Internet Marketing

Is it still possible to make a good income with Google Adsense? After all, there was a report circulating this past fall that said Adsense was dead.

Adsense took a beating a short time ago when Google made some changes. But it is still possible to make some extra money with a Web site or two. It is even possible to make a good living with it.

What You Need

You need a domain name, a hosting account, and a niche topic. Preferably the niche is one that you know something about. That makes it easier to fill it with content.

If you want to make a good income with one or two Web sites then good content is a must. Your goal is to create a site that attracts people and keeps them coming back.

There are sites on the Internet, created by people just like you that are getting thousands of visitors a day. The content is written by the site owner who cares about the subject. They are passionate about the topic and write from their heart.

These sites have grown in popularity simply by word-of-mouth and maybe some simple search engine optimization tactics. Good content will get noticed, although optimizing for the search engines helps.

Getting Traffic to Your New Site

Before your site can become popular through word-of-mouth you need to get the first visitors to your site. How do you let people know about your site?

Free tactics include posting in forums or blogs and putting your URL in the signature, posting on Answers.Yahoo.com and again putting your URL in the signature, and writing articles and submitting them to article directories. These are all free, and they work very well.

Here’s a hint: Write an article each week for each site. Do that consistently and you can’t help but get traffic. It’s a great way to get backlinks, too, which is very important in getting ranked high in the search engines.

For further education (and for examples) visit StevePavlina.com and JackHumphrey.com/fridaytrafficreport. These are two sites that get thousands of visitors a day. They are using the blogging software put out by WordPress, which is free.

Blogs are a simple way to build a Web site. Anyone can start one, and then tweak it as they become more experienced. Jack’s site didn’t start out looking that cool. He’s done some major changes to it in the last year.

Steve’s site looks very plain, but that doesn’t bother the millions of people who regularly visit his site. They are coming for the content.

That simple-looking site is earning Steve several thousand dollars a day in Adsense, affiliate products and donations. Yes, people actually donate to sites that offer them good content for free. Steve uses a WordPress plug in for collecting donations from visitors who want to give him money as a way of saying “thank you.”

A free forum that can provide a great education on the topic of Internet marketing for any newbie is available at Forum.DigitalPoint.com. Be prepared to spend hours there searching through all the posts that give good tips on how to make money online. You can also sign up for free and post questions.

The basics of how to make money online have been described here, along with some examples to study and a forum to learn from. Now it is up to you to get started.

Whatever you do, don’t put it off. You can’t earn money online by just reading about it. You have to take action.

To Your Success
Cody Moya

The Internet is driven primarily by content.

Content is driven primarily by keywords.

New websites are designed to attract new visitors, as many as possible. By going through the steps to make certain that your content, and then your keywords, are just right, you can keep your search engine rankings high and maximize your new visitors. By maintaining fresh content constantly, your established visitors will keep coming back.

What’s Your Theme?

The theme of your website is basically the purpose of it. Are you here to sell a product? Or are you more interested in informing people about something, reviewing other products, or cataloging something?

Most people take their theme and run straight to – graphics. And why not? Graphics are fun. Create your company logo, get it just right. Take pictures of your products, toss on some fancy Flash animations, maybe stick a dancing GIF email down at the bottom of the page so people will see the movement and email you. You’re done now, right? The intro page is awesome and forces viewers to go through it, the bells and whistles are impressive, and the logo says exactly what you want.

Here’s the truth.

Most customers remain on a website for a maximum of ten seconds before giving up. If it takes your graphics-laden site more than that to load, they won’t wait for it before clicking the back button and going to the next store on the search engine list. Animations distract your customers from what you’re selling. Fancy logos are largely a waste of time until you’re a huge company worried about brand recognition don’t bother with designing a complicated logo. Keep it simple.

The most important item on your website, and the item most often ignored, is good solid content. Keyword rich content. Content that makes the customer go “wow,” and then bookmark your site to come back to later.

