Is SEO training important to a budding online entrepreneur? Absolutely! In fact, it’s probably one of the first things you should learn about, as it’ll help you with many aspects of launching and profiting from an online business on an ongoing basis. By learning various aspects of search engine optimisation, you can help increase the traffic levels your new site gets.

Those who are new to e-commerce stores or those who are just beginning to learn affiliate marketing have a lot of choices for promotion of affiliate products. You can create a site from scratch, set up a plug-in site, buy an established niche site, create Web 2.0 pages, set up a free blog or a self-hosted blog of your own, do article marketing, and so on.

Learning how to optimize whichever site / page you create to help you sell. Learning how to gain attention from search engines can equate to success.

Different techniques can bring great results. It’s wise to learn as much as you can about website optimization, both from an on page and off page perspective. There are many sources of SEO advice online that you can glean info from.

What You Can Learn From SEO Training

• How to get your site quickly indexed in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Lack of an SEO strategy can mean a lot longer between your launch date and a time when you’re getting consistent and productive traffic.

• How to set up your permalink structure so it benefits your SEO. Did you know that if you blog, for instance, your default settings could cost you valuable traffic that a few clicks of the mouse could result in your achieving?

• How to write content that’s optimized for words and phrases that can help you get traffic. Content writing can be a cash cow – if you know how to apply marketing and SEO tactics to get your content working for you.

• How to analyse your traffic statistics and use information about your existing traffic to help you get MORE traffic. Info in your reports can dramatically impact your business if used to your advantage.

• Getting your site optimized can help you and best of all, organic traffic is free. You’re not paying per click or per page impression!

There are a lot of ways to obtain traffic but the organic traffic method, through SEO, is the most cost effective and the most effective overall. This is because being listed among the top choices for very relevant phrases is going to provide you with more credibility than any of the sponsored ads on that page.

People inherently trust the organic result MORE than the sponsored ads. Getting the right SEO training and implementing what you learn can help you get found in those top spots.

What Kind Of SEO Training Should You Look For?

There are books, videos, courses, reports, and internet marketing programs that can help you to make the most of your on page and off page search engine marketing strategies so that you can get targeted traffic. Not all courses and books are created equally, though, so look for something that’s recognized by others in the industry as high-quality.

Read testimonials or reviews, look for guarantees, and look for trainer(s) that are reputable, and regularly examine and measure the sources you use for SEO knowledge so you’ll know if they’re effective or not.

Yes, SEO training is something new internet entrepreneurs should put on their to-do list but this should also be something ongoing as well. Rankings change on an ongoing basis, so you should consider learning and putting your newly learned skills into practice on an ongoing basis.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2010

Website optimization is vital if you want to sell affiliate marketing products or make money with online advertising. By optimizing your website, you will get found by your target audience, save on advertising costs, and you could also become known as an authority in your industry.

Learn all you can about website optimization. Here are some areas you’ll want to delve into:

• Site layout
• Keywords
• Meta data
• Intra site linking
• Backlinks

Here’s more of a look into each of the above website optimization methods and why they’re important to affiliate marketing efforts:

Site Layout

By optimizing the layout of your site, you can improve your visitor’s experience. But you can also improve the search engines’ ability to crawl your site. A sitemap, search option, and good navigation / design can all help with search engine traffic and human traffic.

Keywords

People use words and phrases to find what they’re looking for. Optimize your site for strategic keywords and keyphrases and you could get organic traffic. People looking to buy what you’re selling could be referred to you by search engines that deem your site to be among the most relevant for that category.

Meta Data

Search engines do crawl everything on your website but see specific areas as vital for determining how to index each page. Meta data such as meta description, keywords, image tags, and permalink structure should all be carefully optimized.

Intra Site Linking

Linking on each page to other pages can help you sell affiliate products and can help you with other revenue-generators as well. If you link to the pages within your site, you are optimizing for the phrases in the meta data and content of the pages you link to. You also give your website visitors further info to delve into and that could help you to increase the sales with your visitors.

Backlinks

On page SEO is important but it shouldn’t end there. Off page SEO is also an important aspect of online marketing. Create links to your site from other sites and this could direct traffic and search engines to your site. Many of those backlinks could count as popularity votes and this could increase your page rankings, helping you to rise ahead of competitors in terms of perceived relevancy by the top search engines.

Create articles that link to your site, create social bookmarks, blog comments on relevant websites, article directory submissions, and try to get linked to by other relevant sites.

Website optimization is very important. It’s not a one-off task, either. It should be a regular part of your ongoing marketing efforts. It definitely bears fruit! The more time passes, the more you’ll learn, the more traffic you’ll achieve and chances are – the more profitable your site will become!

