. This is one tactic to emply to achieve that.

To paraphrase the lovely Shania Twain – “If you’re not willing to give it all you’ve got- get out of here!”

It’s simple to waste your time trying to know the internet business and end up being in a daze, surrounded by too many miracle cures and instant success tales.

It’s like a tsunami of information drowning you, and there is no escape to higher ground.

I don’t know how someone got my email address, but some drongo (an Aussie term – you’ll figure it out!) wrote to me asking me to place in just 5 dollars and immediately get back 20 without my doing anything…. one of those “instant cash doubler” schemes.

After all this time I’ve got more common sense… and so should you…than to get into his “program.” That common sense will tell you that the only way you will get back 20 dollars for five is if five other mugs like you fall for his scam and front up with their five dollars, so that the promoter can pay you and keep some for himself.

All very well if you are one of the first in line, and get your seed money back with just one payout, but that very rarely happens.

I just got I don’t know how many of these “miracles” and at least one “Next
Product” alert in my mailbox which is supposed to help me get instant riches in internet marketing.

Listen, if you really want to make serious money, you have to be one of these promoters, cobble together a few tips and tricks that anyone can get for free, give it a catchy name, and get one of the huge hitters to promote it to their list. I’m sure you’ve seen your inbox flooded by lots of these people, all trying to sell you the same thing, and with ever increasing bonuses which you will never use, but they sound fantastic.

But, for most of us down in the food chain, that’s not a realistic option – we don’t have our own product, and no guru will touch us.

Let me tell you, the only solid money I’ve ever made is from using Google Adsense to make money. Sure I won’t retire from it, but I am making around $2.50 a day from my sites. Not much, I know, but what if I had an Adsense network of 100, or even 200 sites? (That’s $50 a day for you non-accountants!) That’s how much you can make, and that’s the secret of making money with Adsense.

You can not only use Adsense on your site, you can use Adsense in WordPress blogs, use all the Google information marketing tools, Adwords etc.

Of course the drawback is that you have to set up those 200 sites and maintain them with constantly changing content, and that content has to be sufficiently fascinating to make a few people click on a few ads.

But, there are ways to do this, using RSS feeds, feeds from other blogs, and other auto blogging techniques, but be wary of not overdoing it, make sure the feeds add genuine interest to your site.

The main problem will be in setting up 200 attractive, keyword and Adsense rich sites.

To do this yourself will take a lot of time, effort and money, and you will never do it if you’re just mucking around with internet marketing.

You will have to spend some serious cash on hiring someone to do it for you, or get a website generating software program, and a really excellent one will not be cheap, but if you’re serious, you will spend that money, which gets back to the thrust of my opening paragraph – “If you’re not willing to give it all you’ve got – get out of here!”

Affiliate marketing has been around for years on the net. The thought is some body makes a product and doesn’t want the hassle of selling it, or the person wants more people to sell it so it reaches a wider audience. That’s where you come in. You effectively advertise the product, and for each sale you are responsible for you get to keep some of the money. The percentage you keep depends on the type of product.

E-books have always been highly well loved as an affiliate product due to there being no physical costs making them. That means there is 100% profit on each sale, which is fantastic for an affiliate as you will get a larger amount of money per sale. To find a product you can sell there are plenty of affiliate directories such as ClickBank that stock 1000s. You should be able to find a product in a niche you know a lot about.

Here is the simplest way to make some money with affiliate marketing. Make a simple WordPress site about the niche and occasionally recommended the product you found on ClickBank to your visitors. Make sure you have loads of unique content and articles on your site so search engines will find you for months to come. Then just let it run and make a new site doing the same thing in a new niche.

There are ways to make a lot more money out of affiliate marketing and I will look at those with you another time.

When you are buying ‘get more traffic’ software you want to add or change a function of your website or your business. You have a specific goal in mind and you know what you want. A piece of software caught your attention because the seller used the right keywords. Fantastic! You are ready to pay for the software and install it immediately. Now is the time to stop and question some questions.

• Will the software completely satisfy my need or it will solve only part of my problem?
• Do I need to learn something new in order to use new software? It’s always fantastic to learn something new. But you will have to delay installation of the software. The software trial period might run out and you will be stuck with the software you don’t need
• Is the software refundable? If you don’t like the software and it’s not refundable, you have a problem on your hands

It’s fantastic if you know in advance that the software is tested really well. The problem is that if you question this question, the chances are that you will not get a straight answer. Nobody will tell you that the software was not tested properly. Look for undeniable proof that the software was indeed tested sufficiently and is working without giving you any frustration.

One way to do it, is to try to find a forum and see what people are saying about it. Let me give an example. At the time when I bought Thesis theme for WordPress I knew there was a forum. I also searched for “thesis theme WordPress”. Search returns 899,000 results today. If you look closely at the results, you will notice that the search results include subjects: Pricing, Tutorials, Video Tutorials, About Thesis, the WordPress Theme, Article Tutorials, News, Community Tutorials. 899,000 search results is not a joke. Every search result is a link. It takes a long time to make so many links. It is not a straight evidence that the software is excellent, nevertheless it has to be taken into consideration.

What Is the Undeniable Proof That the Software Is Excellent?

Your own test results are undeniable proof. Install the software. Check every option. Does every option work? Some options have to be tested first, because they might work under certain conditions. Check every option separately and in concert with other options. Test the software for 30 days at least. An error might pop out when the excitement is gone. A excellent thought is to buy the software through ClickBank. We all know that ClickBank does not give any problems when you want a refund. And the trial period is 60 days.

Affiliate marketing is the act of connecting consumers with products in exchange for a percentage of the sales price of the product. Though there are free ways to go about affiliate marketing, many affiliate marketers go the way of building their own website. This can be beneficial in many ways. It offers you more flexibility than the free methods and also gives you a piece of internet real estate.

There are several ways to build a website for affiliate marketing. Those who are incredibly tech savvy might build their website from scratch with html. Those who are a step down from tech savvy will sometimes use the use of a website design tool, such as Kompozer. And those who aren’t tech savvy at all typically use an already developed script that makes things incredibly simple, such as WordPress.

The first page of your website should be a squeeze page. A squeeze page is a page that your clients must go to before they get to the actual meat of your website. A squeeze page is designed to prompt your customer to sign up with an auto responder in exchange for something of perceived value to them. Perceived value could mean anything from a free ebook or e-mail course to access to your website. Naturally, access to your website will be part of the deal. It’s always nice to offer something free though to sweeten the deal. Building a squeeze page is vital because it allows you to continue to sell to these potential customers for as long as their on your list. Most gurus will tell you that the money is in the list.

The next most vital page of your website will be the page where you house your affiliate links. You could make a review page, a blog, a comparison website, or many other options. Whatever you choose to make, you need to make sure that your affiliate products are there for all to see and make a buying choice on. It is also vital to add excellent content to your site so that it doesn’t look too salesy. Your affiliate link will direct the potential customer back to the products sales page, therefore, there is no point in you trying to sell the product yourself since the company’s sales page will do that for you. Your job is to offer information that will help the customer in their buying choice.

The first time you build a blog or review site, it might seem a bit hard, especially if you have no prior experience with website design. After a while, you’ll become a pro at it though. Keep updating your affiliate website with fresh content regularly, do your affiliate marketing, and you should be making money in no time.

If you loved this article, you check out my website, My Making Money Internet. The My Making Money Internet article base harbors a bunch of articles about the different methods for making money online. All articles are neatly categorized, so whether your interest lies in eBay auctions or affiliate marketing, you’ll be able to navigate to related articles quickly. It’s 100% free, so you have nothing to lose.