Affiliate Marketing Programme (pay-per-sale PPS)
A-Z of Affiliate Marketing (ClickBank, Commission Junction)How to Make A Six-Figure Income Online Become an affiliate, where you will promote someone else's product for a commission. That means every time you make a sale, you will get a percentage as remuneration on Clickbank or Commission Junction.
Affiliate marketing is the best way to get started if you are an absolute beginner. Being an affiliate means that you do not have to bother about a product creation or manufacturing, shipping and handling, customer care or any other logistics related to a product. You also do not have to think about the conversion rates (whether people buy it or not) of your product. You need quite a few extra skill sets to start as a product vendor which can be a big learning curve.
So I suggest you start as an affiliate at this early stage. You just need to find a good product that is already proven to convert well and then send interested visitors (traffic) to it! That's it. Nothing else to worry about. Just promote and reap the rewards. As you work as an affiliate, you gain valuable marketing experience in the way; thus, later you can harness these gained skills to get your own profitable products out and running for you!
Now, once you are ready with your niche market and products to be promoted to that particular market as the solutions, what you will need is a website of your own. Your website is your core foundation.
; share valuable information about that particular market and address specific challenges by providing valuable answers and solutions to them. In other words, your hub is where your targeted prospect group will visit and find lots of great information about their problems or issues they are seeking solutions to. This hub or website of yours will consist of 2 major aspects.
First is your blog or your content hub, where you share your valuable information about that specific market needs. Your blog builds your credibility and establishes you as an authority or an expert in your chosen niche market.
Second is a squeeze page or a lead capture mechanism installed in your website. Your lead capture mechanism captures email addresses of your visitors. This helps you build a list of your prospects whom you can contact on a regular basis, sharing your valuable tips and recommendations in the future. After you are ready with your content hub and lead capture mechanism, you then need to let that group of people know about your hub or website and make them visit your website or blog. This is where we will discuss about the various ways to drive targeted traffic (eg. interested visitors) to your website.
I am going to share few of the fastest ways to get loads of interested people on to your website! This is simple yet very crucial to understand the process. You need to understand the main aspect of providing value to a particular group of people and providing some kind of solution to their issues. Providing value is the key. The more value you can provide, the more money you make. That's it. You just need to learn the steps above and you are ready to get started on your online business ventures. The Niche Research The first thing before you get anything else done is to decide on what specific market or the sub-market (called niche) that you want to get into.
thousands of market to start your online business in. Weight loss, Relationship, Make Money, Fitness Programs, Baby care, Learning Piano etc. Now lets take Weight Loss for example here.Weight Loss in itself is a huge broad market. However, Weight Loss After Pregnancy is a sub-market or a niche within that broader weight loss market. Remember this, you do not want to go too broad on this. That will be too competitive for you to start with. Go narrower. For example, you can narrow down to weight loss niche market targeting the following smaller sub-markets: – How to get a toned tummy fast? – How to loss fat in arms for women? – How to lose double chin? – How to get six pack abs at home? You see, these above niches are all related to the huge weight loss market but they are much narrower, much more targeted and thus easier to get into! This is where you want to get started with.
Now, few considerations you MUST take before choosing your niche market... 1. Your personal affinity towards the market.
2. Profitability analysis of the market.
3. The more desperate the market is, better for you!
4. Scope for multiple offers.
You can also go to Clickbank.com, sign-up a free account with them and visit the marketplace in there. Here is what you can find there...Look at the various markets here like business, cooking, e-business, green products health fitness etc.
You can just have a look at all of them and pick up one of them that you are interested in or passionate about. Now lets go deeper into one of them. Let take Health and Fitness for example...As you can see, with the health market, you will find a lots of sub-niches that you can narrow down into like Addiction, Beauty, Diets & weight loss, Exercise and fitness, Men's health, Women's health etc. Just get one of these if it interests you and get started.
These are all great niches to get into. That's how you can explore Clickbank to get your niche or market ideas. Do not sweat over this for too long. Just do your share of researching and select the one that connects with you! Here is one more tactic to get some good ideas about what people are looking for in your marketplace. Go to Google and type in a phrase related to your niche. For example, if you want to get into the weight loss market (which is one of the hottest of all, but bit competitive), type something like “weight loss” in the search bar, without pressing the enter key. Google will display few of the related search queries that actual people all around the world are looking for, related to weight loss. So there is weight loss diet, weight loss tips, weight loss exercise etc. This can be very helpful for you to know a lot about your market. You can dig in deeper and type in one of those sub-topics suggested by Google and see what further Google comes up with. You can get a lot of good information about your interested market. You can narrow down to weight loss yoga and just market to that group of people interested in that topic. The narrowing down will help you to target your niche market properly and provide them with more customized solution specifically for that sub-niche. Next what we need to check is whether your market will be a profitable or not. To gauge this aspect of your market, here are few tips for you: Lets take the weight loss yoga niche as an example.
The first place I go for is Clickbank.com, yet again. Get yourself familiarized with this site, as we are going to refer to this a lot. So when I go to Clickbank, I search for a section in the market place related to my chosen niche. Since, we are taking Yoga as our example, let's see if we have something in this section. As seen in the previous screen shot, we have a sub-section called Yoga in the health and fitness section. So this is what Clickbank marketplace displays, there is the first product that comes up in the Yoga section. The name of the product is Shapeshifter Yoga.
Make sure you sort the results by Gravity. Now the main tool to see whether its a profitable product or not is the Gravity. Gravity shows how many of affiliates are promoting this product at present and how popular is it among them. Affiliates only promote a product that are profitable . A higher gravity score means that this product is a profitable one to promote. I tend to look for somewhere between “20 to 100”. That a good range to get into. More than 100 means it may be too competitive for you to start with, and less than 20 means it may or may not convert that well. You better keep away from it. Now for the above product, we see that the Gravity = 75.93, which is pretty good for me. So that's good sign for me to get into this niche market. For that matter, you can take this exact product to promote and get going.