Search engines catalog content, not images. Why? Content is recognizable and categorizable to automated programs used to map the Internet; images (except in certain cases) are not. And when customers look for pages for information, they are generally looking for informative text, not your bells and whistles or your logo.

Rich descriptive words make your site rise in search engine rankings. Some fortunate webmasters are also prolific writers, and can whip up content articles in a jiffy to toss up on their websites. If you’re not one of this fortunate group though, you can purchase articles and place them on your website as your own. Or you can use free articles from an article exchange (beware – there is a hidden pitfall here. More later.) This unique and fresh content is vital to your site’s success.

The perfect content article delivers easily-understood and useful information to the reader. It also is keyword-rich – that is, it focuses on specific words that the search engines will subsequently catalog and use to rank your site in the listings it returns to searchers. Your first job before writing (or hiring someone to write) your articles is to determine what keywords your customers will likely use to search for sites like yours. One place you can do this easily is at http://www.nichebot.com. Nichebot and similar sites can inform you on what search terms are most often used to find websites like yours.

Keywords should be listed in the metatags, headings, and description of your site, as well as sprinkled through at least the first portion of the article. This tells the search engine spiders how to catalog your site. Fresh and unique content keeps the spiders ranking you higher, and it keeps your customers coming back. Your content should be organized, easy to scan as well as to read, and user friendly. It should also be spread among your pages, not just on your index page. Avoid heavy graphics, and make sure your site is free of spelling and grammatical errors.

Now, about those article exchanges. Deals that are too good to be true usually are, and article exchanges offer you free, well-written content that you can use on your website at will. What’s wrong with that? Article exchanges also require that you include something called a resource box. This box contains information about the author of the article, including his or her website link.

By using this, you’re telling your customers: I’m not really the guru here, but you can click here to get to the site of the guy who is. What are they going to do?

Well, what would you do? Click to the other guy’s site, of course.

If you must use article exchanges to get your site going, follow the rules, but try to replace it with content you own as quickly as you can. This makes you into what you should have been: the information guru for your site.

Check my Private Label Articles website.

Click here to visit my Private Label Articles website

To Your Success
Cody Moya

Do you want to work online? Do you want to build your own business? Do you have a dream of working for yourself, from home, where you could work as many or as few hours as you like and still make a good living?

A lot of people have that dream too, but what’s the best way to make it come true?

Chances are when you start on this journey, you’ll end up joining some get-rich-quick schemes and multi-level marketing programs; but you’ll soon realize that only a select few make money this way, and unfortunately the odds are against you.

However, there are in fact many multi-millionaires being made online.

Most of them are selling their own products they’ve developed; but nearly all of them are also selling products as affiliates.

What does that mean? Selling as an affiliate means working as a commissioned salesperson, or making money selling other people’s stuff!

While the product owner takes care of billing, customer service, refund requests, tech support and so forth, the affiliate just recommends the product to others, and gets a hefty sales commission for doing so… which can often be as high as 50-75%, and sometimes even 100%, for digital downloadable products.

Why would a product owner offer such high commissions? They do it because 25-50% of your sales, and every other affiliate’s sales, add up to a lot more than 100% of their own sales. In other words, they wouldn’t be selling those products at all without you.

Why would anyone offer 100% commissions? Because they want to give you a good reason to promote their product (usually at a fairly low price point so they don’t mind giving up the sales money) in exchange for building their list of opt-in subscribers. Everyone who pays you the 100% commission for the product also ends up signing up with the product owner to download it, so it’s a win-win scenario.

Now here’s the biggest question: how do you get people to buy products through your affiliate link when it seems everybody online is promoting the same thing?

There are numerous ways to get the attention of a customer, which leads them to buy through you.

