Having one or several of these accounts is appealing, especially because it adds a “human element” to your business. Many potential clients like to interact with the people they do business with, and this can lead to having repeat customers, which is particularly vital to many businesses that advertise in online communities. Many of these sites have a verification code during the signing up process, which can subconsciously tell site members that you’re more than some corporate robot.

Using Social Media as a Traffic Generator

Of course, it can’t be forgotten that accounts on these communities are also ripe for advertising potential. If you know how, or if you can imagine how, you can turn a Facebook account into a virtual traffic generator for your website. With a certain arrangement of keyword placement and promotion of your website, as well as backlinks wherever you can put them, you’re certain to increase the traffic to your site. Though more traffic doesn’t always mean more money, you have to have at least some traffic to make money and build your list.

Managing Your Social Media Accounts

Of course, though it would be ideal to collect as many of these social media accounts as you can, there is a certain capacity that you should consider. Either you would have to keep up with these accounts, or you would have to outsource the maintenance on these accounts. Search engines reset the ratings criteria regularly, which could bump an untended LiveJournal account to the bottom of the list. You have to change the content around some; you have to post new blogs; and it’s also in your interest to keep up with those who choose to interact with you on your blog. It’s ultimately better to have five accounts that you can manage than 15 that just go neglected. The latter would be good for an instant rush to the front page of Google, but it could quickly decline after so long of neglect.

Staying on Top of the Top Social Media Sites

So, which social media sites are the best? This is something that constantly changes. As said before, it’s best to pick out the five best. The best way to figure this out during any given month is to check out Alexa.com and do a Google search on “online community” or “blogging community.”

In summary, online blogging communities like Twitter and MySpace are useful for an Internet marketing campaign in several ways. You can advertise your business and provide backlinks to your site. You can also interact with your more-chatty clientele on these sites, and, for that matter, you can network with potential affiliates. So really, the possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

The rationale here is that pretty much, if you designate certain keywords as “headers,” this will draw the attention of the spiders to those keywords. It kind of makes sense, except that it doesn’t work that way. Multiple testing of this idea has consistently proven it wrong.

There are several reasons why this couldn’t work out. First of all, let’s assume that keywords have the same monumental importance that they previously had. The algorithms that the spiders work by don’t include header tags. It’s pretty much the same thing as saying that bolded or italicized keywords help your rankings.

Meta Descriptions – The Exception to the Rule

There is this one exception: It may be more likely that your keywords will show up in the meta description. Again, this will not overtly help your rankings. The search engines don’t consider much about websites based on their meta descriptions, whether they are generated by the search engine or the developers. You might increase some human traffic by theoretically ensuring that your keywords are in the search engine generated meta description, but don’t hold your breath. The keywords tend to be in there anyway.

The second reason that header tags don’t work for rankings is simply that keywords don’t have that much importance anymore. They have importance, yes, but there isn’t a magical formula to use them to improve your rankings. However, you can still get banned for keyword stuffing, so make sure that you’re not doing that in your header tags any more than the rest of your site.

It’s All about the Content

Another reason that putting keywords in header tags doesn’t work is that if the spiders come to that page, they’re going to crawl enough of the content on it to determine what they need to know about the keywords. If header tags DID get special consideration and draw attention to certain keywords, then so what? They’ve seen enough of the rest of your content that the headers don’t matter when it comes down to it.

Keyword Stuffing in the Header Tags

Why is it that the spiders don’t really care about header tags? Call it a hunch, but it looks like an easily exploitable flaw that could be used as a black hat trick. If header tags got special attention, and you can pretty much put in however many you want, guess what? You could spam the crap out of your header tags. You would, of course, have to be careful about keyword stuffing, but you could stuff less and have more weight. Guess who would catch on and not like it?

In the final analysis, you can use header tags all you want, but you shouldn’t expect any big results out of them.