Now let us look at some more places to check if this is a profitable niche to get into. Lets now go back to Amazon.com again. What we need to look out for is do Amazon.com have magazines specifically related to our particular niche market. Just type in your niche market in to the search bow of amazon. For me, I will type Yoga into it. Also make sure you have Magazine Subscription in the search options as shown below. So here what I see on Amazon. As we can see, they have a monthly magazine in the niche that I chose. We can also see some good reviews in there for the magazines. So if someone can run a complete monthly magazine in your chosen niche market, it proves this is a pretty good and profitable niche market that we can get into. One more place that you can check out is Magazines.com and see if there is magazine available about your chosen niche. If yes, then that's a pretty good sign of a profitable niche right there!
Here is what comes up when I look for Yoga...As you can see, we have lots of magazines for the Yoga niche. One more checking that we can also see is... Do you see any “Sponsored Ads” in Google when you search for your niche market. These are ads that people are paying huge money to Google to be placed in there. No-one would be spending such money if this would not have been profitable to them. So if you are seeing such sponsored ads in the Google search for your niche, than its a definite green to move ahead with it. For our example, when I type in Yoga in Google, here is what comes up, lots of Google Ads for the market. With all the signs that we see above, I am now pretty much assured that this Yoga niche is a good and profitable niche to get into. ==> Choosing Your Right Direction - It Starts With A Good Niche! So once you have your checked your niche market with all these above criteria that I have shown you above, you have a profitable niche market with you. Now choose at least 3 products in that particular niche of yours. Choose one low price product, ranging from $17-&47. This is the one that you will use as an entry point offer for your prospects. Then choose one high ticket product ranging from $97-$497. This is what you will promote to your prospects once they get to know you better. Then choose a product that has recurring billing to it. This is the one that you should try to promote the most to your visitors and prospects! I love products with recurring billing a lot, because I only need to do a sale once and I get rewarded for that for many months to come, as the customer keeps paying the subscription for many months. And as you keep promoting more of these recurring billing items to more prospects, it adds up pretty soon to give you a good passive income, each and every month. You just need to make the sale once. This is the best type of product you can promote. There are many places that you can look out for variety of products to promote. Few of my favorite places to look out for products to promote are: – Clickbank.com – PayDotCom.com – Markethealth.com – Moreniche.com – Offervault.com These 5 are my most loved sites that I personally use to find products to promote as an affiliate! You will have enough resources from these sites to get started. Recently, I came across an amazing product to promote in the make money online niche. These are must have products or tools that every internet marketer essentially needs in his/her online business. Even you will need all of these for your online marketing business. That means once someone subscribes to it, they never cancel as their very business rely on them. They will keep paying for these tools year after year. Which mean you will regularly get paid affiliate commissions for many years to come. This is a Simple Money System. So now that you are ready with your profitable niche and your affiliate product to promote, its now time to get started with your online business set-up. Building Your Hub Now that you are ready with your niche and your products to promote, you need to build a website around it. But before you start with this, you need to understand one thing completely. What's the fundamental purpose of this hub, blog or website of yours? There are many things that you will be doing on your website but basically it all boils down just two of them. 1. Your website talks about your niche and share some good value to your prospects and visitors. This establishes you as an expert or an authority in your niche market. This is very important as it makes your visitors trust you as an friendly adviser and adds credibility to your suggestions and recommendations. Credibility and building trust are extremely crucial in your online business success. This is what will make or break your business venture. 2. This website of yours will also help you to build a list of emails of interested visitors or subscribers who will know, like and trust you and thus do business with you in the future. This is a MUST for your online business. You need to build a list of subscribers, who are interested on what you have to say, you you are really serious about your business. This list will become your biggest asset in your online business venture. If you do just one thing in your online business, just a build a list of interested subscribers and connect with them. Once you get this right, you will make money on demand! Let me tell you why.....Now we all know that once we are ready with our solution or offer, the thing that we will need the most is TRAFFIC! That means targeted visitors who will visit your offer page and consider buying, which in turn will make you money.Now, you may have the best website and the best product in the entire planet . But if there is no-one to see it, its all worthless. Without traffic, your online business is just dead. No traffic means no business. That is why traffic is called the life-blood of your online business. There are various ways to drive traffic to your site. But the fact is that we can never control the traffic or the visitors that visit our website. They come, have a look around, may or may not decide to buy your offered solution and then leave forever. They might just forget about you and your site in the next 10 minutes as soon as they leave your site. On an average, a sales page converts at around 2-3%. Which means only 2 to 3 visitors out of every 100 visitors that gets to your offer page will even consider buying. That means the rest of the 97 will just leave your site without even considering any further interaction. Next, it is said that a prospects usually needs at least 7-10 exposures to a particular offer even before he/she considers buying it. But when your visitor lands on your offer page, its just his first ever exposure to your offer. What do you think is the chance of him/her consider buying your products at first exposure. Not much, don't you think so. So that's the challenge here. If you are sending your traffic directly to your offers, you are leaving a lot of money on the table, because most of them are going to leave, never to return again. But what if we can grab their email addresses. Once we have those one time visitors on to our subscribers list, we now own that traffic as we can send that traffic to anywhere we like. They are now within our reach as we can directly communicate with them. You can talk to them on a personal level & build a credible and trustworthy relationship with them. You can build a rapport so that they will listen to you more attentively. You are no more the stranger “salesman” to them, trying to push something down their throat. You are now their friendly adviser to them. They know, like & trust you! Which means, you can repeatedly send them to any offer you like. They will not just buy one product from you and then be gone forever. Many of them will buy repeatedly from you, making you money for a long time to come. So your very list becomes your most valuable source for traffic-on-demand. This is extremely powerful! So your main objective to build your website will be to turn your casual visitors into loyal subscribers & that can be achieve if and only if you are able to add real value to their life. Make this your prime objective: 'To Build A List Of Interested Subscribers and Building A Relationship With Them.' You should build utmost credibility with them. Your subscribers should come to know you, like you and thus trust you as an friendly adviser. It is only then that you will build a sustainable and long term online business that will put bread on your table for many years to come. So, lets build your hub, i.e. Your website – The central point of your existence online! The platform we will be building our website on is called Wordpress. I am sure you must have heard of it. If not, its something that will let you build your blog or website with absolute ease, without any technical HTML programming. You will be needing 3 basic things to get started on your online business: 1. A Domain Name. 2. A Hosting Account. 