I Do Web Marketing

I know I just revamped the look and feel of this blog a month ago, but I wasn’t digging the darker color scheme. I wanted to brighten things up a bit, yet also match the color scheme of Novel Concept Studio and my future project. This accomplishes that goal, and I’ll also be implementing a logo to this blog in the near future.

I have more great posts on the way regarding affiliate marketing. I will officially be launching my Novel Concept Studio affiliate program next week. Specific date has not yet been finalized, but it sounds as though Thursday will be the launch date.

Anyways, I’m going to be sticking with this theme for the foreseeable future as it accomplishes everything I need it to. Just wanted throw in a quick update in between my series of affiliate marketing posts.

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

There are two myths floating around that attract newcomers to affiliate marketing. The first myth is that managing an online business is easy. The second myth is that people believe affiliate marketing can lead them to riches overnight. Less than a hundredth of a percent of affiliate marketers are able to have that success. Those that do launch new affiliate programs and get rich quickly, are those who have been in the affiliate game for awhile and have a substantial emailing list that they can sell to. Anyone successful affiliate marketer will say they worked hard to get where they are. If you can’t put in the hard work and time, then affiliate marketing may not be for you. Now, if you think you’re ready to jump into the affiliate marketing realm, then you’re going to need to need a website!

Having a website isn’t necessarily a requirement for affiliate marketing, as you can utilize things like AdWords and other Pay Per Click methods. However, in order to be truly successful, having a website and knowing how to make updates should be a priority. With all of the available software out there, this process isn’t as difficult and daunting as it sounds.

I am assuming you have your niche market identified and have already registered your domain name and hosting. If you have not done this yet, then this should be where you start. It would also be beneficial if you have determined which products or services you’re going to promote as well. Knowing this will help you in your layout and design of your web pages.

There are a number of website generating tools available. You can look into purchasing Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft’s Frontpage, or look for sources online that will help you built your affiliate site. Now, if you’ve been following along with my previous posts, you’ll know I always suggest that you promote products and services that you are interested in. This helps during the web page development stage, because you’ll have more fun with it when you enjoy the theme. If you don’t have time to commit to learning the tools and making the site yourself, you can utilize a free template or utilize a web designer to do this for you. Paying a web designer will be a more expensive option, and I always suggest learning how to do it yourself. Sure, it will take you longer, but if you are serious about being a successful affiliate marketer, you should know how to make basic websites.

Now, planning your launch and post launch marketing isn’t something a lot of affiliate marketers write down. However, with this being your first program and still learning, I always suggest that you write down your post launch plan in writing. This is something I always do, whether it’s for an affiliate program, my own side projects, or even for my clients. It’s not because I don’t know what I’m doing, but I always like to have a list that I can check off when I’m done. As a matter of fact, I have a daily schedule I put together from the previous day. A to do list for the next day, that allows me to stick to the plan. If you haven’t done this, you’ll be amazed at how well this method works.

Anyways, sorry to have gotten off topic a bit there, but it’s something I felt you’d benefit from. Once you have your web page laid out, you’re going to want to focus on providing quality, original content. This is what users will read, and why they are coming to your site in the first place. If they don’t find information they’re wanting, they’ll go somewhere else. Write interesting articles that relate to your market. If you have your affiliate links, you can link some of your content to those sites. Outgoing links are important for your search engine rankings, though not necessarily as your incoming links. Don’t just put together links to sites though, but instead also create articles based on those products. Keep your readers interested by incorporating facts and relevant information, not just over hyped ads. If you aren’t providing quality content, you won’t get visitors which means no sales.

Your website itself should be fairly simple, yet still a professional approach. You don’t need an e-commerce solution and heavily database driven pages. Afterall, your goal is to provide quality articles that help you sell products for other companies, not your products. If you are stuck on the design, I always suggest browsing other sites in your niche. Getting ideas never hurt anyone, and it also gives you an idea of what you’re up against. Once you have your website up, you’ll want to submit your URL to the major search engines.

As I mentioned before, don’t be afraid to learn. Utilizing keyword research tools and optimizing your pages will help your site get found in search engines. Continue to update your website and add new articles. Inform visitors of new updates. The internet is a huge pool of information, soak it up. Continue to educate yourself, and affiliate marketing success will be right around the corner.