How to Keep Affiliate Websites on the Cutting Edge

Affiliate websites are some of the most difficult websites to update. They usually amount to only having a page or two, and the content is pretty well set from the word “go.” What you’re left with is tweaking different elements to stir things up.

Chances are that you worked hard to create the perfect pitch, and you don’t want to mess with that. So, let’s look at the other elements on your page. Do you have a video on your page? If not, put one up. If so, put up a different one or at least change the tag. The anchor text leading to your opt-in page can usually be changed pretty readily. You can put up new testimonials or change old ones out (quite a substantial change in the copy!), have an editable countdown for empty seats, and so on. The point is to change enough stuff on the page that the search engines notice. Then, ping it!

News Sites are Easy to Keep Up-to-Date

Among the easiest (and most essential) websites to regularly update content on are news sites. If you’re doing news on a particular niche, the easiest thing to do is get a news ticker script at a site like www.hscripts.com. This program makes it easier to write and post news-worthy events on your website without all the hassle of the add/edit/delete process. In fact, this kind of script could be useful for a variety of sites, not just news related sites.

Blog Sites are Easy to Update and Extremely Useful

Particularly if you’re an affiliate marketer, external blog sites are essential for your cause. They start right off with a high level of authority and trust for the search engines. You can even monetize them if you want to play the Adsense game. Some people, strangely, think that this is an unethical practice or that they would even rather join a revenue sharing site like suite101.

The real money, though, is how your affiliate sites can gain page ranking by being linked to it. Most affiliate sites are temporary and don’t have time to get seasoned by Google’s PageRank. The promotion will often end at some point. You may decide that there are greener pastures out there and neglect an affiliate site. That’s all just peachy keen since they have the weight of your blog supporting them.

Your blog, on the other hand, is eternal. The longer you keep it going, the more authority it gets, and the greater a workhorse it is for your affiliate promotions. If you don’t have one, GET ONE!

Meetup.com is Good for Advertising Your Company

If you have a company, or if you have the conception of one, Meetup.com is a means of advertising your company. It can also serve as a sort of human resources department, or it can serve as a corporate networking site. You can expect all these and more from Meetup.com.

Let’s say you put your group, your company, or your vision of a company up on Meetup.com. Of course, you should try to get into every conceivable category and niche you can. This will, of course, drive up your visibility on Google and the other search engines. This will also increase your visibility in Meetup.com itself. Now, what to do with it from there?

More or less, it depends on what you want to do with it. Whatever it is, you should make it up front in your group’s bio. If you want a group of like-minded people meeting up for coffee every weekend, do that. If you’re looking for volunteers to help you get your business off the ground, that’s good too. Whatever it is, it should be on the front page.

Use Meetup to Share Lists

Now, why would you want to arrange a group just for coffee meetings? If you get more affiliates who share your niches in the same room, even just once a week, you can share lists, ideas, and techniques. You can get more lists, ideas, and techniques. Let’s say that you happen to be looking for a hot new niche as a means to expand your business. If you have five people talking about their business niches over coffee, you’re much more likely to find that extra niche than if you racked your brain on your own.

Using Meetup to Forge Partnerships and Joint Ventures

The potential for forming partnerships and joint ventures is also really great on Meetup.com.  It can be used as a mastermind “think tank,” and from there your alliances can launch.  Then you can collect the benefits of these ventures.

That is, potential customers LOVE the idea of two or more marketers working together.  They join the mailing list in throngs, and the great thing is that everyone in the partnership gets the new members on their lists.  After all, an effective joint venture is meant to be a win-win situation for everyone.

Put Your Web Address on Business Cards

Business cards are a great place to start “real world advertising” for your web address.  They’re inexpensive, and you can take them with you wherever you go.  You can often leave them on store displays and counters.

Let’s say that you’re going to a marketing convention.  You will naturally want to have business cards there to get your name out among your peers.  It only makes sense to have your web address included.  Your phone number may be optional, but you’re missing a great chance if you don’t include your web address.