1. Pay per Click Direct-to-Merchant

Many people are making great money online by purchasing clicks from Google AdWords or other pay per click search engines, and sending that traffic directly to the product owner’s sales page through their affiliate link. This can be very profitable if done right. The main drawback is that only a couple of people can use the same domain name when promoting through AdWords, so rather than using your affiliate link as it is, you should create a redirect link. The other drawback is that the traffic you have purchased may be interested in other products you’re promoting, but you don’t have contact with those people once they’ve clicked through to the sales page, so that’s a lost sales opportunity.

2. Pay per Click to a Landing Page

This method uses the same type of pay per click advertising, but sends people to your own landing page first. You can offer a review of the product or some other type of unique content, before offering the visitor your affiliate link to click on if they like your review. Again, once the people click through to the sales page, you won’t be able to contact them anymore.

3. Combination of Pay per Click and List-Building

This method is very similar to #2, sending people to your own landing page first. However, the idea is to have them opt in to your newsletter list before they get to see your review or the sales page. Once someone is on your list, you’ll be able to send him or her related offers down the road. But be careful that your landing page is not just a “squeeze page” with an opt-in form and no content, which goes against Google’s AdWords regulations.

4. Combination of SEO and List-Building

If you don’t want to pay for traffic or worry about operating within Google’s pay per click terms, you can go the natural search way and build traffic through SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization. This takes a different resource – your time — in order to properly optimize your page. You will also want to research how to do it the most effectively. However, many super affiliates are to the point where all their traffic comes naturally from the search engines, and they get thousands of visitors a day.

To combine SEO with list building, you would once again offer an opt-in form to the visitor so that you can keep contact with them. Otherwise you’re letting them leave as easily as they came, which is a waste of your SEO efforts.

As you can see, there are numerous ways to get traffic to your sites and build your affiliate marketing business. If you choose an option that involves opt-in list building, then you’ll also have a growing list of subscribers who know, like and trust you, and will buy much of what you recommend.

Another way to stand out is to offer a bonus or rebate that nobody else offers. You’ll make less on each transaction if it’s a cash rebate, but not everyone will cash in on your offer, and you’ll also have more sales overall.

With a little ingenuity and effort, you can be a super affiliate in no time.

To Your Success
Cody Moya

Most people change their website’s pages whenever they get a new idea. They think that each change is going to improve their site and make them more successful.

Of course, there are basic improvements you can make as you are writing the content for your site. And for the first few weeks you may notice some shortcomings that need to be remedied.

But, after a few days or weeks your site becomes stable. You don’t find any more errors in spelling or grammar. The graphics look like they belong on the site. And your order link or opt-in form performs correctly.

You’re now ready for split testing. This is a slow, incremental improvement of your site through ongoing testing.

Split testing involves making an experimental change to one of your pages, measuring the effects of that change, and analyzing the significance of differences in measured results. In other words, a split test attempts to determine how a change to your site affects some measurable response.

There are several decisions you must make to conduct a split test.

First, you need to determine what change you want to make. Typically you will change a headline, a sentence or two in your sales copy, the price of your product, the wording of your guarantee, change an image, or alter some other single feature of your page.

You will use two (or more) nearly identical pages. The difference being that one page has the “original” material while the other “experimental” page has the change applied.

Second, you must decide what “success event” to measure. For many people, it will be sales of a product or clicks of the order link. Some will want to measure the number of opt-ins. Others will measure the clicks to a pay-per-click service like AdSense.

To measure successfully, you must know how to distinguish successful responses from your “original” and “experimental” pages.

For example, many affiliate programs allow you to include a campaign ID in your link. By placing one campaign ID in the order links on the “original” page and another campaign ID on the “experimental” page you can determine the number of clicks and the number of orders coming from your pages.

Other people use a redirect script that keeps statistics on each redirect request. Redirect scripts typically use a keyword to select the URL for redirection. You can use keywords like “original” and “experimental” and have both redirected to your affiliate program’s order page. Then you can use the admin function of the redirect script to look at the number of clicks to the order page from both your “original” and “experimental” pages.

