Website Marketing Strategy Blog

by Kathleen Hobbins

Many people, including me, think that signing up with a web affiliate program is one of the easiest ways to make money on the internet.  But don’t get complacent.  Affiliate marketing can spare you the burdens of dealing with payment processing, inventory purchasing and management, shipping, customer service and returns and refunds.  But it won’t save you the work involved in getting traffic and making conversions.  And that kind of work is . . . well, a lot of work.  Here are some realities of dealing with a web affiliate program.

• Affiliate marketing is still a lot of work.  You need to choose your niche prudently, do your keyword research rigorously and set up an attractive site.  You need to get traffic to your site by as many means as possible.  That may include paying for traffic with pay-per-click advertising.  It may include writing tons of articles in an article marketing campaign.  It may include posting on blogs and forums and finding other ways to create backlinks.  Then, once you start getting some traffic, you will need to analyze how best to convert visitors to buyers.  All of those steps take skill and hard work.  It’s doable.  I think it’s fun.  But it takes time, effort and savvy that you can’t blow off.
• Once you have reached a level of success, you need to maintain the position of your blog in the search engine results.  To do that you need to continually work on your skills.  The internet as we know it didn’t exist fifteen years ago.  Who knows what it will look like fifteen years from now?  You will need to keep learning new skills to match the dynamic marketplace.  You will need to keep up with trends and new ways of reaching out to your customer base.  Many gurus talk about setting up a business and letting it “run on autopilot.”  Don’t believe them.
• You need have faith that you can make it.  Your faith will keep you working and learning, tweaking and testing, trying to be successful.  Many people earn terrific incomes on the internet.  You can be one of them.  But it won’t happen without an enormous amount of effort and skill.
• You need to keep it all in perspective.  Those web gurus who try to sell you products that will run your business on auto-pilot also make income claims.  Do you need a five-figure month to think that you are succeeding at internet marketing?  Do you need a Porsche to think you’ve made it?  As long as you are going in the right direction, you are succeeding.  If you have higher income goals, just keep working.

A web affiliate program removes some of the work from an internet business.  But not all of it.  You need to work at marketing your site and your affiliate product if you want to see good income results.  But it can be done.  Hone and apply your skills to your internet business and you will succeed with your web affiliate program.

Technorati Tags: business weblog, web affiliate program, Website Marketing Strategy

by Kathleen Hobbins

A website affiliate program is the most effective way you can choose to monetize your business weblog.  Although it requires work and skill to make money online no matter what approach you take, affiliate marketing allows you to start a business with very little capital, very low overhead, a chance to learn as you go, and a chance to work on your own terms and according to your own schedule.  If you are interested in starting a business weblog, you should definitely consider the benefits of a website affiliate program.

Here are some advantages of affiliate programs:

1.    You don’t need to create a product.  You use someone else’s.  Think of the advantages of promoting a membership site, for example.  You don’t have to provide the monthly content or moderate the forum, but you will get an ongoing commission for every sale that you make as long as the member remains a member.

2.    You don’t have do stock inventory or package and ship products. 

3.    You don’t need a shopping cart.  You won’t have to worry about processing payments or authorizing refunds.

4.    You can choose to promote any product that you feel is appropriate.  Although you probably don’t want to offer competitive products on your site at the same time, you can test your results by offering a competitive product after a while and seeing if your profit changes. 

All you need is a computer, a web affiliate program relationship, a domain name and hosting account, a website (which can be a Wordpress blog which are oh-so-easy to launch and use) and your time and skill.  It’s so easy, it’s a wonder everyone doesn’t start a business weblog and monetize it with a web affiliate program.

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Read more about affiliate marketing here:

• Focus Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy On The Entire Sales Chain … – Keyword Research Tool Cuts market research time by 90%. The internet is a great place to earn millions. Affiliate marketing is so famous among many simply because of this reason.

by Kathleen Hobbins

An easy and profitable way to monetize your business weblog is with a web affiliate program.  There is a myriad of affiliate programs available with products appropriate for just about every niche.  The vendor handles the payment processing, delivery, customer service and refunds.  You promote the product and get a check.  With all the choices you have, you should know a few things about what to look for when you choose a web affiliate program.

