Your website might have loads of content, but unless it’s been written with SE’s in mind it’s likely that it’s not being ranked well. Search engines live content that has been search engine optimized, or SEO‘d. However, the search engines will only give you good rankings if the content has been written in a way that both people and search engines will be able to read it. This realization, along with the changes to your current and future content, forms the building block of a primary SEO strategy:

Content is, was, and always will be, king. Good content will bring back visitors, draw in search bots, and help with your rankings. I cannot preach this fact enough.

Without getting into tremendous depth about the ways that Google (and other top-tier search engines) will index your page I can provide a few important points:

1. Use title tags - It has been shown that Google and Yahoo give text placed in title tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) more relevance than just text alone. Use a style sheet to have the title tags reflect your desired look and use them when appropriate, incorporating your targeted keywords whenever possible.
2. Bold, italicize, and get attention - There is good reason to believe that text that is bolded or italicized are given a better ranking than simple text alone. This is likely because Google sees those as more relevant as they are emphasized on your website.Bold/italicize when appropriate.
3. Maintain a keyword density of no more than 6% - Having every second word read as your keyword is annoying to both visitors and search engines. Visitors are far less likely to actually read the text, and search engines will see it as keyword stuffing and penalize your rankings. Obviously, you want to avoid both of those.
4. Avoid images when possible - Though necessary to maintain a graphical interface and a pleasing design, avoid placing important text or titles in images. Search engines are unable to read the text within the image, and hence are unable to rank your website appropriately based on that text, even if it is a keyword.Modifying your style sheet so that the text appears as you intend it to will give your SE rankings a boost and will take less time to load up on a visitors computer (believe it or not, but the majority of internet users are still on dial-up).
5. Everything in moderation - Over-optimizing your website will lead to long-term search engine ranking loss.  Remember that the search engines are all about the user experience, and if they feel that you are not offering an acceptable user experience they will penalize your website.

With that in mind, optimize enough on-site, and then focus on off-site optimization, such as link building.  One you’ve got traffic coming to the website the task falls on your content to keep them there and interested.  Mastering that, of course, is the whole point to the game now isn’t it?

One phrase that I’ve seen a lot lately is ROI, or return on investment. Many people are basing the success of their marketing on the ROI, and though that is a good way of judging the effectiveness of a particular marketing method, I feel that it’s flawed overall.

The ROI should be a figure that you set as a baseline. For example, one of your goals should be at least a 100% ROI on your next campaign. With that in mind, you can judge the effectiveness of it, and hence determine whether or not your marketing strategy is working out in the way that you predicted. With that type of information, you can then determine if you are going to make any changes.

However, the big figure that you should always be looking at when marketing is your profit. The amount of money that you actually make is much more important than the return on your investment. Think of it like this: if I spent $100 and made $300, that’s a 200% ROI, which is definitely a good ROI. However, if I spent $1,000 and made $2,000, that’s only a 100% ROI. However, the first example yielded $200 in profit, whereas the second yielded $1,000 in profit.

So what’s more important here? $200 profit and 200% ROI, or $1,000 in profit and 100% ROI? Personally, I’d take the $1,000 and the lower ROI simply because, at the end of the day, I have $800 more in my pocket.

The Right Mindset

Focus on creating profit, and once you are doing so, optimize and tweak your campaigns to maximize your conversions and hence the amount that you earn. Affiliate marketing, as a business, is privy to the same risk vs. reward figures as any other business. The fact that it’s done entirely online in an intangible marketplace is irrelevant.

For your next campaign, really consider your total profit figures and not just your ROI. If you’re experiencing a steady 50% ROI, why not spend more to make more?

I’ve come to realize that I’ve put quite a bit of content on this website that is helpful in the sense that it talks about the poper mindset or expectations, yet there is nothing that flat out says “this will make you money”.

So, here it is. Read this post, do what it says, and you will make money. It’s that simple.

Step One: Finding an offer.