3. An Autoresponder service. Now since you are going to start a business, there will be few expenses. The expenses are absolutely minimal compared to an offline business venture, the start-up cost here is next to nothing. That's one of the biggest advantages of an online business. Plus, I am also going to give you few of the best and the cheapest options to get started with: The very first step is getting your own domain name. What's a domain name?! It is just the unique name of your website. Its also the address of your site in the www or the world-wide-web we see in the browser window. This is where your site is referred to. For example, for hubpages.com, the domain name is www.hubpages.com. That's what you need to get one for yourself too. There are free options too. But I will highly recommend you getting your own domain name, if you are absolutely serious about your online business. One domain name will cost you around $6-$9 a year. I have used Namecheap.com for my all domain names since a long time now and never had any problem with them. I also love their customer service and support. I will recommend you to go for their service as well. For the domain name, go for something related to your niche. I will suggest you try to get one “.com extension” if possible, but “.net & .org” will also do. For eg., lets take the Yoga niche for example. Lets try The power of yoga dot com. But when I try that in Namecheap, I see this...It says that it is not available, as someone already took it. You can see thepowerofyoga.biz is available (its even cheaper). But I prefer to stick to .com. Lets try some other variation of this. Try anything that you would like to, related to your niche. One of the best ways is to add a prefix or a suffix to your niche market name and try it. Remember, this name will be associated to your main hub. So try to keep it simple so that it is easy to remember.Let's try out “Get Healthier With Yoga.com”. After you have your domain name, you will also need a hosting account where you will host your site. Your site & your contents need a designated web space to be stored & exist. That's provided by your hosting company. Its just like renting a place in the web space for your website. This is going to cost you just around $7-$9 per month. That's it! I have been using Hostgator since I got started, to host all my sites. They are a wonderful service with some great support. I can highly recommend you to get started with them. You can get started with them here! Now there are few ways to get this hosting for free. For example, You can join the Wealthy Affiliate training community, one of my most favorite affiliate training communities in the internet, as they will host all your sites for you without any extra charge! Basically if you are looking to get into affiliate marketing, I can recommend you a better training support than the Wealthy Affiliate. There is no other place in the net where you can talk directly to highly successful million dollar affiliate marketers and get your questions answered by them. Its just absolutely awesome. The third component of your online business is an autoresponder: building a list is the most crucial part of you business. So you will need a service that manages the emails of your subscribers and maintain them. It takes care of the facts that your emails are actually delivered to your prospects and not land on their spam boxes. This is a MUST have for your online business. Usually this is going to cost you around $20-$25 a month. For this, I would recommend you to head over to Simple Money System and you will be able to grab a top-notch autoresponder service PLUS a lot more powerful additional tools for your online business in a low monthly price. Its one of the the best deals I have seen around! Now when you get your domain name, hosting account and your autoresponder, all set-up, your are ready to start on your internet marketing journey. So here's what you will need next. You need to set up a Wordpress blog on your domain name. This is going to be your content hub. This is where you will write and discuss about your chosen niche. Its very easy to get this all done. I will let you know how to do all this. Then you need to install few of the plug-ins on your blog essential for maximizing your blog for the search engines. Plug-ins are add-on to your blog that enhances the functionality of your site. Here are the only 8 plug-ins that you will need in your blog: – Akismet: It keeps your blog safe and clean from all the the spam comments & links. – Contact Form 7: You need to have a FTC Disclaimer page and a Contact form in your blog. This particular plug-in helps you get a contact form installed with ease. – Google Analytics for WordPress: This plug-in helps you install Google Analytics in your Wordpress blog & thus helps you to track your visitors and everything else that's happening on your site. – Google XML Sitemaps: This will help search engines to index your site better & be regularly updated about it. – Pretty Link Lite: This helps you cloak & track your affiliate links and help your get a better idea of whats actually working and whats not. – Sociable: This will help you get the social love to your site. This will provide you with all the social networking sharing buttons like Facebook, Tweeter & Google+ etc. – All In One SEO Pack: This will help you make your site search engine friendly. This will take care of all the on-site optimization for you. – WP Super Cache: This will make your site load & run faster. That's it. Once you install this 8 plug-ins, your site is all set and ready to get started. Then you will also need to install your email or lead capture form (also known as squeeze page) on your blog, so that your visitors can enter their emails and join your email list. This is the most important part of the whole equation. Its very easy to do so. In your autoresponder service, you will need to create a list. After your list is created, they will provide you with a little snippet code to be installed in your site. You just need to copy and paste that little code given by your autoresponder service on to your side-bar and you are done. As you can see, to do that you will need to offer something valuable to your visitors, that is related to your niche market, in-exchange for their emails. This will be like an incentive or bait for them to give you their email addresses. Here is how to do that.... Go and do some research on that niche of yours. Prepare a report that solves some specific problem of the market. Try to give as much value as possible in it. Do not let the scarcity mindset to take over you. Pack in as much value as you can in that report. You do not have to write a 100 page eBook. A 25 to 30 page report will be more than enough. If you find it problematic to come up with topic to write about, go to site like the ezinearticles.com and do some reading. They have a lot of quality articles on any subject you can think of. Read related forums and see what people are asking and what are the solutions being offered. This will give you some pretty good ideas on what to write about. Just take those ideas and write in your own words. After you get the report done, just record yourself reading that report and get an audio version of it. Audacity is a very good software to get your audio recording done and the best part is- Its Free . This will increase the perceived value of your free gift and add to your conversions. You can also download the trial version of Camtasia and get a video done on that. Just prepare some basic PowerPoint slides with the main points on it and read out the report along with them. That’s it. The point is to add as much value as possible. The value you provide is your competitive edge. One more faster way to get your free gift ready is... Just go and contact few of the experts in your niche for an interview session, where you will ask few of the important question related to your niche and the expert answers them. You just need to record that interview and package it to give to your visitors. Get it transcribed too and make a PDF report of it. Again, add value. See if you have any expert related to your niche in your local area too and get hold of them. The good thing is that most of them will except your interview proposal as this is also going to give them some good exposure. This is a win-win situation of both of you. You