Here are some things to consider:

• Most affiliate programs are free.  If there is a charge to join an affiliate program that you are considering, you may want to look elsewhere.
• The best affiliate programs provide you with marketing tools.  At a bare minimum, you should expect a few images of the product and some banner ads.  Many affiliate programs or product owners go further and provide suggested keywords, articles that you can rewrite for your blog or article marketing campaign, even short ebooks for you to use as give-aways to build your list. Some also have materials for new affiliate marketers to learn more about affiliate marketers.  The more support you get for your marketing efforts, the more successful you will be.
• Do research about the product.  I have bought products that I was interested in promoting, both to be able to promote them effectively and to ensure that the quality of the product was something I wanted to stand behind.
• Be sure you understand the payment schedule.  It is not unusual for a web affiliate program to have a minimum payout amount or other parameters for payments.  Be sure you know these guidelines and that you can work with them before you commit too much time and energy into earning commissions that are governed by them.
• Understand the commission structure and take it into consideration when you choose your web affiliate program. Here are some common options:
  • You make a sale of a single product, whether a physical product or a digital download, and you get a commission, usually a percentage of the sale.
  • You make a sale of a product that has a continuing charge to the customer.  A membership site is an example of this.  You get a percentage of the continuing charge as long as the customer is liable for it.
  • A two-tier system gives you an incentive to bring other affiliates into the program by giving you a commission on the sales generated by your sponsored affiliates as well as on the sales you generate yourself.

There are different ways for a product owner to set up an affiliate program.  You should understand all the features of a web affiliate program, and compare different programs applicable to your niche, before you sign up.   

Read more about affiliate marketing:

• 5 Ways to Turbo Charge Your Blog Monetization – By now you probably know that simply plastering ads all over your pages and prominent donation links don’t really work. There really are no get-rich-quick schemes in blogging; turning your blog into a reliable income generator requires …

• Yahoo Earnings Boom on Search Engine Advertising Search Engine . – Search related and online advertising pushed Yahoo’s quarterly profit over the edge as it more than doubled. Overture search and context targeted advertising was the driving force behind this quarter’s Yahoo earnings. Yahoo had a second-quarter net profit of $112.

by Kathleen Hobbins

Are you disappointed with the amount of money that you are making on your business weblog?  To make money, you need, first, to get traffic, and then to convert the traffic into sales.  If you are not making money on your business weblog, maybe you are making one of the following mistakes.

1. Maybe you aren’t blogging regularly.  You need to post to your blog regularly both to please your readers and to please the search engines.  Your readers will only keep coming back if there is new and noteworthy content on your blog.  Once the search engines have indexed your business weblog, they will only take note of it if something comes to their attention, either from regular new posts or from backlinks.  So keep posting regularly.
2. Maybe your content isn’t up to snuff.  Take a cold, hard look at the quality of the information on your blog.  See if you are posting interesting content.  Do you need images or videos?  Do your readers have a reason to email your posts to friends with the same interests?  Make sure your content is compelling.
3. Maybe you aren’t using your on-page SEO skills.  Make sure that you use your carefully-chosen keywords in your titles, categories and content.  That is how the search engines will find your posts and send new readers to them.  Do you know what you need to know about SEO?  If not, sign up for my free report, Website Marketing Strategy:  Search Engine Training.
4. Maybe your business weblog isn’t monetized.  To make money from your blog, you need to sell products or services on it.  You can do this in a number of ways.  Sell your own products or services; sell an affiliate product; or sell advertising.  But make sure you pick one of those methods and do it well.

To make money from your business weblog, you need to avoid making the mistakes outlined above.

Technorati Tags: business weblog, Website Marketing Strategy

by Kathleen Hobbins

To be successful, your business weblog needs constant updating with fresh, well-written content.  It can be a challenge to keep up with it.  One tool that you can use to assist you is PLR, or private label rights material.  Used correctly, PLR can be a big help to you as you manage your business weblog.

PLR is easily available for download on the internet.  Although a large amount of PLR is on the broad topic of internet marketing, there is PLR available for many other niches as well.  It can be found in several formats, including ebooks, packs of articles and video series.

There are correct and incorrect ways to use it.  I don’t advise you ever to simply take it and post it unedited to your blog.  Duplicate content is discarded by the search engines, so posting an article that has been posted elsewhere on the internet, possibly dozens of times, will never be to your advantage.  Secondly, PLR material won’t be optimized for your keywords.  The best way to approach the use of PLR is to take an article, or a portion of an ebook, as a springboard to write your own article.  Your rewrite should be unique and optimized for your carefully chosen keywords.