The first thing that you need is an account at an affiliate network. There are many to choose from, though I prefer to use Copeac (for a variety of reasons- see this post). You’re looking for a very specific type of offer- what’s known as an “e-mail submit” or a “zip submit”.

These types of offers are unique for two reasons:

1. They have low payouts. Their payout is almost always less than $2.
2. They require almost zero effort from the user. All the user has to do is enter their e-mail address of zip code. This type of simple entry means that your conversions will be higher (as it requires no effort at all from the user).

When I am looking for zip/e-mail submits, I just look for the one that’s paying the most. The offer itself is irrelevant to me, as the conversions are going to be high so long as the landing page is decent.

TIP: Right now, iPhone offers are converting like mad. My advice would be to use one of those.

Step Two: Make a diggable website.

If you don’t have a Digg account, make one. Sign up, and then post a story. Try and post a story that is funny or insanely interesting, as you want to draw in as much traffic as possible. I made a page about funny cat pictures, and over a four day period in drew in 5,000 hits (not bad, huh?).

Once the site (or page) is made, make sure to place your affiliate ads on good positions on the website. Use graphical creatives to catch the attention. If possible, use a targeted offer based on your Digg story (it will increase conversions).

Step Three: Start Digging

Submit your Digg story and make sure that it links to your website. Then, get a group of your friends to “digg” your story, making it more popular. As it becomes more popular, more people will see your funny page. If it is actually funny, viral marketing may spread as well (how many e-mails do you receive a day with funny stuff in it?).

This all translates into traffic, and traffic means more traffic for your affiliate ads. Since Digg traffic is free (it only costs time), any amount of money that you make will be profit.

Profit Potential

How much money could you make doing this? My first few Digg’s landed me four of five days, and each page was making $80+ a day. Though the longevity of this method is uncertain, the results are there for now.

Many affiliates shoot from the hip with their marketing, and the result is a massive bombardment of advertising and promotion that usually yields little reward. What many affiliates don’t realize is that the affiliate program itself is a major factor in their success.

Thousands of affiliate programs exist online today. Online commerce was completely revolutionized by them, in fact, and now nearly two thirds of all of the transactions made on the web have three parties: the vendor, the affiliate, and the customer. Generally speaking, two people are making money while one person provides it.

What Makes a Good Affiliate Program?
A good affiliate program will almost always become successful. Aside from happy affiliates and loyal customers, it’s just good business, and good business usually succeeds (with the right amount of push).

You can expect your affiliate program to do a few things:

1. Offer fair tracking. The tracking system should be top-notch, and you should never have to worry about whether or not your conversions are being credited to you accurately.

2. Pay you on time. Late payments are a sign of disorganization, and you don’t want that from an affiliate program. If they don’t pay on time, get out and find one that does.

3. Offer support when needed. Affiliate manages will know which offers are converting and which ones aren’t. Talk to them when in doubt.

4. Promote the highest payouts. Why settle for less than you deserve? A good affiliate program will pay you the most that they can reasonably afford to. If you find an identical offer with two different payouts, something is up.

Honesty is the best policy when it comes to affiliate marketing simply because the industry itself is not well known for its trustworthiness. Every day I read horror stories from affiliates that are owed thousands of dollars in commissions and are never paid. Don’t become one of them; promote affiliate networks that have an established reputation for being reliable.

The affiliate landscape today is the most competitive, hard-to-get-into, and complicated that it’s ever been.  Because of that, damn near anyone can make a few bucks online.  There are thousands of people out there clearing $500 easily.  Hell, I know people that clear $10,000 in a day without even breaking a sweat, and it always comes down to the same six elements.  You know, the same six elements that hang over any business, affiliate marketing included.

