Internet Affiliate Marketing Blog

Establishing inbound links through reciprocal link exchanges is a very effective affiliate marketing promotional and advertising tool.If done correctly, building inbound links can improve your rankings in the search engines by raising your link popularity, increasing your website traffic, and providing a valuable resource for your website customers and visitors.

Here are 15 link exchange tips to get you started:

1. Exchange links with websites that will bring you targeted traffic. Targeted traffic means visitors and/or customers that will be interested in your affiliate products or services.

2. Keep your link title brief and free of long sentences.

3. Try to keep your link description (for your affiliate marketing site/blog) brief (aim for 200 characters or less).

4. Do not capitalize all letters in your link title or description.

5. Do not give the webmaster a deadline on when they should reciprocate. Webmasters are very busy people and it may take from 1 to 60 days or more. Be patient and in the long run you will receive more quality link partners!

6. Never remove a link partner from your site once they have agreed to exchange links with you and placed your link on their site.

7. Do not request link exchanges from sites that are unrelated to your website. For example, if you have a candle website, don’t exchange links with a pharmaceutical website. This will not benefit your customers or visitors and the search engines may penalize your website for this.

8. Let the webmaster know that you have indeed visited their site and explain to them why a reciprocal link exchange with your website would be beneficial.

9. Be sure that your link pages are search engine friendly. Link pages are easier indexed if they have no more than 25 links per page.

10. Complete your website before requesting reciprocal link exchanges. Most webmasters will not link to a site where most of the pages are “under construction”.

11. Do not give misleading information in your link exchange request. Most webmasters are not going to believe it and your request will most likely be ignored. For example, don’t claim that your site receives 100,000 unique visitors a day unless your site really receives that many.

12. It is best to categorize your link partners. For example, you might want to have a home and garden page, a home improvement page, a candles page, etc. This is a much better way or organizing your links for both your visitors and your link partners. If you just have one huge page of links in no order, most webmasters will not approve your link exchange request.

13. Make sure your links page is linked and visible from your affiliate marketing home page.

14. If your site is family friendly, do not add link partners that offer services or products that are not family friendly.

15. Be aware of free-for-all link programs and link farms. These are sites that basically offer nothing but unrelated links and end up collecting and sharing your email address, which results in a lot of unwanted SPAM in your inbox.

The above tips are only a few suggestions on how to build a successful linking campaign. Most importantly, be patient and take your time to find quality link partners that will add a valuable resource and bring targeted traffic to your website.

#1 - Article Marketing - Use Article directories such as www.ezinearticles.com; www.buzzle.com; www.articledashboard.com; www.goarticles.com here’s a huge list but Ezinearticles is the best IMO

****Tip****
If you can justify the cost you can find writers here at DP, http://www.rentacoder.com; http://www.getafreelancer; http://www.need-an-article.com make sure you that you request at least a few samples from your writer and that they can write and speak in the language you want the affiliate marketing articles written in.

#2 - Directory Submissions - And yes the ones that seem to carry the most trust and authority in Googles eyes you usually have to pay for…well Except for http://www.Dmoz.org do not submit to the 5 below unless your site is of high quality.

http://dir.yahoo.com/ $300
http://www.business.com/ $180
http://www.botw.org $99.95
http://www.joeant.com $39.99
http://www.dmoz.org Free, but seems to be a long wait for most people..

Their is also many more directories that you can submit to but most have no editorial guidelines therefore they typically carry little weight in Google..

****Tip*****
If you do submit your site to lots of directories than an easy way to get your listing crawled by Google faster is to bookmark the page that your listing is on….Because most directories will have your listing pretty deep in their site.

#3 - Blog Comments

You can comment on other peoples blogs to get referral traffic and link juice. Great free tool for this is http://www.commentkahuna.com/ you can find dofollow blogs and pretty much automate the process of commenting on blogs….