just need to be bit smart on how you present & request for the interview session. Just show them the benefits they will gain out of it... Explain to them clearly on “what's in it for them”. Let them know that you are going to start a blog or website on this topic and thus you will promote their expertise and their interview to all the visitors in your blog. Tell them all the various benefits they are going to get of this interview session. This is the best way to get a give-away product ready, as you are leveraging the authority of an expert and also gaining the advantage of your association to industry experts. This adds to your credibility too. Then go to Fiverr.com and get the cool graphics done for your free gift. It will only cost you $5 to get that. A good graphics increases the perceived value of your free gift and thus get you a better conversion on your squeeze page. If you do not want to do all these, then just buy a good quality PLR that have the giveaway rights. That way you can get your free gift ready-made. Just go to Google an type “your niche + PLR”, and you will get a ton of them. I just love PLRs. They make my job a lot easier. Just be bit careful of the fact that there are many crappy PLR products available out there. Make sure what you give away is of quality! Because that low quality will tarnish you image. I hope you now have some pretty good ideas on how to get your incentive for your site visitors. You just need to give them a good reason to subscribe to your list. That's your only motto here. Next you need to load up your autoresponder with follow-up sequences. You need at least 16-20 emails loaded up to your followup emails to start with. Then you need to add them up as you move ahead. At least 2 emails per week will be good to go. Again, give them a good enough reason to be in your list. Your value, along with your personal touch is your edge here. As you visit the forums, take note of the most asked question in the there. Make a note of them all. Do a little research and get the answers to those and load them up into your emails. Keep them short & simple. Do not make them too long or essay type. And within those emails, recommend your affiliate offers. I will suggest not to go too hard on your pitching, at least during the first few communication. Keep it soft and subtle. They should look like recommendation, rather than sales pitches. Keep one very important thing in mind - “People like to buy, but People do not like to be sold.”. I hope you get the point here. This is extremely crucial! Though you can recommend your offers and tell them about the wonderful benefits they are going to get out of the product, but never ever hammer your subscribers with sales pitch after sales pitch. This will just chase them away. Just try to provide some excellent value related to your niche. Again, give them a reason to be in your list, open up and read your emails. Try to make your email headlines as catchy & punchy as possible (but not hype), because its these headlines that will get your emails opened and read. Make your subscribers consume your information. This is where you build a solid relationship with your subscribers. Now the next step is getting contents to your site or your hub. Aim for around 5 to 10 articles on your blog to start with. Then keep on adding more of these in regular intervals. The more you put, the better it is. Regular postings will make your site a good one in Google's eyes. I guess you must be thinking what to write about in your blog. For this, you need to do some keyword research first. What are keywords? These are phrases or combination of words that people all around the world are typing into the Google search bar (or other search engines like Yahoo or Bing), looking out for some specific information. I am sure you must have used Google thousand of times yourself. So what ever you type into the Google search bar, that is called a keyword,. There are millions of keywords that people are looking for each and every day. One of the best freetools to find related keywords is called the Google Keyword Planner (previously known as Google External Keyword Tool)! For eg., when I check for related keywords in the above tool, here are few of the keywords that I get.... (look at the image below) yoga weight loss with 2900 average search results, which means this particular keyword is searched 2900 times every month on average. Again yoga dvd with 4400 searches per month. In this way we can grab a lot of keywords and do a analysis on them, whether they are worthy going for. Now 3 crucial things you need to look out for, before you decide on whether you want to go for a particular keyword phrase or not: 1. Search Volume of the keyword. 2. Competition on the keyword. 3. The Keyword Intent or The Profitability of the keyword. Let me explain these a bit here. The first is the search volume of the keyword. This just means that whether that particular keyword you are looking for has a substantial number of search volume. I mean whether there are enough people looking for it enough times & tying it in the search engines. You do not want to go for keywords which are searched very little as that would not give you much visitors. I go for at least 500-1000 searches per month, on exact searches. For example, in the above screenshot we have yoga weight loss with 2900 average search results which is pretty good. But here is an example of a keyword that you wouldn't want to go for...Look the those keywords with 30 & 40 searches per month. I will avoid those to start with in the blog. Because they are too low on search volume. (One tip: You can actually take few of these low search volume keywords and write articles targeting these keywords to submit them to the various article directories and also syndicate them all over the place. We will take about this later.) Next, we need to look at the the competition level of the keyword that we target. Our main intention is to go for keyword that we can easily rank for in Google. You don't want to compete with the big guns when you are just starting out on your online business. We have to lookout for keywords which have low competition level so that we can rank for them pretty easily. But before you start looking out for competition, you need to understand few things here.. 1st is PR of a site, which mean Page Rank. To keep it easy and short, PR denotes the authority & the rank of a site in the eyes of Google. Higher the PR of a particular site, higher is the authority of the site. When the site is fresh and new, the PR is zero. As your site grows to become an authority site in your niche with many articles on it and more audience interaction with your site, your PR increases too. Search engines prefer the sites with higher PRs than the new once. So we have to make sure that no high PR sites are trying to rank for the same keywords as us. Just Google your keyword and see the ranking PRs of the site in the 1st page results. I will suggest you install SEO Quake plug-in on your Firefox browser. It will give help you give you some good details about the sites you are looking at. For example., when I take the keyword yoga weight loss & search for it in Google, lets see what See those PR5 sites in the top 10 rankings. That's not at all a good sign to go for. You will find it pretty hard to beat a PR5 site. But there are also few more criteria that we need to look for before you reach any conclusion on this! For the time being, what we want to see in here are sites not more than PR2 ranking in the top 10 results in Google for that particular keyword phrase. Next thing we need to understand is the Backlinks to the sites, which means the number of other sites linking back to your particular site. The more the number of links from other sites, the better in the eyes of Google (though there are other criteria too, which we will come to later). These are just like votes from the other websites. The more votes you have for your site, Google gives your more authority and thus rank you better in the search results! One of the best ways to check Backlinks to a site is a site called https://ahrefs.com/ . We just need to feed in the site we want to see the backlinks for and it spits out all the information in front of us.For example, I want to see the number of backlinks of one of the top PR5 sites that comes in Google for my keyword yoga weight loss. As soon as I plug the site URL into https://ahrefs.com/, here is what I get.. Here are the total number of backlinks (76 in this case) and all the other details that we want about our competing site. The lower this number, the better for us. We want it to be less than 100. Also we need to