Advertise Your Web Site in the Newspaper

Many people still use the newspaper, and it’s still a valuable advertising medium for your website.  There’s a good chance that you’ll have to start small if your business is new.  Start with the local papers and expand to the more national ones as your budget allows.

Magazines are also a great place to advertise your website.  Just like with the newspapers, you’ll want to start off local and expand to the larger ones as your business grows.  You should particularly focus on the magazines that are local business oriented, especially if they relate to your niche.

TV Commercials Too Expensive?  Try Google TV Ads

Of course, having TV commercials would be awesome, and now Google TV Ads makes it affordable to most marketers.  Until a couple of years ago, TV advertising was cost-inhibitive for fledgling Internet marketers.  Here’s a basic idea of how Google TV Ads works.

If you’ve used Adwords, the interface for TV Ads should be familiar to you.  Much like in Adwords, you auction for your niche.  You use keywords to find the appropriate shows that you can advertise in, and you bid for time slots.  Once you win your time slot, you can upload your video and you’re ready to air.

This is, of course, assuming that your video meets their technical specs.  They’re not terribly hard to follow, but they have the option for you to let someone in the Ad Creation Marketplace make it for you.  It’s your call if you want to use it, but I’m willing to bet that you can find someone to make your commercial for you cheaper than what you’d find in the Ad Creation Marketplace.

The expenses in TV Ads follow the same basic patterns as in Adwords.  The hotter your niche and the better your time slot, the more expensive it is.  Just like Adwords, your TV campaign will be a compromise between your budget and your desired results.

Step One is Forming a Partnership

Basically, what you start with is forming a partnership with someone who already has a membership site or a download page.  It has to be within your niche to work.  In this partnership, you make an exchange where your product goes on their website as a free bonus.  In return, you get to communicate with their list, and thereby import them to yours.

This accomplishes several things that both parties can enjoy.  For them, they get the extra reputation points and opt-in power for giving away an amazing product or service.  For you, it’s a chance to build your reputation, and it expands your list immensely.  From this particular list, you can draw traffic to your site, which equals highly targeted traffic.

Granted, this doesn’t mean you’re making sales on the product that you’re giving away.  However, it works incredibly well as a lever to bring them to your other products.  Since you’re communicating with them, it’s only natural to say, “Hey, I have this other stuff too….”

This is Seriously Targeted Traffic

I’m not kidding when I say that this is targeted traffic.  They fit several criteria of what you want in traffic for your website.  Here’s what kind of traffic you’re looking at getting from this joint venture.

First of all, they’re clearly in your niche.  They’ve already opted in for a product or service that’s closely related to what you’re offering.  In fact, by the time they get your freebie product, you know that they’re actually buying products in your niche.  These aren’t window shoppers; they’re the people who have their credit cards next to their keyboards.  Rope ‘em in!

How to Approach This Joint Venture

Of course, how the proposal of this joint venture is made is important.  If you’re new to affiliate marketing, chances are you haven’t made the kinds of friends that you can just ask to post your product and expect it would do any good.  Additionally, you can’t offer a competing product and expect a positive response.

The product you offer should complement their product.  It’s the essential chocolate and peanut butter scenario for both of you and for the customers.  It could be that you have shoelaces, and they have the shoes.  They could have website templates, and you could have hosting services.  Stuff like that.

Above all, this proposal should be a win-win-win situation.  They get more sales for having a bonus product.  You get a larger list from them, which you can direct to your website.  The customers get a little something extra for their money.  In the end, everyone’s better off for this kind of arrangement.

Page Ranking and Offsite SEO Sources

Of course, everyone in affiliate marketing wants to be at the top of the search engines’ page ranking.  Generally speaking, this is something that can only really come with time and effort.  Once you have your page made, your energy is best spent in offsite SEO, mainly at social media platforms.