Next, you’ll need a script to randomly deliver your original or experimental pages to your site’s visitors. It would be helpful for this script to place a cookie on the visitor’s computer so the same page is delivered when the visitor returns.

Finally, you’ll need to analyze the results. The Chi Square statistic is often used to determine the significance of experiments similar to this. While differences in results often seem satisfyingly clear, they often are not statistically significant.

For example, consider two pages that are each displayed 500 times. One page resulted in 20 sales while the other page resulted in 30 sales. “WOW”, you say. “One page caused 50% more sales than the other page. That’s got to be meaningful.”

In this case we had a total of 50 sales, all things being equal, we would expect 25 sales from each page. The difference for both of your pages was only 5 sales. One page made 5 more sales than expected while the other made 5 fewer sales than expected. This could easily be the result of random variation rather than being caused by differences in your pages.

To help you understand, consider this story. Two random people are each given 500 pennies and each is placed 30 feet from a small can. They toss their pennies at the can. One person gets 30 pennies in the can while the other gets only 20 in the can. Can you conclude that the person who got 30 pennies in was significantly more skilled at tossing pennies than the other person?

No. In fact, if this penny tossing experiment was repeated 100 times, it is likely that 15 of those results would differ by as much or more than our example. That’s too close to simple random variation to believe that there is a real difference in skill levels between the people tossing the pennies.

For many experiments, a “statistically significant” result means that the differences we seen in our result would occur 5 or fewer times if a similar random experiment was repeated 100 times.

So, we should not conclude that there is a significant difference in the ability of our pages to deliver the “success event.”

There are now two things we can do. One is to conclude that the change we made to our “experimental” page is not statistically significant. In this case we can move on to the next split test experiment.

Or, we can continue this split test and hope that the ratio of sales remains the same. If we carried on the split test longer and found the same ratio of results, the differences could be significant. Consider doubling the number of exposures of your pages. If the ratio held, and we now have 60 sales compared to only 40 sales, that result would be statistically significant.

In 100 truly random experiments, successes having differences similar to 60 and 40 would occur fewer than 5 times. This is a good indication that the observed differences were not caused simply by random chance. Rather, we can conclude that there was a real cause for the observed differences.

The Chi Square statistic can be found on many spreadsheets, including Excel. With this statistic you compare the expected success values with the actual success values. When the statistic has a value of 0.05 or less you can conclude that there was a real reason for the differences.

Don’t expect every split test experiment to yield important results. Perhaps a third of your split test experiments will show the experimental page significantly improved sales. A third of the time there will be no significant difference. And a third of the time, the experimental page will cause a decrease in sales.

But, keep testing because that’s the sure way to improve your sales.

To Your Success
Cody Moya

Article marketing is nothing new. But applied to affiliate marketing it is the easiest way to make money online. And best of all, you can do it without spending a dime using only free tools available online.

This is all you will need:

- A free keyword research tool
- A free text editor
- A free Clickbank account
- A free Blogger account

Do a quick search on your favorite search engine and you will find these free tools very easily.

Quick cash blue print:

1 – Keyword research:

Using your keyword research tool, search for low competition keywords. Those are keywords that have at least 300 searches a month and that have less than 5000 competing pages in Google (when entered between quotation marks like this “keyword”). Try to find 5 to 10 good keywords related to the same topic.

The idea is to focus on keywords for which you can get a first page ranking in Google, Msn and Yahoo.

Hint: If you have no idea of which market to target, start by checking popular phrases like: how to, purchase, get rid of, help, cure, tips, etc.

2 – Find a digital product to promote

Go to Clickbank.com and find a product related to your topic. Choose one that pays at least $15 to $20. Generate your affiliate link and write it down or save it in a text file on your computer.

3 – Article writing:

Write an informative article (approximately 400 words) focused on each of your keywords. Put your keyword in the title and in the first and last paragraph of your article. Also sprinkle it throughout your copy. You can also throw in a few other keywords related to your topic. This will help you rank well.