****Tip****
Make sure you actually read the post and make an intelligent comment…

#4 - Social Luvin

You can use the power of social web 2.0 sites to gain links, traffic and brand trust.

http://www.kaboodle.com - Social shopping, Kaboodle is great for Ecommerce sites…Install toolbar button and your ready to go.

http://www.thisnext.com - Social shopping, This next is great for Ecommerce sites.

http://www.hoobly.com - High PR classified site. Easily add your products and since they have such a high PR your listing will show up in minutes.

http://www.squidoo.com Make pages about your site and add multiple elements such as videos, rss feeds, links, articles etc…

http://www.zimbio.com - Make your own “Wikizine” - Wikizine is basically just a page that everyone can add or edit content…You can add your rss feed and then Zimbio will ping your feed and fetch the content…It’s best to change up the content a little before publishing to Zimbio to avoid any duplicate filters for Google.

http://www.hubpages.com - Make a page, add elements…

These are just a few but of course theirs tons and tons more that almost everyone knows about such as youtube, myspace, facebook, digg etc…heres a huge list.

****Tip****

Its best to use unique, original, never before published content on your pages that you build and use 3 or more affiliate marketing keywords in your title of your page..Link to your pages you build too…..Also some pages that you build will allow you to add rss feeds…Add them…You can build a squidoo page and add the rss feeds from your other squidoo pages, hubpages, article feeds, blogs etc….

#5 - Make a link bait page

Like above in this list their are two link bait pages…The first is a list of article directories and the other is a list of social sites….as you can see it works because I linked to them…

You can compile a useful report in your niche like the Top 15 worst celebrity plastic surgery procedures. Or Top 20 bloggers. Or hottest women online. Do something different, useful, funny, sexy in your niche and people will link to it naturally.

Of course their are many, many more ways for you to build traffic and links but hey this is a top 5 list ….You want more tips, techniques then just grab my free book which is absolutely 100% free, no strings attached.

Stuff I recently did to some new websites, and seen a huge increase from Yahoo.

1. Internal Linking
I have used some within the page, and at the footer. Make sure put to this on every page possible.

2. Backlinks from different sources.
International directories are great or with different languages. Articles!!!! Make sure to post the article on your blogpage first before submitting it elsewhere.

3. Use long Anchor Text Keywords for your affiliate marketing site or blog

4. Blog frequently ON YOUR WEBSITE.
Try to put the affiliate marketing blog on your homepage, and use internal linking to spread the juice to other pages. Your domain should be like a pyramid. The top domain being at the top, and the less important further down. Submit your blog, and make sure to ping it! Spiderbots love fresh content so don’t make your website stale!

5. Stop using some many images that makes your webpage load in minutes instead of seconds. Spiderbots are like US Navy Seals….they go in AND they immediately come out. They go into a building and all they see is pictures. What do you think they’re going to do? Nothing here….LET’S GO! If they find countless cabinets of info, they’ll start spending more time trying to acquire info.

6. Use the link command on YOUR page and your Competitor’s page.
Look at the all the links, and you will see a pattern with the top links. They’re usually some type of blogs with high PR rankings. Gee I wonder where you should spend more time at/on?

7. Sometimes it’s always good to leave your best articles ON YOUR PAGE.
I have noticed that many ppl are taking content from my page, and giving me a full dofollow link with my content. If you save your best content for ezine, they’ll just a link to ezine. This will benefit you in the long run.

8. If you’re going to blog comment (to put a backlink) make sure to do it in a highly ranked/highly visited/do follow blogs. Most spiderbots visit it, and they’re more than likely to see your site. What website is a good website to leave your ’spam’ link? Try tmz You will notice fast results from yahoo/google. Don’t get banned from there now.

You have joined a few affiliate programs and now you wonder what to do…As a newbie you may have various options:

Article Marketing
Write great positive reviews of the products you are promoting, Include your affiliate links at the end of the reviews. Post yours reviews on sites such as Goarticles.com or Ezinearticles.com

Blogging
Create a free blog using a blogging platform such as Blogger.com. Write posts (reviews) of the products you are promoting. Include your affiliate links at the end of the reviews. Then ping your blog at a site such as Pingomatic.com. Your posts will be picked up quickly by search engines

If you want to host your own blog, read this: From Blogger to WordPress (tutorial for newbies): http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=8270241

Social Bookmarking
Welcome to the Web 2.0 era! In order to make it easy for your readers to save and share your content you may add social bookmark links to your blog - Link: SocialMarker.com

Forums
Join popular forums, go into your forum profile and edit your signature. Make a signature that includes your affiliate link(s), or links to your own reviews. Make frequent relevant contributions - Don’t spam! Depending on what you are promoting and the forums you are joining you will target direct sales or subaffiliates

Social Networking
Use social networking sites to promote your relevant reviews blog if any. Don’t spam with affiliate links!