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2010

It’s nice to graduate from novice to success, isn’t it? If you want to succeed in affiliate marketing, blogging can certainly help you move from newbie to seasoned.

Read on for some tips on how and why blog marketing is a great way to sell affiliate products.

Why Blog?

Blogs are interactive. Blogs are quickly noticed by search engines. Blogs entries can be published often. People can easily link to them and comment on them. Blogs are a great way to communicate with others, to cover a lot of keyword phrases for your optimization strategy, and offer a great way to get noticed.

Blogs can be custom designed very easily. As an affiliate marketer, you can customize your sidebars to include plenty of money-making opportunities. You can make money with Adsense, affiliate products etc, and you can also use opt-in boxes to help you build a marketing list.

Within your individual blog posts you can target even further so that you can write around a specific product or idea. Within that post you can list other items for sale or other specific call to action choices. It’s easy to learn how to blog, blogs are easy to maintain, and you don’t have to be technical to manage your blog. These are just some of the reasons that blog marketing is a great vehicle for making money online.

Blog Marketing – Search Engine Optimization Tips

When you write and publish a new blog entry, you draw attention, particularly if you optimize those blog posts. Instead of putting up a static website that won’t get noticed unless changes are made to it, you bring traffic to your site on a continuous basis. Here are some search engine optimisation tips to help you optimize those blog posts:

• Keywords – Choose a few keywords for each blog post you write. Make sure you sprinkle them throughout the text, especially in the title, first paragraph, and in subheadings.

• Photos – Add a relevant photo to the blog. A picture really is worth 1,000 words and if you give the photo an alt image tag name that relates to keywords and phrases in your niche, this is another way to get search engines to take notice and index your site.

• Links – Link to other pages within your site. This is good practice, keeping visitors on your site longer and telling search engines that stop to visit the new content, exactly what the other pages on your site are about.

• Bookmarks – Add social bookmarking buttons, for example, you may like to use the Sexybookmarks or Sociofluid Wordpress plugins. Encourage your readers to bookmark your new posts and share with the world. This can help you get more blog traffic.

• Write good content – Show people that your site is a valuable resource and they may come back more often, subscribe to you, recommend your site to others, and they could purchase something, too.

• Encourage people to subscribe – Subscribers to a blog will get new info delivered to them via their feed reader or via an email. This can help you build a following who buys from you and recommends you to others on a regular basis.

• Post new blog content often – The more often you post, the more often search engine spiders will stop by to see where they can list those new pages.

• Buy a domain name – Sure, free hosted blogs are useful for building links and directing traffic and you may even earn money from them. By all means, use them! But you’ll have more control if you also have a self hosted blog on its own domain so register a domain as well. You can even do the vast majority of your business on a blog. Choose a great blog theme, learn to optimize your blog, put together a solid affiliate marketing strategy to follow, and get going! Blogs and associated tools can help you build great communities and be great vehicles for helping you achieve the success you want.

Learn all you can about how to use blog marketing to sell affiliate products and regularly analyse your blog traffic statistics so you can see what’s working and what could be optimized further. Happy Blogging!

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2010

Article writing on a continuous basis is one of the smartest things an internet marketer can do for keeping two important things flowing: traffic and money.

Articles do help you profit. They draw traffic to your site, they provide search engine optimisation, and they help you to continually build your brand.

A well-crafted and optimised article strategy can help you continually expand your ability to make money online. Here are some tips to help you keep online content flowing:

Join Challenges

There’s nothing quite like a good challenge to get you motivated. Ezinearticles has one called #HAHD. HAHD stands for Hundred Articles Hundred Days. Imagine the traffic, rankings, and potential sales that could come from 100 different articles pointing to your website(s)? Not just will you get those links but you’ll get links through social media and through article syndication as well.

Article Syndication

Speaking of article syndication, make sure that while you continually publish content on your website, blog, etc. that you also submit original articles to sites that allow for syndication. By publishing content on other sites, you get a valuable backlink and an increased chance of being noticed by new potential clients.

Subscribe To Your topic

One of the challenges of continually posting valuable content is to come up with ideas. The internet is an endless source of inspiration but you don’t always have the time to sit and research for ideas.

Don’t dismay. Get the research spoon fed to you. Set up your feed reader to get fed blogs and articles on your favourite subjects and set up some Google Alerts so that when you’re ready to sit down and write, you’ve got plenty of inspiration and ideas at your fingertips.

Schedule Your Time

Maybe you don’t feel it’s practical to sit down and write an article every single day but could you spend a few hours one day each week? Some internet marketers have designated days per month for various activities and you could spend time producing content for your blogs, article marketing sites, and creating for Web 2.0 pages and then space distribution out over the month.