Most important, write a great bio box that will make people want to learn more and click on the link to your blog. Put your keyword in your bio box as an anchor text link to your blog.

4 – Set up your blog.

More and more article directories will not let you put your affiliate link in your bio box. So your blog is going to be your landing page. The idea here is to put up a simple blog that will presell (not sell) your product and make people click on your Clickbank affiliate link to go to the sales page.

Hint: set up a blog for every product you promote and give it a keyword-focused name.

5 – Submit your articles to article directories.

You will need to find article directories with a PR of 5 or more. These are the ones Google likes and it will help you get a first page ranking in the search engines and drive tons of free traffic to your blog.

Post one article a day on each article directory and do not post the exact same article to more than one directory.

Hint: Your best choice is Ezinearticles.com. You will need good quality articles, but it is the most powerful directory online. Alternatively you can use Goarticles.com.

6 – Rinse and repeat!

Article marketing is a game of numbers. The more articles your submit, the more money you will earn. But every product is not going to be a winner. Some will do well, some will not. So test a new product every week putting up 5 to 10 focused articles each time.

That is all there is to it. This may seem to good to be true, but it really does work. Off course it will take a couple of weeks for money to start rolling in on a regular basis but the magic of this method is that once you write a money making article it will generate residual income for months and maybe even years — without ever costing you a single dime.

Check my Private Label Articles website.

Click here to visit my Private Label Articles website

To Your Success
Cody Moya

Relevant, unique content is the key to obtaining and retaining targeted traffic.

Dissecting that sentence:

- Targeted traffic is the specific audience you are trying to reach – usually your customers.
- Unique content is content that no one else can provide.
- Relevant content is content that has meaning to the targeted traffic audience.

And if you have that relevant, unique content, your customers will be happy and keep returning.

But good content is more than just relevant and unique; it is rich in keywords. These are the Reeses Pieces that keep the spiders happy; if you have lots of keywords placed intelligently in your text, the search engine spiders (cataloging programs that look for and list websites) will rank your site higher than they would a similar site poorer in keywords.

The importance of this cannot be underestimated. Most customers reach a site for the first time by using a search engine. They feed the engine search terms, and the engine looks up and spits out the relevant websites – that is, the ones that rank highest with those keyword search terms.

That’s a hard task, but the harder one is this: if you don’t capture your customer’s attention within about ten seconds, they will click onto a different site. Yes, they will leave you. Web surfers are fickle creatures; if you don’t believe it, pay attention to your own behavior when browsing the web.

But you can captivate them with excellent content, the sort that captures their attention and gets them focused on your site. Ideally, it should also sell to them whatever it is you have to sell, while also keeping them interested and informed. And the best way to have excellent content is to provide informational articles.

In today’s electronic world, every website may be its own publisher, its own newsletter or magazine, its own advertising agent. Every website may be in the business of providing the information that has, until now, mostly been delivered by commercial magazines.

More than just providing information, articles can give you guru status. If your website’s articles are well-written and provide intelligent advice, your customers will know that you are an expert in your field. Answering their main questions ensures that they will come back with followup questions. And you can even get interactive, with a FAQ where you can provide the answers to questions posed.

Some people are confident enough in their own writing ability to go ahead and write their own content articles. More often, though, webmasters either don’t have the time or the skills to write articles to load online. This is where article brokers can come in handy.

An article broker sells private label rights to articles to webmasters. Say you run a website on how to care for anacondas. A good article broker can find you keyword-optimized articles written by a professional that will work perfectly on your website. And you put your own name on the article. Suddenly, you’re the author of “Top Ten Reasons You Should Never Feed Alligators to Anacondas.” It’s keyword optimized, so that when web searchers type “anaconda” into a search engine, it returns your article near the top. And it’s well-written and informative, so your viewers see you as an expert and are more likely to bookmark and return to your website than they would otherwise.