But if you take that approach to PLR, you will find that it can be a very helpful tool.  Here are some of the things you can do with it:

• Take a pack of articles or an ebook and customize it into a series of blog posts. 
  
• Use it to create a short report on a specific subject that you give away for free on your site.  This is a common list-building technique.  The prospect of a free ebook is often enough to cause your readers to enter their email addresses.  It’s not that you couldn’t create the report yourself.  It’s just that using PLR material as a first draft helps you to get the report written faster and more easily.  And remember to link to your blog in the report to get your readers back there.
  
• In an expanded version of the suggestion just above, take a PLR book, enhance it with your own contributions, optimize it for your own keywords, update it if necessary and either give it away or sell it on your blog.
• If the PLR license permits it, you can leave the PLR ebook unchanged and give it, along with the PLR rights, to attract subscribers on your blog or through a JV giveaway event.  You can add it to another product as a bonus.  You can give it away or sell it to your list.  You can do anything you want to with it, as long as the license permits it.

PLR is easy to get and relatively inexpensive.  If you follow these tips and use PLR wisely, it can be a handy resource for you to produce fresh content quickly for your business weblog.

Technorati Tags: business weblog, Website Marketing Strategy

by Kathleen Hobbins

Your website marketing strategy needs a business weblog.  But your blog needs its own strategy.  You need to devise a plan to bring traffic to your blog and make money from the traffic.  Here are five ways to maximize the benefits of having a business weblog.

1. Post to your blog regularly.  Bloggers who write about politics or the entertainment industry often blog several times a day.  From my perspective, few bloggers who manage their blogs as part of an overarching website marketing strategy need to post that often.  Posting three times a week is probably sufficient for most business bloggers.  But be sure that you do it faithfully.
2. Trade places with other bloggers.  By trading “guest post” positions with other bloggers, your readers will be introduced to your guests and your guests’ readers will be introduced to you.  That should expand the readership of all concerned.
3. Don’t forget to monetize your blog.  You can sell your own service or product on your blog.  Or you can sign up for an affiliate program.  Affiliate programs allow you to place a link on your site that will take your reader to the product owner’s site.  You don’t have to deal with a shopping cart, inventory, shipping or customer service.  Your only responsibility is to market the affiliate product and get a commission from a sale.
4. Don’t forget to optimize.  Do your keyword research to find appropriate keywords with a reasonable amount of traffic and a small amount of competition.  Then optimize your posts, including your post titles, for those keywords.
5. Ping your blog regularly to alert the search engines to your new content.  One way to automate that is by using http://pingomatic.com.

If you are going to have a business weblog, you owe it to yourself and your business to make it the most successful blog that you can manage.  Follow these five steps to bring traffic to your blog and money to your pocket and to bring success to your business weblog.

Technorati Tags: business weblog, Website Marketing Strategy

by Kathleen Hobbins

The search engines love a well-written business weblog.  They love the informative content, the comments from readers, and the frequent updates.  But if you really want to get traffic to your blog, you need to go out and get it.  Some of the basic strategies for driving traffic to a static website can be tailored to suit a blog.  Here are six easy tips to increase traffic to your business weblog.

1. Use your keywords.  Don’t forget to optimize your blog posts for your keyword phrases.  There are two reasons that this is beneficial to you.  First, your readers will keep coming back when they find that you are posting interesting, well-written content on a topic that they are doing searches on.  Secondly, your search engine results will soar when the search engines find regularly updated, keyword-optimized content.  To optimize your content for your keyword phrase, use it in the first and last sentences of the first paragraph of your post.  Use it in the last sentence of your post.  Then use the same keyword phrase throughout your post about once for every 100 words.
2. Optimize your titles.  Choose the keyword phrase that you will be optimizing for in your post.  Use the same keyword phrase in the title, at the beginning if possible.
   
3. Use your blog to build a list.  There are huge benefits to building a list.  You can use your list to bring traffic to your site by sending out emails that summarize your recent blog posts.  Finish each summary with a “read more” link back to your blog.
4. Submit your posts to social bookmarking sites.  Use the same keyword phrase that you optimized your post for as the tag on the social bookmarking site.  Write an enticing comment to generate interest in your post. 
   