Have your own thoughts? Share!

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

The internet gives you an opportunity to gather an almost endless supply of information on virtually any possible interest. As time goes on, the internet continues to be engrained into our daily lives. It has been said that the internet is growing at more than 1 million pages everyday. That is an alarming rate of information. The popularity of the internet gives an opportunity for businesses and entrepreneur’s a chance at greater financial gains.

As I have mentioned before, affiliate marketing can be a great opportunity to make money online. Here are a few basic principles that will help you to get your affiliate marketing program started.

First, you want to identify a particular niche market that you are intersted in and building a website around it. Finding something you are passionate about is a key element for a number of reasons. For one, you won’t be bored with the subject matter. Another reason is because it will help bring out your best, without much effort. You’ll also leave an impression with potential customers that you are an expert. This helps to gain customer trust. Once you have established your niche market, you want to start searching for good paying merchants with products or services that relate. It helps to have knowledge of the product itself, so for your first attempt I suggest sponsoring something you have purchased yourself.

After you have established your market, built your website, and chosen your affiliate product, you’re ready to promote. Promotion of your affiliate program will be what you spend the most of your time with. This is the most important aspect of your affiliate marketing career, so it pays for you to take the time to understand this portion. This is something I’ll discuss in greater detail later on, but don’t be afraid to read books and articles about the best promotional techniques.

Affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick scheme. Sure, it’s possible to earn large sums of money by sponsoring high end and expensive products. However, these products are much harder to sell. Affiliate marketing requires persistence and hard work. As I mentioned before, you need to be willing to learn more every day. Through hard work and determination, you can build your affiliate marketing success and earn money even as you sleep.

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

Affiliate marketing continues to gain in popularity. It has been proven that affiliate marketing can be an effective way to make money online. Some affiliate marketing gurus are able to generate a full-time income strictly on their affiliation programs. Affiliate programs are truly a win win for both the merchant and the affiliate. Both mutually benefit from the sale. The merchant didn’t have to do the selling, and the affiliate didn’t need to have a product of his own. Yet, both get paid. Affiliate marketing is growing on a daily basis, thus increasing the competition you’ll face. This putting a premium on creativity and utilizing effective methods in which to make your affiliate program succeed.

Affiliate programs are one of the most effective forms of advertising. It’s cost-effective and relatively risk-free. Yet, many people still fair at affiliate marketing. There are numerous reasons for this. Probably the most important aspect of an affiliate program is how it’s being advertised. Many affiliate marketers stumble across the industry when looking for easy ways to make money online. Therefore, they may not be the hardest working. Having a solid work ethic will go a long ways towards your affiliate marketing success. If you want to earn the big bucks, you need to put forth the time. Whenever you aren’t working on your affiliate program, someone out there is.

Not being prepared is another key reason for failure. By you reading this, it just shows that you are in the process of preparing yourself which is a step ahead of most. You need to make sure you’re researching any affiliate program you join. You need to become familiar with the merchant, and cannot just choose every affiliate opportunity you come across. Find closely related products to your website. If you’re website is built around weight loss, it probably doesn’t make sense to pitch your poker related affiliate product.

Your website will be your most important tool for your affiliate program. Proper research should go into your domain name, design, and the content you’re going to display. If you’re website is not up to par, you will surely lose potential customers. Your quality content is what will keep visitors coming back. Having overly hyped product pitches can be a deterent for your visitors. If you aren’t able to keep a visitor interested, you won’t be able to lead them to the merchant’s website. Not getting them to the merchant’s website means no sales.

I mentioned planning your domain name. This is also referred to as your top level domain name. Try and use your ideal search terms within your domain name. This helps visitors know your site is relavent to what they’re looking for. It also helps to gain better search engine ranking.

Affiliate marketing, like anything else, is a constantly changing environment. You must be willing to change and adapt, and be willing to continue to learn more. Many are focused on the end goal of making money quickly, and lose sight of the path to reach that goal. Continue to gain as much knowledge in these areas as possible: advertising, web design and development, search engine optimization, and of course affiliate marketing.