If you want to crank it up a notch, you can buy a whole ebook, not just an article. Ebooks offered for free on your website show your customers that you are not only an expert, you know enough to write a book on the subject. If you offer this informative ebook this is an impressive thing.

Better yet, included in the ebook is your URL, so that the reader can click and open your website right up, enabling them to access any new information on your site and not incidentally supporting your site by viewing advertising, purchasing things from affiliates, or purchasing items from you.

Ebooks can generally be purchased from the same article brokers you purchase articles from. They are simply documents created in MS Word and saved to PDF via Adobe Acrobat or OpenOffice (a freely downloadable program compatible with MS Word). You can write your own if you feel confident in your abilities, but most webmasters choose to purchase them from professionals.

Check my Private Label Articles website.

Click here to visit my Private Label Articles website

To Your Success
Cody Moya

First of all, what is a blog trackback? A trackback is a type of blog feature that is used to associate blog posts on different blogs – or a way to notify a website or another blog that you have published an entry that references it. The result of this is that two or more different blogs are able to share readers.

The description above is a little hard to fathom so here is an example. Say you just posted an article to your blog about Pit Bull dog training. Now, as you are surfing the internet, you run across a similar or related post on another blog. So, you could use the trackback feature to notify the person who posted the other post about Pit Bulls that there is a similar post on your blog.

When your trackback, which is the permalink to your post, appears on the other blog’s post, that blog’s readers find out that you have something to say about Pit Bulls and may even pay your blog a visit to find out more.

In order to create a trackback, you have to get the trackback URL from the post where you want to send your trackback notification. It will be shown on the blog as a Trackback URL or possibly a Permalink. Once you have found it, copy the URL into the correct place in your blog’s post. Your blog software will have some notation like Trackback URL identified for where the Trackback URL would go.

Once you have done this, save and republish your blog. Your blog software will automatically send the Trackback ping to the target blog’s post. So now your trackback, which is the permalink to your post, will be listed on the other blog’s post after that blog owner has approved it.

The trackback feature works by actually sending a ping from your blog to the blog you are trackbacking to notify them of your post. This also causes your post to be listed on the other blog, after it has been approved of course.

Trackbacks should be used to elaborate on or add to a related post. So if your post is on Pit Bulls, your trackback on another blog should also be about that related subject and not one like pet care in general or something like that. Blog comments can be used for posting non specific comments on blogs where trackbacks are topic related specific posts.

You may have noticed that by trackbacking you are essentially placing your link (permalink) on another blog, which creates a backlink to your blog. For this reason, when you set up your blog, modify the permalink structure to be more search engine friendly. This can be done a few different ways, but you want a structure that ends up having keywords in it as opposed to having more dynamic looking links.

By having the backlinks to your blog and by having them relevant to the content of your blog, you now have the ability of improving your blog’s page rank. Those backlinks will strengthen both your link popularity and your link relevancy which will bring your blog more organic search engine traffic.

It should be noted that trackbacks should be used with care and not used as methods for spamming other people’s blogs.

To Your Success
Cody Moya

Building your opt-in list starts with having a website that will persuade visitors to spend some time there. By doing that they will be more apt to sign up to your newsletter or offer.

Here are 7 steps that will help accomplish this.

1. Use original material. If they see that you are displaying the same content as similar sites. They aren’t going to stay around for very long.

2. Start out with a headline and introduction that captures their attention. Let them know what is going to be found on your website. It doesn’t take long for today’s surfers to decide if this page is going to be worth further attention.

3. Make sure your visitors know just what they will find on your website. They are looking for information on a certain subject and they need to know that you have their possible answers. Therefore be sure to use the keywords that best fit your web page because when your visitor clicks on a keyword with his browser he wants to find the corresponding content.

4. Be sure you have numerous cross links to various pages on your site so the visitor can browse through it. If he finds it helpful and pertinent he will be more inclined to bookmark your site and come back again. Be sure your links are well designed to catch the reader’s eye.