1. Determine your market - Your website should be focused around a market that you’re trying to target.  If you are trying to promote offers to 19-29 year old men, for example, your website needs to look the part.  This is the single most important part of your success is going to come from targeting (which this site has written about on numerous occasions).  Promote offers applicable to your target market, because doing so will ensure that the market responds favorably and that your conversions stay consistent.
2. Assess your approach - Will you make a site designed around making a sale, or will you shoot for high quality content and rely on passive conversions?  Determining how you want to address your market will determine how your site will be built.  In the end, there’s no “right” and “wrong” way to build a site, there is simply the fact that a site needs to be built.  It comes down to your personality type, so go with the approach that feels the most natural to you.
3. Tailor to your traffic - If you plan on sending PPC traffic to your website, tailor your site so that it reacts best to PPC traffic.  If you are planning on long term SEO, make sure the website is designed to be as optimized as possible while offering the user as much value as it can.  Make sure that you know the characteristics of your traffic (which bring us to our next point)…
4. Know your traffic - Know how your traffic thinks, feels, reacts, acts, eats, sleeps, dreams, and poops.  You want to know everything about it when it hits your website: where does it click, what pages does it stick around on, how long does it hang around, does it come back, what ads does it click, etc.  This is CRUCIAL if you ever expect to make a black cent online.  Don’t forget this, ever.  If you aren’t making money, it’s likely because of this.
5. Monetize - Display offers your traffic will want to see.  If you’re running PPC traffic, send the traffic to landing pages relevant to the ad text.  Make sure that the traffic knows exactly what it’s supposed to be doing, when, and why.  You do not want people clicking around because they don’t know what to do, and you do not want that traffic leaving your site without making you money somehow.
6. Re-monetize - So what someone has converted for you?  Try to catch them again!  Get their e-mail address, hit them up with another offer, and potential double their value to you.  This one is a literal no brainer.

Read those six points?  Good- a step by step guide to making it big on the internet.  No go do it!

This is a good thing.

On Friday, I put in a 3 week notice at my current day job.  Over the past 2 months, I’ve seen what can be accomplished with affiliate marketing and I want to devote more time to it.

I’ll be at Affiliate Summit West next week in Vegas so feel free to drop me a line if you want to meet up.  I’m interested in meeting new affiliate managers, networks, and pretty much anyone in the biz since I’ll be doing this full-time.  I’m excited to ramp up an already decent revenue stream to only-dream-about levels.

Having gotten into some new advertising platforms recently, I’ve realized something that can be vastly improved: daily stats tracking.

I love sites like Google Analytics, but I find that there’s so much buried data that I’ll never use.  And for everything else, it’s a pain logging into site after site, only to get one single piece of information, and then being unable to juxtapose that data with the previous stat.

Time to take this to the next level.

I like programming. Mainly Java for enterprise Web apps and storefronts, but PHP is the clear winner for every problem I’ve wanted to solve lately.  It’s literally the perfect Web/scripting language for affiliate marketing.

I program for a living full-time but am slowly starting to realize the value of automating literally everything possible. Why not dedicate a few hours a day now to save days and weeks in the future?

The script I started (and mostly finished) today logs into a few of my advertising and affiliate accounts (Facebook and OurFreeStuff currently), scrapes relevant stats data, and downloads the information to a local DB on my dedicated server. The next step is to build a reporting platform on top, using the same sort of open-source stuff I’ve been using up until this point. The script runs every X minutes (X is 5 at the moment), then queries the reporting system to provide me graphs with relevant metrics like leads/sales per hour, CTR at different times of day, which days of week give the most volume, etc.

Let’s step back first.

The main problem I’m trying to solve is: when I start a campaign, how can I know for absolutely sure whether it will be profitable?

It’s not even an option to work with affiliate networks that don’t provide real-time stats. I need to know now.  Or at least within the next 20 minutes from when I start receiving impressions.

For you fellow geeks out there (and the rest of you who want to be thoroughly confused, impressed, or annoyed), here’s the technology stack I chose:

• PHP using cURL for logging into Web sites, POSTing user/pass for authentication, and regular expressions for parsing data from returned-HTML
• MySQL for data storage, using a custom schema I came up with while considering business needs
• Linux Crontab for scheduling (every 5 minutes) - the goal here is I don’t want to even touch a single thing unless it’s CTRL + R in Firefox on my stats page
• JpGraph for colorful, useful graphs that show me the metrics I want

The beauty of all this?  Well, besides that it works, and it’s badass; it’s all FREE.  I love open source stuff.  Why re-invent the wheel, or why pay for the wheel when it so readily available?