look at the number of referring domains (which is 33 in the above example). The lesser the better! Now to makes things a little easier, I use two keyword tools that helps me out with these analysis are Market Samurai & Traffic Travis. Both of these are great tools that gives me a pretty good idea about the competitive and also few important details about the competing sites. They do not have to it by myself. These tool do everything for me and gives me all the data I need. Don't worry. You can grab the FREE versions of these to get what you want. You can grab the free version of Market Samurai & you can get the free version of Traffic Travis Now this is how these tools help me on my keyword analysis...Here is what these tools have to say about the keyword yoga weight loss. Here what you see is the in-depth analysis by Market Samurai of the top 10 sites in Google for this keyword, without you yourself looking at these manually. It does the job for you. Now, don't get too scared of looking at this here. We just need to understand few things. First, the PRs of the sites. As we see few sites with more than PR2 here that I have circled red (PR4, PR5, PR3). We do not want these. Next, we need to look at the RDP column. It just denotes the number of backlinks to this particular page. We do not want these to be more than 150-200 in here. And next the last for 4 column – Title, URL, Desc, Head. This shows whether the sites are optimizing specifically for this particular keyword in their Title phrase, in their URLs, in their description and their headings. The lower the optimization, the better for us. In this example above, we see that 3 of the sites (which are also having high PRs) are fully optimized for the keyword (the 'Ys'), which is not a good sign for us. What we want is more of the “N” & less of “Y” in these columns. Here is what Traffic Travis have to say about this keyword yoga weight loss...The difficulty level in Traffic Travis gives you a pretty good idea of whether the keyword you are looking at will be easy or tough to rank. Also we want the numbers in the median column in Pagerank & Backlink Page to be a low one, around lower than 100 is a good sign. But always use your own diligence to take your final decisions. Never solely rely on any software or tool. These are just to help you out and make your job easier. Your own brain and intelligence is your best friend. Just remember the basics or the fundamentals that I gave you earlier in here and you will be able to get this right! That's the only reason I talked about the basics of analyzing your keywords on your own, before you take the help of these tools. Get your basics right and you will never be dead-stuck! Now that you have check your keywords for the good search volume and low competition, you now need to look at the one last point to make sure its a good one. I am talking about the keyword intent here. Its the specific intention of the particular person searching for that particular keyword. What I mean by this is that what is the thought process or the probable purpose of the person while typing that particular keyword into the search bar. What exactly is he/she looking for?! Now let me tell you how is this a pretty important factor for us to know! For example., when someone is searching for something like free download, he/she is clearly looking for FREE stuff and thus such people are hardly going to spent any money to acquire what they are looking for. You will find it pretty hard to sell them something because they are looking for free stuff in the first place. This is not at all favorable for us. These are not the kind of group of people we want to aim for. Rather we want people who are ready or willing to spend money & buy for their specific solutions. Lets take the dog training niche for example here. When someone is typing in something like dog, you will find that it has millions of search volumes. But it is too broad or general because we never know what that particular person is exactly looking for. May be he is just trying to see different pictures of dogs. Or may be he is just doing some research on dogs. It can be anything and everything! Its quite impossible to put a specific face to this searcher here. You should be able to put a face to your prospects. You need to be able to guess his/her age range, their needs, problems and issues. We should be able to picture & visualize them in our mind. And only when you are able to get some kind of rough picture of your target prospect, you will be able to connect & talk with them, or else you will just be shooting in the dark! Here is a video that will give you a good idea about what exactly I am talking about! ==>> Knowing Your Customer Inside Out – Your Customer Avatar! Now, lets get back into the dog niche example here again. We are looking for someone who is most probably in distress because his/her dog doesn't behave properly and thus want some information on how to train a dog to behave properly. Such a person is in some kind of pain or trouble and he/she wants to get rid of the problem as soon as possible. Thus when we present a relevant offer in front of them, its most likely that they will spend money and will buy the product. Keywords like how to stop my dog to bark, or how to make my dog behave properly, or how to cure my dog illness are good keywords to target, because you can very well guess that the person behind is in some kind of trouble and is looking for a solution. We can pretty much picture & guess what kind of problem this particular person may be going through. And thus we will be able to provide them with a very specific solution. Its much easier to deal with such specific needs, rather than something vague and general like dog. Lets take one more example here (yes! this is that important). When someone is searching for the keyword juicer, its too broad a term to guess out what exactly the person is looking for. It can be anything from pictures of juicers, to names & types of juicers etc.. But when some is looking with a specific keyword like Breville Juice Extractor, now we can be pretty much sure of the intent of theperson that probably he or she is specifically looking for a particular brand or model of a juicer and thus, is very close to his/her buying decision. May be they just want a little more information about this particular brand of juicers that he/she wants to buy. In such a case, when you are able to present some good information to help them decide on whether to buy or not, you are much likely to close the deal on him/her pretty easily. Becoz he/she is already considering the product. You just have to push that person over the edge by providing him/her with some relevant & good information and thereby helping that person to make the ultimate buying decision. This is also called the “buyer intent”. It just means how close the person is from the intention of buying something. You keywords need to have a buyer intent to it. Or it should have a sense of trouble or deep pain behind it, like how to lose weight fast or how to get my ex back or how to stop my divorce. As you can easily guess that these people are desperately & urgently looking for a very specific solution to their real problem! Whenever you look at a keyword, think and imagine the person behind who is typing that keyword. “Is he/she in some kind of crisis or desperate pain, looking for an urgent solution?! Is he/she planning to buy or purchase something very specific?!” If the answer to these questions is yes, its a green. You probably have a good & profitable keyword in your hand to target. Go for it. Only when you have checked out these 3 major factors of searchvolume, competition and the profitability for a particular keyword, you are ready to move ahead with it. Using all these techniques that I explained to you above, dig around your niche & get at least 30-40 good keywords for your blog articles. After you are ready with your set of profitable keywords in your chosen niche market, now is the time to get your content ready for your blog. Write one articles for each keyword. These articles must be of around 600-1000 words. The articles should be valuable, informative and interesting to read. Whenever you write your contents, keep in mind that you want your visitor to actually like your content & thus STAY on your site for as long as possible. This is called the retention or the bounce rate of your visitor. Google looks at how long a visitors stays on your site and how many pages the visitor browses through within your site. The more time they stay on your site & browse through, the better for you! You want your visitors to love and share your content in the social networking sites all over the place. This is when your content gets viral and you get a lot of traffic to your website. Now when you install Google Analytics in your site, you will be able to track all of these stuff. Google analytics report of one of my sites,Look at the Bounce Rate. Anything below 75% is pretty good. Also have a look at the Avg. Visit Duration. This denotes the average time a visitor is spending on my site. As you can see its more than 4 minutes. This is damn good I feel. This means that my visitors are liking my content & actually consuming it. That's what you want. Try your best to please them and give them the best of information that you can muster. Providing a lots of value is the key here! Here are few powerful tips on writing your blog articles: 1. Write for your visitors. Your first intention should be to please anyone who visits your blog and go through it. Its only when you will be able to provide them value, that they will take any action, like subscribing to your list or just clicking through your recommendations to consider buying. 