5. Design your site so your pages can load quickly. Don’t load it up with too many pictures and long blocks of text. Leave enough “white space” so one’s eyes can be drawn down the page. Articles should be broken up into short paragraphs and adjust your text so it is easy to read–not too small nor too light. Difficult in reading the content will discourage a visitor from continuing.

6. Proofread your pages so you don’t make grammatical and spelling mistakes. You need to appear a professional. If you are not sure of the effect the page is presenting let someone else take a look. Forums are a good area to ask members to view your site or particular page. (You will probably receive all kinds of opinions!) But you should definitely get some valuable help.

7. Offer your visitors freebies–ebooks, software, articles etc. that they can download from your site. Ask them if they would fill out a survey which could help you find out for what type of information they are looking, or ask if they would like to sign up for your newsletter. If a visitor does nothing else than to become one of your subscribers and be put on your opt-in email list you have won the first battle.

Now that you have a means to add to your opt-in list by way of your website, you also need to build your list in other ways, especially if you don’t yet have too many hits on your site. That takes time but by building your list you will increase them.

Here are 5 more possibilities outside your website.

1. Advertise a free ebook. You can have it downloaded from your site as mentioned before or you could have the visitor send you an email and you could attach the ebook to an answering one. This ebook doesn’t have to be more than 7-10 pages.

Advertise your newsletter and send responders to your list via your autoresponder, which will take care of the opting in, and startup of your emails. Be sure any email, whether yours or your autoresponders has an opt-out feature.

Use email signatures, which you can add to the bottom of your emails. In 3-6 lines you put your name, short description and appropriate link to your site or offer.

4. Send an email to an individual email address and ask the recipient if they would like to sign-up for your mailing list or offer the option to decline from any future mailings. Be careful here because anyone receiving your email could consider it to be spam. To me this is the least desirable method.

5. If you have a newsletter in which you have just about exhausted your material and want to start another newsletter on a different area you could send a broadcast and invite anyone nearing the end of your letters to change to the new newsletter. You may be able to keep some of those who are ready to make a change. You won’t gain any new subscribers really but you may be able to keep some of those you might otherwise lose. Let them know that you are proficient in different areas.

As you can see building your opt-in list need not be difficult. Use your imagination and I am sure that you can find many other means to get results.

How to get new, fresh and big list monthly without any work?

Click => Business opportunity leads to find out.

To Your Success
Cody Moya

One of the hottest sites to come out of the Web 2.0 phenomenon is Squidoo. If you are not building sites to Squidoo, you are missing one of the quickest and easiest ways to build free traffic for your website or blog.

Squidoo is a cross between a blog, a mini site, and a My Space page. Squidoo calls the sites “lenses” and the people who produce the sites are called “lensmasters.”

Squidoo lenses are very easy to make, even if you have not ever built a website or blog before. You can have a lens up and running in as little as 15 minutes.

Squidoo lenses are made up of “modules”. Squidoo has dozens of modules to choose from. There are modules for making lists. There are modules for You Tube videos. There are modules for Amazon and Ebay auctions. With a little knowledge of the module system, you can have your lens built in no time.

Squidoo also offers you a chance to make money from your lens. Squidoo makes its money from affiliate advertising with Google AdSense, Amazon, Ebay and several other sites. They keep track of the earnings of each module and split the profits with you 50-50. You can also donate your profits of your module to charity if you wish.

Squidoo is very lenient about allowing you to use third party advertising on your lens. You can promote your own website if you wish or promote your favorite affiliate product. Savvy network marketers often use Squidoo lenses to promote their products and recruit new reps.

Squidoo lenses often rank very high on Google, so it’s a great chance to build some backlinks to your primary company website.

One of the best ways to use Squidoo to build traffic to your primary blog is by using the RSS feed module. You simply load the RSS feed from your blog and the Squidoo lens will update automatically as you update your blog.