I mentioned in my previous post about persistence, and I’ll bring it up again. Don’t get disappointed if your first attempts don’t work. There’s a learning curve, and you must come to the realization that not everything you promote is going to make you money. Many affiliates quit if they don’t get immediate results and then signup for a new program. Instantly blaming the merchant’s product for their lack of sales.  Instead, try and learn why the program didn’t work. Is it because of the product you’re affiliate yourself with, or is it because you weren’t able to get traffic? You got traffic, but couldn’t convert them to sales? There are a number of reasons things may not work out, but you must try and learn from those things.

Think I left out any reasons why affiliate marketers fail? Feel free to share!

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

In a couple of my previous posts I stated that I would be starting a series of Affiliate Marketing posts. This is to be in conjunction with the launching of Novel Concept Studio’s Affiliate Program later this month. I’ll try and write a daily post regarding the topic, as there are a lot of things I want to cover with regards to Affiliate Marketing. I am in the process of a major project, and also have clients that I need to attend to, so I cannot guarantee daily posts, but it will be frequent! So with that said, let us begin on this fascinating topic!

Getting Started
We all have our own interests and hobbies. Some people love sports. Others love books and movies. There are those who love gardening, others who love spending time with their pets and some enjoy traveling.  These are all interests and hobbies that help us to relax and get more out of life. They’re an escape from every day problems and/or troubles. Having said that, not everyone has a hobby that makes money. Unless, of course, you consider your job a hobby and truly enjoy it.

Having a money producing hobby could open a lot of doors for you. It would obviously allow you to spend a little more lavishly. It could also allow you to eventually quit your current job. The ladder is why many of us today go online to start a business; either to supplement their income or to gradually replace their current income from their job. Affiliate marketing is a great way to start earning money online. Thus, making it a hobby you might want to pick up.

What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing, as described by Wikipedia, is an internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. In other words, it is a revenue sharing partnership between a web merchant the affiliate. The affiliate is paid a commission for referring clicks, sales to the merchant. Referring sales is the most often used in affiliate programs. This type of system allows you make money in a business where you don’t have upfront costs of creating your own product. You also do not have to worry about any bookkeeping, e-commerce, or customer support as those are the merchant’s responsibility.

Do You Have What it Takes to be an Affiliate Marketer?
Before you begin your venture into affiliate marketing, you first need to choose which niche market you’re going to be affiliate with. What businesses and products do you know the most? Which products can you do the best job of selling? Once you discover your specialty, you are going to need to come to a realization. The realization is that you are going to need to remember the three P’s.

Three P’s of Affiliate Marketing
Persistence
Patience
Perseverance

These three qualities are one’s you should possess in order to be a successful affiliate marketer. Too many online business owners fail because they become impatient. You have to know what your strengths are, the things in which you are good at and your capabilities. It’s also important that you have a strong desire to succeed in affiliate marketing.

Notice that sales skills are not listed in those qualities. Why are sales skills omitted? Because, it’s the merchant’s job to ultimately make the sale. You can recommend them, you can give your own personal experiences, but you don’t need to be a hard nosed sales person to be a successful affiliate marketer. I am not going to say it does not help, but it’s certainly not required.

It’s not an easy task to become a successful affiliate marketer. You have to learn the techniques of marketing the products you’re sponsoring. You shouldn’t take up every affiliate marketing opportunity that presents itself. I would suggest that you start by promoting a product you know, perhaps even used or purchased yourself. This gives you that first hand knowledge of the product and you can feel more comfortable supporting it.

An important aspect of being an affiliate marketer, is actually being successful at internet marketing. Most affiliate marketers have their own website. It’s important to know how to effectively draw traffic to that website so that you can further enhance your chances of a sale. It’s possible to be an affiliate marketer without having a website. This is done by Pay Per Click ads (something I will discuss in another post). However, having a website and promoting a product or service within that niche will be a better long term solution.

It is also beneficial to have knowledge on how to “upsell” your visitors for the more expensive services. This helps to portray you as an expert in your niche, and will go a long way to improving your sales. There are affiliate marketers that think just having affiliate links on their website will bring them good profits. This can have some truth to it, but the more successful marketers still believe that making use of strong marketing campaigns is still important. Affiliate marketers will find more success when they treat their customers or online visitors as friends, not necessarily as just consumers or customers. Make a commitment to establish relationships with your customers and especially with visitors to your site.