2. Write one article targeting one keyword. Have your keyword in the title of the articles. But do not force it to fit in. It should read & sound natural and should make good sense to its readers. For eg., Something like “5 Powerful Ways To Weight Loss with Yoga” is much more appealing than just “Weight Loss Yoga” as my title. I guess you get the idea here! Also try to include your main keyword in the first paragraph and the last paragraph of your article. Include LSI keywords within your articles. LSI (Latent Semantic Keywords) are your closely related keywords other than the main keyword you are targeting in your article. You can find many of them when your type your main keyword into the Google keyword tool. This will let search engines know what your article is all about. 3. From within your article, link to other related pages of your site, whenever possible. If within your article, there comes up a particular term or topic for which you have a separate article itself within your site, just link to it. You want to visitor tobrowse through your site as much as possible. Also try to link to other authority sites with higher PR, if & when necessary. Google loves this types of internal and external linking patterns. A very excellent example is to have a look at any article on Wikipedia and how they write it. (For eg., Here is Wikipedia on Yoga) See how they link to their internal pages for each and every term possible. Google absolutely love this. Now I am not saying you to write 100s of pages and articles like Wikipedia for each and every topic possible. But what you can do is get some good content on few of the major topics within your target niche and inter-link them wherever possible. If you do not have the information on your site about something, link it to some other authority site in your niche that provides some good information on the particular topic. Its all about providing a good overall experience to your visitors. They should get what they are looking for! In return, you will get what you want from them as well. 4. Have related videos and images in your articles. Make it content rich. Go to sites like YouTube or ehow.com and find related video and embed them in your blog posts. Both Google and your visitors will love such multi-media rich contents & thus reward you accordingly. Just follow those rules above and you will be good to go. The two things that your content should achieve is...1st, it should be a good, informative and a fun read for your visitors & deliver exactly what they are looking for. 2nd, they should let the search engines like Google know what it is all about. Keep adding regular contents to your blog. The more content it will have, the bigger and more authoritative it will become! Still confused about all this website building. When your site is ready for the visitors. Next step will be to let your interested people know about your site. This is where we will drive traffic to our blog. This is where you will promote your site all over the internet. Let's get started! Getting Traffic To The Hub AS already discuss previously, Traffic is the lifeblood of your online business. No traffic means no business. You may have the best site with the best information in the entire planet, but if you have no visitors to your site, its equal to dead! I will reveal to you few of the best & most effective sources of traffic that has worked pretty well for me. But before I reveal you these traffic strategies, let me tell you that when you are starting off with your online business, this is the part where you will and you must spend most of your time on, i.e., driving traffic to your site. And you have to do these consistently, day-in day-out. Let me be very honest and frank here. Its not going to make you rich overnight. Its going to be hard during the initial times as you will see little results for the efforts that you put in. But as time goes by and you work on this consistently over a period of time, you will start seeing some pretty good results. You cannot do this particular traffic strategies for a day or two and get frustrated because you see no or very little results. It just doesn't work like that! Remember the 2 very important words I pressed on you before at the start: Consistency & Persistency! Never forget these.... These 2 qualities will decide on whether you will be successful or not! I know this because I myself have done this mistake in the past. I just tried one traffic strategy for a week and when I didn't got the expected results, I quit on that and got started with some other strategies. Believe me... This is the biggest blander you can ever do in your online business endeavors. You just got to have a loads of patience at the initial stages of your online business. You got to push yourself through that initial phase of struggles and troubles. I can pretty much assure you that things are going to go wrong many a times for you. Things will look boring and dull at times. You will be tempted to procrastinate thing to a later date. You will feel you are just not moving ahead. But this is what differentiates the successful from the unsuccessful ones. The successful people never quit, whatever may be the challenges. Whereas the unsuccessful ones quit when they hit these initial bumps. Just have patience. Keep working. I can assure you that what I am sharing with you in this article was my personal experience. I know what are the issues or hurdles you are going to face during this particular journey of yours. That's why I am fore-warning you against these fatal mistakes! You just need to keep working consistently and persistently and you will definitely succeed!! Okay...so lets get into the nitty-gritty of driving traffic or visitors to your site. Here are the best traffic strategies that has worked very well for me: 1. Forum marketing: Find out few of the biggest & the busiest forums in your niche. You can just go to Google and type “Your niche + Forum”. For eg., when I type yoga + forums on Google, here is what I get...See the forum related to Yoga that comes up here. One more technique that you can do is type yoga + forum and click the 'More' tab as shown below. Do you see that Discussion tab in there?! Click that and you will find many more forums related to your niche market. One more technique to find forums related to your niche is just go to http://boardreader.com/ or http://omgili.com/. There you just enter your niche and you will be given a lot of discussion forums related to your niche. Once you find few of the related forums within your niche, you need to look if its active enough or not! For example, when I look at the Yoga forum I found in Google, As you can see, its a pretty active one. You want to make sure that there are recent activities going on there. If not, go and find another one. Once you find out 2-3 good and active forums I your niche, sign-up on them and get involved in there. Your only motive -- Add as much of value as you can to the discussions going on there. Ask questions, help others. You do not need to project yourself as the know-all guy. If you don't know something, do your research before you post or reply to anything. Now the way you get traffic to your site is by something called the “Signature Link”. Most of the forums do not allow any link inside the post or the content but they will allow you to add a link to a resource box right below your post. It looks something link this....But before you add your signature link, make sure you hang in there in the forum for sometime and get to know them a little better. A forum is a kind of closely knit community. You first need to get in there and get yourself introduced. You actually need to learn their lingo and their said and unsaid rules and regulations. Never ever try to spam the forum with your promotional links or you are sure to get banned or be thrown out of it. Even before you make our first post, read the forum rules & just stick to them. See if they even permit signature links in there. If they don't, there is not much of use sticking to them. Go get into another one that permits signature links and start connecting in there. Your signatures should be short and catchy. Try not to get it too hyped. It should clearly tell people a single attractive benefit they are going to get if they visit your site. You can give a hint about the amazing free gift they can grab by visiting your site. The basic principle you should remember is...Your content should be such that it should convince the readers that you know your subject pretty well and so they can be greatly benefited by your expertise. Next, as they scroll down your post or your content and see your your signature link below, it should compel them to click through it and visit your site for more of you. This is the simple trick of forum marketing! 