The Amazon module is also very easy to use for people that are new at Squidoo. For the case of Amazon products, you simply enter the ISBN number of the Amazon product and Squidoo will pull it directly off the Amazon website, complete with the photo and the price. You can also have the module pull directly from keywords if you don’t want to take the time to find ISBN numbers on Amazon.

Another great Squidoo module is the Ebay module. With the Ebay module, you can select products by keyword or by seller. If you sell a lot of products yourself on Ebay, this is a great way to get free traffic to your auctions.

As you can tell, Squidoo is a great free and easy way to build traffic and make money online. So get Squidooing

To Your Success
Cody Moya

For great placement on search engines, you should use great content articles, drawing targeted traffic to your website as well as providing search engine spiders something they can tell is valuable. The better your content is, the more likely your customers will become that most valuable type of customer: a repeat customer. By using original articles by you, or by purchasing them from article directories or article brokers, you can keep your website filled with fresh, keyword-rich information.

Keyword-rich articles are what spiders (the automated programs used by search engines to catalog websites) look for when they go to new websites. If a spider can easily tell that you’re selling rubber chickens, it can then catalog you with the other people selling rubber chickens so that searches for that term bring up your website as well as similar ones. People used to do this with metatags – information in the header of a webpage – but so many sites were loading the metatags with terms that had nothing to do with the page the search engines stopped cataloging them heavily. Now they look for those key words in the text of your website, particularly with header tags and in the early part of your site content.

By keeping your content fresh and unique, you can keep the customers that find your website in these searches. Keeping your page simple and with few graphics will keep your customers coming back for more content as often as you can add new content to the site. Pages should be easy to scan and laid out well, and the site should be easy to navigate.

Affiliate Links: Another Source of Income and Traffic

By including affiliate links on your website, you can make extra profit while improving your ranking in the search engines.

Affiliate links are links from your website to someone else who’s selling something. A good example is a book review website that includes links back to Amazon for each book reviewed; if you have an affiliate agreement, Amazon tracks the click back to the site that referred it – the review site, in this example – and credits them with the visit. Generally, click-throughs earn a certain amount of money, and in some cases a sale earns even more. The affiliate also links to your website somewhere on theirs, ideally herding even more traffic back to you.

But how does this improve your ranking? Most people know that the search engines look for keywords when ranking web pages. The number of links to your website also influences your position in the rankings. If you have dozens of links from affiliates to your site, the search engines will note that and your position will move up; after all, with dozens of links you must be an important site!

So how do you get these affiliate links? The most important thing you can do is make your website valuable to the affiliate. When you link to another site, it’s as if you’re saying, here, look at this website, it’s good. It becomes a personal recommendation. If your site has little or no value, that looks terrible on the affiliate.

If, however, your site is crammed with excellent information, you make the affiliate look good; he or she is providing a valuable service. For instance, you have a recipe website, from which you want to sell spices, special blends, and cooking accessories for an affiliate cooking store. If you have six recipes copied from the back of a Betty Crocker cake box, you’re not likely to have a good reception from the cooking store. They would not appear very intelligent if they linked to this sort of website.

If, however, you have hundreds of good original recipes or a very complete Cajun recipe database or some other especially valuable content, the cooking store is much more apt to want to link to you. And there you go: you’re selling the spice mixes you’re recommending in your recipes, right on your website. And the store supplying the mixes is linking back to you, which increases your level in search engine rankings.

Better yet, if you use hyperlinks from the recipe, you can slip the affiliate links directly into the text of your content articles. Your website isn’t cluttered with someone’s ads, and you have supplied an easy way for your site viewers to get a needed article. And you make money doing it! Thumbnail graphics – graphics that have been physically shrunk to postage-stamp size to save space – are another excellent way to slip links into your page unobtrusively. Make certain you shrink them in a graphics program, not by resetting image size in your web design program! This is crucial to make the graphics worthwhile.

I have Private Label Articles website.

Click here to visit my Private Label Articles website

To Your Success
Cody Moya