PR
Once every few weeks you may post a press release at sites such as PRweb.com. Your press release will be a favorable review of the product you are promoting, alongwith your affiliate link

Email marketing
If you own a list of subscribers (people who have opted in to receive email offers from you), you may send them an email telling them about the products you are promoting and include your affiliate links in the email Once again, don’t spam!

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
You may easily generate incomes with affiliate programs and PPC like Google Adwords You may also loose a lot of money before making your first sale. So be careful if you do use this way to drive traffic to your sales pages. Learn how it works before!
Learning centers: http://adwords.google.com + DP + PPCdiscussions.com

Make your own tools, write your own texts and try to think like a visitor or a potential buyer, study competitor tactics (use Google!), experiment, upgrade yourself all the time…It’s a matter of creativity, trial and errors, time and dedication

Never give up

I decided to toss up a post with 5 ways to make $100+ per day. I’m not selling an ebook or trying to get you to read my affiliate marketing blog. These are just good ideas to keep in mind.

I’d love to hear your opinions, feedback, and ideally to hear some of your suggestions/methods in the comment box!

1.) Freelancing. Offer a service, such as writing (content creation), design, coding, SEO, etc. I know many people who don’t even have sites that exclusively provide services and make well over $100/day.

Can it be scaled? Outsourcing is key to scaling.

2.) PPC. You all know what it is. Don’t listen to ANYONE who says “that market is way too saturated.” Keep this in your mind: there is no such thing as an oversaturated market. Yes, this includes things like ringtones, nike, dating, adult, etc.

PPC-Coach is fantastic for learning, but there are so many resources on how to properly optimize PPC campaigns you shouldn’t have trouble learning, even without PPC-Coach.

A final note: Yes, PPC does require an initial investment, but it isn’t nearly as much as some would like you to believe.

Can it be scaled? Yes, nearly endlessly. Paul Bourque wrote an excellent article on scaling, despite his recent criticisms.

3.) The Shotgun Approach. This is a fairly popular method and you’ve probably heard of it before. Design 100 (or more) sites for which the goal of each is to make $1/day. $1/day is NOT difficult to achieve on nearly any site by means of CPC (adsense or others), ebay (phpbay, BANS, etc), and/or CPA offers.

Can it be scaled? Yes. Just keep building sites. Make 100 sites that each earn $1/day over the course of a year. Tweak them as you go to hit the $2/day mark.

As you can see, the “shotgun approach” will quickly add up your revenues. You are also highly diversified (one site dies/goes down/stops performing - oh well, no big deal). It’s a lot of work, but very possible to make $100+ daily.

4.) Classifieds Marketing. I know a lot of you play in this arena. Classified sites like Kijiji, Gumtree, and quite especially Craigslist are all goldmines. Most people think that doing anything regarding online sales for these sites is “spamming” or “blackhat”, when in fact it’s very possible to do entirely whitehat marketing and profit handsomely. I, personally, don’t subscribe to any particular hat color, so I do a bit of everything with these kinds of affiliate marketing sites when it suits my needs.

Can it be scaled? Yes, quite so. Consider the number of classified sites and the many, many automation tools available. It’s possible to make well over $100/day - even automated.

5.) The “Super” Affiliate Marketer. No, I’m not talking about everyone’s favorite bloggers (cough). I’m talking about building a downline (2nd tier, 3rd tier, etc). Essentially people who sign up through your link for various affiliate networks or affiliate programs. I have to admit that this will certainly not be your fastest way to $100/day, but it’s a good little “side project” to keep going. Once a few heavy hitters are under you, you’ll see the effects. Have a friend who does very well in a certain niche? Get him to sign up under you and test the offers at your network - he just might like it better.

Can it be scaled? The more people sign up through your link, the more you’ll make (provided they make money).