2. Blog Commenting: This is the 2nd best traffic strategy I love. Its fast and easy. But this is something that you need to do on a daily and a regular basis. Look for the top authority blogs in your niche and get involved in them by commenting on their posts. What you exactly do is make a list of the top most 20-30 authority blogs of your niche. Go and visit them and if possible, subscribe to their email newsletters. By doing that, you will be regularly notified each and every-time there is a new post in them, so that you can hop over to them quickly and get into the discussion before anyone else. You should read the blog post and then add your own bit of knowledge by posting your valuable comment in there. Now you must be thinking how do I get a link back to my own blog or site by commenting in other blogs? As you can see, you will have an option to put your website address in there. That's how you get a link back to your site. Now here's how this works... Whenever this high authority blogs makes a post or an article, hundreds and thousands of avid readers drop-by their blog and read the post. Then they also check out the comments by various people below that post. That's how you get in front of them. But your comment should be valuable enough to grab their attention & make them click and visit your blog. You should add something to the discussion. 3. Link Building cum Content Syndication: When other related sites link to your site, Google or the other search engines count them as votes and thus your site gets a favor from the search engines. They rank your contents better and faster. As many links you have from other sites linking back to your blog, the better is in the eyes of Google. But nowadays getting links from irrelevant and spammy sites can hamper your position, affecting you rather negatively. You have to take care of the fact that the sites linking back to you are healthy sites with high PR authority (not porn or adult sites, no gambling sites, neither any of those low content quality sites) and are very much relevant to your niche market. For eg., if my site is related to yoga or weight loss, I have to get links from others sites that are also related to the same subject or niche. Links from a marketing site or a financial blog is not as valuable as links from other health related sites. You have to build your off-site links slowly and continuously, specially when starting of with your brand new site. As it grows, so does the authority of your blog in the eyes of the search engines. Once your sites gets some authority and ages with time, you can go bit aggressive on your link building activities (but you have to be really careful with those aggressive linkings). For everything you do outside your site, always have a link back to your site. You can link it just by getting the URL in there. Or even linking it through some anchor text. Anchor text means the visible text in a clickable link or a hyperlink that when clicked takes us to some other website. the text My Online Marketing Journal is called the anchor text that links to my blog http://myonlinemarketingjournal.com. The HTML code to use an anchor text to link back to your site is The Anchor Text That You Want To Use For anchor text, you can use your particular keyword itself, all the variations of your keyword or related keywords, your blog name, or just your naked site URL, or miscellaneous and random texts like click here, to know more, my site etc. Don't forget to mix it up to give your site a good variety of linking texts! Now here are few of the exact steps that I do to build links to my site and also get traffic from other places to my site: - 1st I write & submit a press release to few of the high PR sites. Press release are very powerful traffic sources. To write a good press release, first thing that you are going to need is something that is news worthy. Press releases are not like articles or blog posts. They need to be used to get the word out about a news worthy event. That means you will have to create a news worthy event! Here are few resources for you below.. - http://www.inc.com/guides/2010/09/how-to-write-a-pressrelease.html - http://service.prweb.com/ - http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Press-Release Using these resources you will learn how to create a killer Press Release. They will walk you through the setup and structure that will both get your PR noticed and your PR published on other sites. You can also go to Fiverr.com and find a good press release service to do that for you. They will both write and submit it for you. Check out the review and the ratings for the gig before you order any of this. Don't go too crazy n this. Just few high quality links from good sites will be enough. - 2nd, I write few unique 500 word articles and submit them to web 2.0 sites like squidoo.com, hubpage.com, blogger.com, wordpress.com, livejournal, weebly.com, tunblr.com, webs.com etc. Then I also submit unique articles to the article directories like Ezinearticles.com, ArticleBase, GoArticles, Article Alley, ArticleDashboard etc. Each & every post or article that I write & submit (whether its in my own blog or any other place), I go to Pingler.com and ping it. Then I go to SocialMonkee.com and bookmark it. This gives that initial push to my content and let the search engines know about the articles. It gets my site get indexed and ranked faster. Then again, each & every article I write, I convert it to different formats and submit it to different places. For eg., - I convert them to PDF and submit them to PDF sharing sites like Scribd.com, Docstoc.com, Slideshare.net, Issuu.com etc. - I convert them to Power Point slides and submit them to sites like SlideShare.net, SlideRocket.com, Slideburner.com and SlideBoom.com. - Then I convert them to videos by just recording few PowerPoint slides with the major points, while I just read them out loud. I use screen-capture softwares like Camtasia or Camstudio to do that. Then I submit my videos to the various video sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion etc. - After this, you can just compile all of your articles into one ebook and submit it to the various e-book directories online. So after you submit your contents to all these various sites, remember to keep note of all the URLs of your various submissions. Go to a site like http://www.pingfarm.com/, copy and paste all your the above URLs of all the various submissions and mass ping them all. Go to Fiverr.com and buy a link boosting gig to boost up all your various submission URLs. Its just $5. But let me warn you here. Never ever get any of this mass linking services directly to your main site or your niche blog. Always get this mass links to your other articles, web2.0 sites and your various others submissions. Also no software links for your main site. A linking pattern shows that only the manual links that you yourself build point directly to your main site. All the other massive links that you get from Fiverr.com or other mass backlinking services goes only to your second tier sites but never to your main site. Only the highly quality and high PR links from relevant authority sites should link directly to your main site. Even your forum signature links and your blog comment linking back to your site will contribute greatly to your linking building effort. 