A few weeks ago when I started thinking about this, I was almost going to outsource my stat tracking to a virtual assistant.  Timothy Ferriss’ of the Four Hour Workweek goes into great detail about how to basically automate your entire life.  Do you set goals or have a daily to-do list?  If not, well, maybe you should work on that. If you do, consider re-reading all your tasks/goals with one thing in mind: could I have someone else do this for me? If your time could be better spent starting campaigns or researching niches, why not pay somebody else to do your menial tasks? It’s amazingly cost-effective - every hour you spend doing affiliate marketing is insanely more valuable than collecting, gathering, and organizing data.  Let’s be honest - you can pay a high school freshman to do that.

Literally, Ferriss outsourced everything from his businesses’ customer service to ordering flowers for his girlfriend.  Pure genious.  When about ready to putt this in action, my plan was to outsource stat tracking and all the annoying (but important) tedious tasks I don’t enjoy doing - i.e. login to all my advertising, affiliate, and stats accounts and send me one daily email every morning with a nice, clean report with all the info I need.  And maybe I’d have him/her reserve a table at a hot LA sushi restaurant one week too.

But instead, I decided just to code it myself.  Refreshing one site (mine) instead of ten and get all the combined information should be more efficient.  Imagine being able to get only the relevant Google Analytics stats you want, combined with the impressions/clicks/CTR/etc. from your Facebook Ad Manager, and also stacked right up against the number of leads you’re generating from your affiliate account?

That’s 3 sites, all calcuated together: overall page views -> impressions -> clicks -> leads -> dollars.  Boom.

Anyway, that’s the idea, now time to get back to work so I can pimp this one out. If it ends up being worth something to someone, maybe I’ll just sell it or give it away for free, who knows!

But the point remains - focus on stats and tracking - for every successful campaign I’ve begun, I’ve started 3 that lost money or just simply didn’t perform.  The earlier you catch this, the better. 

After a few e-mails from people who are looking for a step by step tutorial on how to make money I’ve decided to talk about one of the methods that I recommend to newbies that does well and doesn’t cost much to start up. 

What You’ll Need:

• An account at a reputable CPA network.  I recommend ourfreestuff.net since I’m an affiliate manager with them, but really any CPA network will do so long as they are reliable and reputable.  Also, make sure that you can contact your affiliate manager easily.
• Web hosting.  Get a top-level domain name that can be used for nearly anything.  I like to use “media” or “marketing” names (www.salvomedia.com, for example) as a subdomain can be added and not look fishy in the eyes of the users (ie- freewii.salvomedia.com). 
• Basic HTML and knowlege.  If you don’t know any HTML at all check out www.htmlgoodies.com and read up untl youi’re comfortable with it.
• A Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing account.  You’re going to be running some PPC ads, so get an account and desposit $50 or so into it.

The Method:

First, this method does not have longevity each time you do it.   In other words, once you start doing it you’ll have to continue to do it in order to maintain your income.  That being said, it only really takesd about an hour to get set up.  I’ve been able to milk around $1,500 to $2,000 a pop out of this method over the course of a couple of weeks each time I impliment it, but your results may vary.

1. Read the newspaper, watch the news, and generally stay up to date with current events.  Look for big stuff (remember Micheal Vick and his dogfighting ring?) that lots of people will be searching for online.  This is going to be your meal ticket.
2. Once you have something juicy (ie- Paris Hilton getting into another car accident), make a quick survey page.  The purpose of this survey page is to direct to an affiliate offer.  Your survey page should basically say something like “Is Paris Hilton a Bad Driver?  Vote for your chance to win INSERT OFFER HERE“.  Both answers (yes and no) will redirect your simple and easy affiliate offer.  Mobile, e-mail, and zip-submits are all good for this.
3. Set up your keywords.  Make sure that they are all related to current events and that your CPC’s are about 5% of the offer payout.
4. Test, test, test!  If you find that after 200 clicks you haven’t had a conversion you know that something is up.  Test your tracking and make sure it’s working properly!

