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The Key Connection – How Well Do You Know Your Affiliate Product?
November 19, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Do you know very little about the product you’re promoting on your website? Does this product only exist to you as a vague banner? Do you hope it has enough of a heartbeat to send dollars your way on its own?
Then you’re not doing enough to make your affiliate relationship a beneficial one. When you promote something ensure you talk about it intelligently. If you walk into a jeweler to buy a watch and ask the store owner about one, you expect them to be able to tell you its features. If they stare at you, shrug, and say “I don’t really know anything about it, I just get ‘em in and display ‘em.” Would you buy that watch? Of course not. You’re already headed out the door.
Visitors to your site do the same thing. It’s up to you to prevent them from doing that. You’ve heard the saying “If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it”. If you don’t use the product you’re promoting, or at least attempt to learn how others use it, you’ll lose affiliate commissions. Using a product gives you first hand knowledge; enabling you to write effective copy to promote the product.
Okay, okay, you’re promoting lots of different products. You can’t possibly afford to buy and try every one of them. Fair enough! You can, however, ask around and find out information from people who are using the product. Talk to them. Ask them about the good and bad features of the product. It’s a worthwhile exercise. Summarize all that knowledge into effective information content for your site.
Another benefit of talking to users about the product is in gaining testimonials. A chit-chat with someone who raves about the product is half the work done for this project. Just write down what they’re saying, edit it, ask their permission to use their name and get it online. There’s no creative brainstorming needed. Listen to them and write!
Do you know anyone who’s an ‘in the limelight’ kind of person and using one of your affiliate products? Why not talk them up and get an endorsement from them. Someone others admire and respect add value to a product that they endorse for you.
If you write your own ads and informative content ensure you can back up your claims about the product. Customers hate nothing more than reading grandiose statements that prove unfounded when they try a product. It’s the “Where’s the beef” factor. If you promise it, it better be there. As an affiliate marketer, you are the platform for the product and your websites integrity rests on you making factual claims about it.
Read reports to gain more knowledge of the products you’re featuring on your site. Read different reviews to give you a well-rounded take on a product. You’ll read something you never knew or really understood about it. That information turns into an excellent selling point.
The key in all this is connecting with your product; knowing it inside out. This way, you target your efforts for promoting it. Write about its benefits and advantages over similar products. Highlight attractive features or various uses of the product. Give your visitors lots of information to make an informed decision about your affiliate product.
They will view your website as a trustworthy one. They’ll rely on it and come back for more. They will drive your affiliate income higher.
11 Twittering Rules On How To Twitter Well, And Earn Money
November 1, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Twitter has taken the world by storm, faster than a F1 racing car. The entire major news channels, TV channels, celebrities, businesses now are also on Twitter. Not forgetting the individuals and Internet Marketers who are spending enormous amounts of time twittering or tweeting. But most of them don’t know how to twitter well; twittering needs skills just like marketing does. There are even a statistics on who is the most followed Twitter user in the world. I’m going to reveal some Twitter tips on how to twitter well, so that you won’t be hate on Twitter.
- Always provide solid information every time you tweet, such as big sales, free gifts at this website. Providing pictures are better.
- You should find people who share similar interests to you, if you’re into Network Marketing, finding people with the same interests would be great. Use Twitter Search or Twellow for that.
- Doing things online are actually virtually real, you should try to imagine you are at a party or business mixer. Social Networking is a virtual event; try to be friendly just like you would in a real life.
- Be yourself.
Now, I’ve seen a lot of good things and also bad things on Twitter. Some of the bad things are caused by the Internet Marketers who are chomping at the bit thinking Twitter is going to make them rich beyond their wildest dreams. They just don’t know how to twitter well, I’ve followed many Internet Marketers and have been pitched and approached by every get-rich-quick scheme or new MLM venture, and even the next big thing projects.
What they don’t know is that 90% of the people think you are spamming them. You need to know how to twitter well, to promote your business. I’m sure giving a link to a landing page you own is absolutely not the way. Below is the way to let Twitter work for you:
- Do not try to pitch your business with your Twitter Profile, Automated Direct Messages, and Tweets. Those are for you to build your credibility and reputation online, don’t sound like you need cash badly.