4. Guest blogging: All the sites in your niche are in need of regular good contents. Its difficult to produce content on a regular basis. That is why many blogs and sites allow other guest bloggers to write in their blogs and in return, you can add a link or two back to your own blog. This is one of the best traffic generation and link building strategy you can practice. Contact our related niche blog owners and tell them that you want to write a good quality blog post for their site. In return, all you want is a link back to your own site. Most of them will love to have your content and will allow you to write. Just make sure your content is of top-notch quality. This is one of the fastest and best ways to get traffic to your site 5. Get Some Social Love: Get a Facebook page for your site. Here's an excellent book on Facebook marketing I got for you. Check my hubpage on facebook marketing here , you will learn all the ways that you can use Facebook to market your site. Also you can use Fiverr.com to get some social link love. The only thing I will recommend to get from fiverr.com directly for your main site are Facebook likes packages, Re-tweet packages and Google+ packages. Go to fiverr and look for some real and quality social packages. Make sure you check out the feedback from past customers and their ratings. Get one of each of the above. But again, do not go too crazy with this too. Make sure they are authentic & real ones. All these will build a lots of good backlinks to your site. These will also drive lots of traffic from all these various places to your niche site. The more you of these content your submit all over this various places around the net, the more of traffic you will get. Keep doing these traffic strategies above and you will see results in a very short amount of time. Your site will gradually climb up in the rankings in the search results, thus generating a lot of free organic traffic from the search engines. Now, you know more than a lot of those newbie marketers who are trying to make money online. Just make sure you utilize this knowledge that you gained here in this book to the fullest. In this entire book, you will see that I constant refer to two highlyrecommended resources for you... 1. Do get your free starter account at the Wealthy Affiliate. This will make your journey lot easier. This is the place that I got started with in the first place. There is a wealth of information in there to help you out in your online business. I cannot recommend you a better place than this training community to start with. So do not think much and just get your free account in there! 2. If you want to get in the make money online niche, make sure you check out the Simple Money System program. It just provides you with a ready-to-go done for you business-in-a-box solution. Check out the video here! Remember, I will say it the last & final time yet again... Just pick one system or one method and stick to it. Master it. Be consistent and persistent in your efforts! You will succeed. I have given you everything you need to have your first $500 online and further quickly and easily! Now its all up to you to get this all done and achieve that financial freedom that you always dreams of! For any question and help from me, you can contact me anytime You can also connect with me on facebook Now lets look at these in more details.... First, Your personal affinity, I will recommend you to get started on a subject or niche that you are personally interested in. Why? Because when you are starting out, you have limited resources at your disposal. I also guess you will not prefer to spend too much on outsourcing your jobs. Which means you yourself have to do everything during your initial phase. You will have to write, talk and discuss exclusively and extensively on that particular subject matter; unless you are interested in it, you will find it pretty hard to get yourself going. If it doesn't interests you, you will have to drag yourself into it each and every day you work on it. Dragging is not a good sign at all to get started with as far as your first online business venture is concerned. A time will come when you will give up on it. I know this pretty well because I have done that in the past & failed miserably! So I will highly recommend you start with something that you love to talk and discuss about. Something that you are good at or something that you would love to know more about. Moreover, when you are passionate about something, your audience connects with you better. You will write better, talk better and reach to your prospects better. Thus, personal affinity is critical when you are getting started. But once you get off the initial hump and you have got that initial money rolling in, you can definitely start on something that you have no connection with and can simply outsource all the content creation part to someone who is knowledgeable about that subject. You will not have to do all the work for that! Profitability Analysis of the Market. Now the fact is that you are here to make money. So if the market you choose is not profitable enough, what's the use of going into it (unless you are just in it for hobby). Profitability only means that there needs to be actual rabid buyers ready to spend and buy stuff in your chosen market. For example, you do not want to get into a market like the “How to tie a bow tie!” or may be “How to download free songs”, because you will find it pretty hard to get someone wanting to pay you to learn these skills. Now you also do not want to get into something like 'How to hack Facebook account!”, as that will be illegal and you do not want to get into trouble with your business, do you? You want to get into a market where people are desperate for a solution and are ready to part with their hard earned money to actually buy the solution to their problem. Your market should be really desperate for a solution. They should have a real painful problem that they are eagerly looking for an urgent solution to. For example, someone is looking for “how to make a cake” will be much less desperate than someone who is looking for “how to cure hemorrhoids fast” or “how to get rid of acne”, because the later are going through an excruciating pain or trouble that he/she wants to get relief off as fast as possible. That's a sign of a good market. The more desperate your market is, the better for you to sell a solution to them. The forth point is, the market should be able to support many related offers and products, so that you can turn your one-time customers into repeat buyers, by providing them with more of related solutions and serve them for a long time. For example, Lets take the Make Money Online market now. Its huge, as there are products ranging from $7 to even $10000 or more. That is exactly what you want in your market. Also it has a wide range of topics to choose from. For example, you have sub-niches like Affiliate Marketing and List Building to Traffic Generation, then from Wordpress blogging to Web-designing or Software development etc. So you get a wide variety of products to market to your prospects. You can also discuss & talk on numerous aspect with the same market and produce content on a regular basis. You are never going to fall short of what you should write or talk about. You have an unlimited number of options to go for. These are signs of a good and profitable market! You do not want to go into a market where there is only one product or offer for that problem and then you are done. One time business is not a sustainable form of business. You want repeat business from the same customers over a longer period of time. Now if you wondering on what market to go into, here are few of the ways to generate a lots of ideas on various available markets and their sub-niches. Go to Amazon.com and you will find all the sorts of good markets in there. Amazon looks like: above you can see the various markets available that you can go for like Baby care, Beauty products, Camera & accessories, Health and Personal care, Home & Kitchen etc. Each of the section above can be a market that you can opt for. But there too broad markets to start with. So we need to dig deeper into them. We have to find sub-niches in these broad markets. For that, when we click one of them, suppose the Baby market, here you can see, within the baby niche itself, we have tons of other sub-niches that you can target like Bathing and Skin care, Car Seats, Diapering, Gears, Health and Baby care etc. We can dig even deeper in to these. For example, when we click Health & Baby Care section. Thus. You have unlimited options to explore and get involved with. This is how you can find various markets in Amazon. Here are few more resources for you that I use for research before choosing my specific market....