That’s it, it’s THAT easy!

Income Potential:

You could easily make $500 a day doing this, but keep in mind that search volume will trail off drastically as the news gets old.  For some quick cash, this method can’t be beat!

Misc.:

Obviously, use a top-level domain that is somewhat relevant to the news.  Test your tracking, make sure that your keywords are targeted, and generally use a bit of common sense here.

A great way to create a passive income stream is to find a product or service you want to promote, write some creative content about it, and promote it via PPC.  The idea is simple – if you can come up with a conversion ratio that, when multiplied by your PPC costs, exceeds the payout that the product or service gives you, then you win.  Winning is good.

Let’s start with an example, shall we?

The tricky part here is creativity – it’s 4-fold, really: you need to pick a good offer, come up with a nice domain, write some solid content, and create your ads wisely.  This took several iterations to get good at – and even now not every one of my sites are home runs. Here’s what I do, in super brief description, from end-to-end: 

• Think of a domain that would adequately describe the site without infringing on any trademarks
• Go to GoDaddy, register the domain, set up your dedicated hosting server (hopefully you have one if you’re serious about doing this!) to point to it
• Create a virtual host for the domain (I have lots of domains on the same physical server), create a directory for the Web site content, create a test index file to ensure everything’s working, and hit it in a browser to make sure the DNS has propagated
• Install Wordpress in the site’s root directory
• Pick a theme for the site that suits your content – for example, if you’re going to create content on a automobile offer, pick a suitable automobile theme
• Write, write, write.  Come up with some good content that is informative, fun to read, and serves a purpose of promoting whatever offer you chose.  This is extremely important because your content is a big part of your Google Quality Score, and this will affect your CPC costs down the road.  Remember that your content should be helpful, accurate and informational. 
• Link to your offer throughout your site but not in any sort of overbearing way.  The goal is to encourage visitors that the product or service is valuable and that entering their email or zip code is worthwhile.
• Start a PPC campaign with long-tail ad groups.  If you’re promoting paid surveys, for example, use keywords such as “make money online survey” or “free fun myspace survey” instead of just “paid survey” or “fun survey”.  The latter keywords are more expensive because they’re more common, and many times the market on those keywords is very saturated.

After implementing all these steps, you’ll be up and running!  Again, this is oversimplified, but this is a true end-to-end business that just about anyone can start.

In terms of what to do going forward, you’ll want to tweak each of these steps to a certain extent.  As I’ve listed them above, you’ll want to spend the most time tweaking the bottom step and work your way up.  For example, spend the most time on monitoring and modifying your PPC campaign, a bit less time tweaking your content, and even less time changing your Wordpress theme.

The details of the PPC campaign are key because if you’re not getting enough conversions to pay for your PPC costs, this will be a losing venture.  It’s as important to find diamond-in-the-rough offers with higher payouts as it is to keep your ad groups very targeted.  Low PPC costs and higher payouts give you a much higher margin of error for a lower conversion rate.

Wow, so Google has effectively killed AffiliateWeb’s search engine rankings with their latest algorithm update, sending us from number 3 for the term “zip submits” to… get ready for it… number 46 (as of this writing). I’m annoyed, but that’s not the point of this article.

Many forums and message boards (www.wickedfire.com, www.sitepoint.com, www.digitalpoint.com, for example) are starting to make threads and comments about how shady zip/e-mail submits are and how they aren’t experiencing any conversions with them anymore. From an affiliates perspective it is probably quite frustrating, and I get that. Truth be told, I’m not running half as many e-mail/zip submit campaigns as I used to simply because there are a lot of them that aren’t converting anymore.

But, the real question here is, “why aren’t they *converting?”
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