5. Submit your RSS feed to RSS directories.  The process will build backlinks to your site, which in turn will cause the search engines to pull your site up higher in the search results.  It will also cause readers to find your business weblog straight from the directory.  Here is a list of RSS directories.
   
6. Convert your posts into articles and submit them to article directories.  Rewrite each post so that you aren’t publishing duplicate content.  Optimize each article for your keyword phrase.   You can find a list of article directories here.

Don’t pick one or two of these search engine optimization techniques.  Do them all.  If you do, your business weblog will flourish.

Technorati Tags: business weblog, Website Marketing Strategy

by Kathleen Hobbins

Small business owners often get the advice that a business weblog is a great way to make money.  It is, but only if you take the appropriate steps to monetize it. There are five chief ways to monetize your business weblog.

1. Use your business weblog to sell your own products or services.  Showcase your products or services in a sidebar and use the accompanying post to highlight them.  You want to be careful with your tone.  Most people who keep coming back to a blog aren’t interested in a hard sell.  They would prefer candid and accurate information.  Use your blog to develop trust over time.  The sale may take a while.
2. Use your blog to promote affiliate products.  An affiliate product is one that is created by someone else who makes it available for sale through an affiliate network.  If someone buys the product from your site, you get a commission.  The products should be carefully chosen to reflect the subject matter of your blog.  You also need to be sure that you have a high opinion of the product you promote.  You don’t want to lose the credibility of your readers by promoting something that doesn’t meet your standards.
3. Sell space on your blog for advertising.  The easiest and best known way to do that is to set up a free Google Adsense account.  Once your account is set up, you can place code on your site to display the ads of other internet marketers.  When your reader clicks on an Adsense ad, you get paid.  There are two disadvantages with the program, however.  First of all, the amount that you get paid is typically very small, so you need a large amount of traffic coming to your site and clicking through on the ads before you make any money.  Secondly, the nature of the ad takes the reader away from your site, when your general aim is to keep your readers on your site.  Some internet marketers have made good money with Google Adsense, however, so you may want to test your results to see if it is profitable for you.
4. Drive readers from your blog to your money site.  This is an indirect way of making sales.  But if your business weblog is not your chief website and you have, in fact another site as a money site, you may find that a profitable business model is to attract readers with good content to your blog and then entice them to click through to your money site by describing your great offers.
5. Use your blog to generate a list, then market to the list.  Again, this is an indirect way of monetizing your blog.  The common advice about list-building from your blog is to offer a free report on a pertinent subject in exchange for your reader’s email address.  Once you have the email address, you can develop a relationship with the reader through your email campaign and use the relationship to market related products to your list.  The products can be affiliate products, your own, or a mixture of the two.  For an example of that model, have a look at the blog that you’re reading!
   

I knew once of a new internet marketer who wrote an interesting blog but, amazingly, failed to offer any money-making options.  It was largely because he was uninformed about how to go about it.  You have now been informed.  So take action and make some money with your business weblog.

Technorati Tags: business weblog, Website Marketing Strategy

by Kathleen Hobbins

Putting up a blog is easy and lots of people do it.  But succeeding with a business weblog, and earning money from it, are far more difficult.  Here is a list of six habits to cultivate in order to succeed with your business weblog.

1. Work hard.  You will need to post to your business weblog regularly.  So you need to research and write regularly.  Make the content compelling to draw people back.  That takes work.
2. Be creative.  Think of new ideas to present and new issues to discuss.  Think of new ways to do it, using quizzes, lists, surveys, aggragations of comments and other techniques.  And look at the niche not from your point of view but from that of your readers.
3. Work at making money from your blog.  You can sell your services and products, affiliate services and products, and advertising space.  Test different products and different ways of selling them.
4. Always be looking for new ways to get traffic.  Use the tried and true SEO techniques of social bookmarking, article marketing and forum posting.  Use guest posting with other bloggers to expose each of you to the other’s readers.
5. Build a list.  Offer a free report on a subject of interest to your readers and give it away in exchange for an opt-in.  The list will give you a way to monetize your business and get readers to it. 
   
6. Persevere.  Don’t give up.  It will take time and effort, and possibly some trial and error, to get traffic and to make sales.  So you need to keep working at it.  Persevere.  Don’t give up.

Nurture these six habits and you will see that your traffic and sales increase.  And you will have succeeded at creating a terrific business weblog.

Technorati Tags: business weblog, Website Marketing Strategy