There are 3 main angles of attack in your Web 2.0 strategy.  Video sites, such as YouTube, are always a prize commodity.  Article databases, such as Ezine or Articlesbase, are the proverbial work horses of your campaign.  Blogs are always a good way to draw traffic, as well as social networking sites.

Each of these sources can provide a much needed backlink to your site.  They can all be beefed up by the right keyword placement.  The blogs and social networks are especially good since you can build a list from them.

Approaches to Use from Social Networks and Blogs

Blogs are great ways to build your brand and establish yourself as an expert. You can also use social networks, but this could be de-emphasized some, depending on your strategy.  Certainly, on your blogs, you want to emphasize your knowledge in your field and provide good advice.

The social networks behave a bit differently, so your strategy here should reflect it.  Many people make the mistake of thinking that it’s good for “just” posting up links to your site.  In reality, it will get you next to nowhere.  You can drop tidbits of information here and there, link to your less overt marketing properties, and just describe your day.

The point here is to be human and make friends.  If you do it right, when you post your links directly to your affiliate site, people won’t hesitate to go there.  It’s also a good way to keep a nice, large list, which comes in handy when you introduce a different product.

Having a Good Traffic Strategy

With all that said, you need a good traffic strategy.  On your video and article properties, you’ll naturally want to link directly to your Web page.  On the blogs and the social networking sites, it’s good to mix things up a little bit.

Especially on the network sites, people want variety.  Between your articles, your videos, your blog, and your affiliate site, you have just that.  On your blog or social networking account, you can reasonably switch between linking to your affiliate site, your articles, and your video site to keep people interested.  Additionally, on your social networking site, you can link back to your blog, which especially makes sense if you’re using Facebook or Twitter.

The ultimate goal is to get them to your affiliate site, but sometimes it takes a roundabout way to get people there.  Having a variety of Web 2.0 properties makes it easy.

Building a List by Gaining Friends

The simplest way of building a list on social media is to just make friends.  The more friends you get, the more people get your messages. It’s that simple.  All it takes is to click on “Add Friend” or the equivalent.

Eventually, people will start seeking you out.  This is an especially good thing because it means that your message is spreading through your friends to their friends.  While it’s no reason to keep looking for new people for building your list, it certainly makes the process go more quickly.

Build Your List from Apps and Quizzes

Creating apps or quizzes is a great way to build your list.  Sure, it takes a little bit of work at first, and in some cases, it takes knowledge of html.  However, think of it this way—people do this A LOT just to waste time.  Why not profit off of it?

Basically, you should check out Alexa to find out what the hot topics are.  Try to find something that will last longer than some “Team Edward vs. Team Jake” contest.  Then, go to your social media sites and make an app or quiz from it.  Some will automatically include a mailing list option while with others, you’ll have to make a mailing list opt in.

Building Your List from Fan Pages and Business Profiles

Another natural way for building your list on social media is to create fan pages and business profiles.  The effectiveness of this technique depends largely on how many niches you have your finger in.  You can often link your fan pages and business profiles, so you can gain a lot of cross membership.

Building these kinds of pages usually isn’t very different from building a personal profile.  One major difference is that you have the option to pay for sidebar ads.  If you think your profile will be profitable enough to pay for these ads, go right ahead and use them.

More often than not, if you already have an influential enough personal profile, you won’t really need to buy any advertising.  By sheer force of herd mentality, you can often get a sizeable following if you just create it and join.  Just to make sure you get maximum membership, you can send out invites to your entire list.

These are just a few of the ways you can manipulate your social media memberships to maximize your listbuilding efforts.  Just take a look at all the options they offer, apply a little imagination, and figure out how you can use it for your business.

Use the Software. Ditch the Domain Hosting.

You can start off one of two ways with affiliate marketing on WordPress.  You can either get a VIP membership, pay some extra money, and have certain restrictions on your marketing, or you can download the software and use it with your own domain hosting.  Truth be told, the latter is the better option.