Being creative doesn’t hurt your chances either. Another key to being successful with affiliate marketing is to create a quality content based website and incorporate your affiliate links into your content. You have to provide your prospects with good, quality information to keep them coming back to your site.

Stay tuned, as I’ll be devling into several topics with regards to affiliate marketing. Have other thoughts that you think might be beneficial? Any acronyms you use in relation to affiliate marketing?  Let me know what you think by commenting!

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

Just wanted to take a moment and share some of the things going on with Novel Concept Studio and the I Do Web Marketing Blog! We’ll start with the blog. Over the course of the next month, I’m going to be posting various topics in relation to Affiliate Marketing. This is to work in conjunction with the new affiliate program for Novel Concept Studio.

This brings me to one of two solid announcements for NCS. We are currently fine tuning the system, and will be rolling that out by the beginning of the year. This affiliate program is going to be very friendly in terms of it’s payments, as there are going to be regular recurring payments for affiliates. We already have a couple of the top internet marketers on board with the program when it’s ready to be launched. If you’re interested in becoming an affiliate for Novel Concept Studio, then let me know and I’ll put you on the list to be immediately notified.

There is also a second major project underway for Novel Concept Studio. However, details are still being finalized and so I don’t want to get into much detail with this yet. However, if you’re an affiliate/internet marketer, or you run an online website, then this project is going to be extremely beneficial to you! You’ll have to stay tuned to this blog as I’ll make any announcements here first.

Now, starting Monday I’m going to open things up to the some Affiliate Marketing related topics, so stay tuned for that.

Be sure and let me know if you want to be added to the list as an affiliate for Novel Concept Studio as well.

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

So you have a blog, have been writing to your blog, yet outside of your immediate family and circle of friends, no one reads your blog. This is a problem for all new bloggers and one problem you will be able to resolve by using the following techniques:

1. Use Your E-mail Signature

On any outgoing emails you are sending, you should always have your blog link attached. Even if it’s to a relative or friend, it can never hurt!

2. Subscriptions

An easy way to get your readers e-mail and repeat visitors is to give them an opportunity to subscribe to your blog.  Entice your readers to subscribe by giving them exclusive information. You can possibly add a discount to a product, ebook, whitepaper or just offer additional posts to your subscribers that aren’t available publicly. Just be responsible in using their e-mail address, as the last thing you want is to be labeled a spammer. Be sure and ask for them to subscribe as well. You’d be amazed how well this little suggestion helps.

3. Understand Your Readers

Ask them directly, or conduct a simple survey for your readers to understand their interests as well as advertising preferences.  Ask people to give you feedback on a post, to understand their opinions.

4. Join a Blog Network

A network of blogs is a collection of blog sites that share the same niche, interest, readership base, etc.  Consumers find credibility and convenience in clicking one link to numerous real bloggers about a particular topic.  You will just need to do some research to see which networks would be best suited for you and your blog.

5. Use RSS and “Ping”

RSS is one of the fastest growing technologies on the internet today.  As such, having RSS feeds to your blog is definitely another means of generating awareness for your readership base.  Having a variety of feeds can add interest to your blog site. This is second nature for the most part now, but still something you want to make sure you have. Anytime you have created a post for your blog, you should immediately use either Pingoat or pingomatic to alert all sources that you have a new post. Once you check the sources, proceed to the nex

6. Blog Commenting

Comment on other blogs within your niche market/industry. By offering genuine comments, you will find traffic from those blogs that make way to your blog. I have found a great tool to locate “DoFollow” blogs that can searched by niche called Fast Blog Finder. DoFollow blogs count the links back to your site for search engine optimization purposes and are helpful to build your search engine rankings.

7. Rewards

Maybe you don’t have a product you can offer, or an e-book, but there’s a simple way to reward contributors to your blog. That’s by offering a link back to their website. This helps their site by giving them a link for search engine optimization purposes, and also gives them traffic from your blog to theirs.

Although this should probably be an eighth tip, it must be said that it takes great persistence, and regular attention to help grow your blog. One post a month probably won’t be suffice to sustain a regular following. With these tips, you should be well on your way to establishing your blog on your particular subject matter.

Have other ideas? Feel free to comment and share your thoughts!

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.