- Always follow people who you feel may be a potential client or prospects for you. But do remember, you only want to follow them and build a good relationship with them, don’t pitch your business on your first tweet.
- Always provide your information about your business or product through a blog, article, press release or even squidoo.
- After you have successfully branded yourself as a leader in your field, most Twitter users will eventually be curious about your business, and they will always be able to find a way to your landing page through your blog.
- Always be available; reply all your Direct Messages and replies tweet to you.
I have said that some of the bad things are caused by many of the Internet Marketers, but some of them are also caused by the misuse of Twitter tools. Nowadays, there are so many twitter tools or applications available online, free and paid. Some of the Internet Marketers are greatly misusing this. Here is why:
- Automated Welcome Direct Messages
This is actually a very powerful feature available in most of the twitter tools out there. Now, I have received too many messages that say, “Thanks for following, want to make $576K in a year? Click here (link)”. Now those kinds of messages are the messages that I won’t even read. They are pitching me on the first day I knew them.
Always use friendly and non-pitching welcome messages, “Hi, great to be friends. Let’s talk further.” That’s enough. People will be more than glad to talk to you if you’re not selling them anything.
- Automated Tweets
Some Twitter users that has 500 followers or below 1000 followers, and they are making automated tweets for more than 20 times a day. That’s totally ridiculous. The less your followers are means the slower your tweets will be replaced by people’s. Now, you don’t want when people clicked on your profile and saw that you are actually tweeting the same content over and over again, and it’s pitching.
You should set your automated tweets properly, set some that will be tweet once a day, a couple which will be tweet once a week. Be creative on tweeting.
Tantawi Sagara is a leader in Internet Marketing and expert in Social Media, always searching for new potential members to join him on a mission to be one of the 100 millionaires to be created by 2012,learn more about him on his blog, http://freeforyoutosearch.com
Top 3 SEO Tools to See How Well You Do in SEO
October 27, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
SEO has proven to become a great factor in the success of a website. Have you ever wondered how successful your SEO campaign is? Well there are several tools around the web that measure that success, some are accurate enough to provide you the details that you wanted while others seem otherwise.. So let me give you the top 3 tools that we use to keep track of our progress when it comes to internet marketing campaign including SEO. Let’s start first at number 3 down to number 1.
#3 SEO Tool: SiteYogi
One of the sites we found is SiteYogi. Now don’t misunderstand the Yogi part with Yogi Bear. Yogi in Yoga means someone who knows that the entire cosmos is situated within his own body. Much like it’s built for, SiteYogi determines the site’s inner cosmos or what we say its capability to become successful in internet marketing and in SEO.
Upon arriving at the site, you can already guess what the site will offer at first glance. The site’s pretty straightforward once you look at it, no sign ups, no registrations, and no payments what-so-ever. All you have to do is input the domain of the site that you want to be analyzed, sit back and watch. The wait will only take seconds, depending on the speed of your internet. Then gradually, you’ll see on the panels the fields being filled in which contain information about your site.
The first panel indicates the diagnosis of your site. The good thing about SiteYogi’s diagnosis is that it gives a score or an average grade on every detail your site has such as URL, Title, Keywords, Description, HTML Tags, HTML size, and Favicon — thumbs up means good and thumbs down means, well, not-so good. It also gives some comments and recommendations on how to make your site rank better such as working on the site’s URL or keywords or description.
SiteYogi is a great tool for SEO because it also provides other information that can be very beneficial on an SEO campaign such as the site’s ranking, syndication, social bookmarks, validations, indexed pages, and backlinks.
Visit an SEO Philippines site to learn more about SEO tools and how it can aid you in your SEO campaigns.
#2 SEO Tool: Website Grader
Another great tool we stumbled across is the Website Grader. From the name itself, Website Grader is built to grade a website. Website Grader is a free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. This is the information we found on their site.
Now what’s the difference between SiteYogi and Website Grader? Well both of them can provide information about a site. One good thing about Website Grader is that it can provide more comprehensive information on every detail about the site. It can give a more expounded detail with comments and recommendations.