The reason for this is simple; if you have your own domain already, then why pay for another?  Furthermore, if you have complete freedom to post what kinds of links you want on your own domain, why would you use domain hosting that doesn’t allow it?

WordPress Has More Static Pages and Plugins.

One problem of using Blogger rather than WordPress is that Blogger’s static pages aren’t immediately easy to create, whereas WordPress is pretty straightforward.  If you want your affiliate links to show up immediately on Blogger, you have to backdate your recent articles.  Only then will your blog posts be static rather than dynamic.  You can do that, or you can use several Blogger accounts for each link.

Simply put, WordPress has more plugins than Blogger does.  This can make your blog more interactive and all around more useful for your marketing strategy.  There are several so-called Blogger plugins created by independent programmers, but keep in mind that there’s a good chance that they won’t work.  They could even get your account suspended.

Affiliate Link Do’s and Don’ts on WordPress.com

As long as your blog isn’t overtly about affiliate marketing, you can use an affiliate link from certain affiliate programs.  The trick is that it has to be a “real blog,” so if you’re aggressive with your linking, you definitely don’t want to host on WordPress.com.

There are certain types of affiliate advertising you can’t do on WordPress.com, though you can do it to your heart’s content if you download the software and put it on your own domain.  That is, you can’t use AdSense or other dynamic contextual advertising on their domain.

They do allow links to “reputable” vendors such as Amazon, and if you’re making your own products and selling them on sites like Etsy.com, you’re okay.  Now, while many merchants are actually quite reputable, WordPress may not think so.  These rules are also subject to change, so it’s better to just download the software and put it on your own domain.

So, What Good is Blogger for an Affiliate Marketer?

Let’s go back to the beginning.  Blogger ranks higher than WordPress, right?  For the affiliate marketer, this makes Blogger great for testing the waters on a niche.  If things look good, you can scrap the Blogger account and start a WordPress blog.  If it doesn’t look good, you’re not out any money.

If you’re interested in creating a joint venture with someone, there are several benefits to consider:

Joint ventures increase website traffic.
Other than financial gain, joint ventures (also known as a “JV”) attract more traffic to your website, as well as your partner’s website. As you promote your project through your websites, blogs, or other promotional activities, people will want to get more information about all the people promoting the products.

Joint ventures are an effective way to build your lists.
The added benefit of having two or more names promoting a product is that you can extend your reach to more people online. Be sure to have an opt-in form on your blog or website so you can capture leads from the added traffic.

You may even want to interview your JV partner and post that interview as a podcast on your site. Then he or she can do the same and interview you and post the podcast. Podcasts not only showcase your expertise but also place a personality on a product. In Internet marketing, a good personality can have a lot of pull when it comes to listbuilding and sales.

Joint ventures allow you to split the work.
A joint venture can often be a huge undertaking. The good news is that you can split the work so you won’t have to carry the entire load on your shoulders. Some people opt for a 50/50 split in the workload; others may do a 90/10 split, with one person contributing more financial resources while the other does more footwork. As long as both parties are happy with the arrangement, JVs are beneficial to everyone involved.

Joint ventures are a great way to promote your brand.
Because of increased visibility, JVs can promote your brand as well as create a new one. Working hand-in-hand with a partner opens up many more doors than working independently on your own projects.

Once launched, a joint venture is a great way to earn passive income.
There’s no doubt that it takes a lot of elbow grease to develop your JV from an idea to a full-fledged product launch. However, once initiated, your JV can create a source of passive income for weeks, months, or years to come.

Joint ventures are a great way to team up with someone to create and launch a product. If you’re interested in using JVs in your affiliate marketing business, your best bet is to partner with someone you’ve known for a long time or with someone who has already experienced a moderate degree of success in affiliate marketing. For best results, you should team up with someone whose strengths balance your weaknesses (and vice versa).