Here are the things that the Website Grader would usually check about the site:
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On-Page SEO
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Metadata
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Heading Summary
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Image Summary
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Interior Page Analysis
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Readability Level
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Off-Page SEO
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Domain Info
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Google PageRank
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Google Indexed Pages
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Last Google Crawl Date
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Traffic Rank
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Inbound Links
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DMOZ Directory
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Yahoo! Directory
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ZoomInfo
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Blogosphere
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Blog Analysis
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Blog Ranking
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Recent Blog Articles
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Social Mediasphere
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Del.icio.us bookmarks
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Digg.com Submission Summary
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Converting Qualified Visitors to Leads
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RSS Feeds
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Conversion Form
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Competitive Intelligence
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Keyword Grader
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Competing Websites
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Historical Data Available
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Now isn’t that comprehensive enough? The cool thing about this site is that aside from giving out good comments and recommendations, it also explains the importance of every detail shown above such as what metadatas are for or what is the relevance of checking interior pages rather than the homepage alone, or why it is important to check the readability level of the site. Checking these things are important for the success of a website.
Another great thing about this site is that it analyzes how well a site fare’s with its competition. It shows an organized and complete detail about the site and its competitor (remember to indicate your competitor’s domain before you ran the test/analysis) such as the keywords they are competing for, grade (Website Grader’s grade), Google PageRank, Google Indexed Pages, Traffic Rank, Blog Rank, Inbound Links, and Del.icio.us Bookmarks.
Website Grader is a tool that can be used to analyze the site’s effectiveness in internet marketing. Though there are some similarities with SiteYogi, Website Grader is much adequately used with internet marketing campaigns. As Website Grader also gives out recommendations on how to make a site more successful in some parts of SEO, it is much more focused on grading a website based on its internet marketing campaign which also includes SEO.
Check out what this SEO Philippines site can offer on SEO and tools used in an SEO campaign.
#1 SEO Tool: Trifecta
Now here is our number one favorite, SEOmoz’s Trifecta. Trifecta is almost synonymous to Website Grader in terms of giving an overall grade; the only difference is that Trifecta focuses more on SEO. Trifecta is a tool used to measure how important and popular a website is in the web from its domain and through its pages.
Every factor that may affect the success of a website is included in Trifecta, factors which are used to determine the strength of a domain such as:
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PageRank of Homepage
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Average PageRank of Top 10 Pages On Site
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DMOZ Links
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Median PageRanks of Top 10 Pages On Site
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Google News Mentions
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Google Blog Search Links
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Google Domain Mentions
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Compete Rank
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Alexa Rank
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Yahoo! Site Explorer Links to Domain
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Quantcast Rank
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Wikipedia Links
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Technorati Blog Reactions
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Age in Days
And factors which are used to determine the strength of a page in the web such as:
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Ranking At Google For 1st 4 Words In Title Tag
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Pagerank Of Homepage
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Google Blog Search Links To Page
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Yahoo Internal Links Percentage
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Yahoo Site Explorer Links To Page
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Pagerank Of Page
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Yahoo Site Explorer Links To Domain
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Google Url Mentions
Through the results of these factors, Trifecta can calculate and measure the popularity and importance of a website in the World Wide Web.
And much like Website Grader, Trifecta can also provide a comprehensive detail about every factor that affects the success of a website. Trifecta can also offer a detailed outlook on the competitiveness of a website not only on its competitors, but to all industry such as in business, technology, health, science and many more. Through this, one can compare how valuable or important a website is in the whole web. The more important and popular it is in the web, the more successful it is in all types of industry.
Another thing about Trifecta is that it can also provide comments and recommendations on how to make your website more successful. But unlike the two that I’ve discussed earlier, Trifecta can provide some learning materials coming from its own creator, SEOmoz. As one of the most popular provider of SEO tools and guidelines, SEOmoz can offer a wide range of utilities, including Trifecta, and popular tutorials for SEO campaigns, thus using Trifecta can offer a more accurate and precise reading on how popular it is on the web and how well it fares in SEO.
Visit SEO Philippines site to learn more about SEO, or just visit Optimind Technology Solutions at www.myoptimind.com to learn more on SEO.
Wendy Ang is the president of Optimind Web Design and SEO, a web design and seo company in the Philippines. Optimind specializes in building and promoting websites that are designed for conversion.
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