Online content sells. It sells your brand, it sells ideas, it persuades, and it helps you gain valuable organic search engine rankings. Strategise to create as much content as possible and you will start to see a steady flow of traffic and sales or affiliate marketing commissions.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2010

Great web copy presents you and / or your company well to the public and it also converts visitors into customers. Here are some tips and strategies for writing web copy that converts to help you succeed with internet marketing.

Pique Curiosity

Curiosity is powerful online. It’s what makes them click. Get someone curious and they’ll want to dig deeper. Get them interested in your title, your meta description, your headline, and make sure that first paragraph convinces the reader that they’ll benefit from reading further.

Get To The Point

When talking to potential customers, you need to get their attention quickly. Web surfers tend to have a rather short attention span due to all that’s at their finger tips. For this reason, you need to get to the point quickly.

Sure, there are sales letters that are more than 5,000 words but until you’re a master copywriter, you’re probably best to try to say what you can a bit sooner than that. A good rule of thumb is to grab your visitors attention before they need to scroll – so they’ll want to scroll past the fold.

Solve A Problem

If you want someone to buy what you’re selling, solve a problem for them. Help them overcome a problem, save them time, or earn them money. That’s what sells products online. Be convincing in that you can help someone achieve one or more of those three things in your web copy and you could do well.

Show Them The Money

A lot of people are programmed to be wary of online promises so when writing web copy, be prepared to “show them the money” in terms of demonstrating proof that what you are saying has merit. Testimonials, illustrations, photos, videos, and other media can help immensely, so can a money back guarantee. Illustrate proof and eliminate risk and you could be laughing all the way to the bank.

Walk In The Shoes Of The Customer

Read your web copy to yourself to make sure it flows, looks formatted properly, and doesn’t contain errors. Try reading it in more than one browser and consider printing it to help you proofread as well.

Test And Tweak

The top method for writing web copy that converts is to test it out. Some internet marketers test and tweak several times before they find a winning combination. You might try running multiple landing pages and analysing results. Check your conversion rate, your organic SEO, your Google score (if using pay per click advertising), and ask some colleagues or internet marketing mentors for their opinion.

Don’t hesitate to read web copy and internet marketing guides that could help you tweak and refine your overall internet marketing strategy and help you learn the secrets of effective copywriting. Writing web copy that is high quality can be hard work but develop these skills and the fruits of your labour could be delicious!

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2010

If you’re looking to make money online, learning how to make money with Adsense is a great place to start.

Google is a company that can help you in many different ways. One such way is through their Google Adsense program. You can make money with Adsense via several options, such as: content marketing and through revenue share sites, or applications.

By implementing some code, from the Adsense publisher site, on your own website, blog, or on pages that you publish content on, earnings can be funneled to your account.

Consumers consume content. So, to that end, content marketing can be lucrative. If you have a website that provides content to people, contextual ads can be listed on that site. When people visit your site and click your ads, you make money.

You can start off on a blog or your own site. Spend time to learn how to blog, learn about organic search engine optimisation, do keyword research, and learn the art of social media marketing and your site(s) could become sources of earnings.

Setting up websites or blogs in order to make money with Adsense can take time and effort initially but this could become passive income for you. Once you create content, it can generate income on an ongoing basis. Google pays you about 30 days after each month that earns $100.00 and pays you via cheque or direct deposit to your bank account.

Content you publish today could pay you revenue years from now. Many internet marketers don’t just make a little bit of coin every month with their contextual advertising, many use it as a major source of income.

Revenue Sharing Sites

Established websites that rely on user-contributed content often offer revenue share programs where contributors can earn a percentage of revenue generated on the site. By signing up as an Adsense publisher and implementing your Adsense publisher ID, your pages could earn you money.

While many marketers would recommend retaining 100% of your income wherever possible, revenue share sites can be lucrative due to the fact that the site already gets traffic that you can take advantage of and could be an additional source of Adsense income. For this reason, you may opt to do a combination of your own site and revenue share sites.

A good example of a revenue sharing site is HubPages, which can provide powerful backlinks to your own website on a site that gets a lot of attention from search engines. Not only could you earn from HubPages but you could also have people click through to your site where you can earn further from that visitor.

Make Money With Adsense – Some Cautions

Google Adsense is an earning program with a lot of potential and writing blog content that is interesting, in demand, then publishing it on your sites could be all it takes to make money, but there are some things you need to be cautious of:

• Google has distinct rules about which topics can and cannot be on Adsense publisher sites. Be sure you do not break these rules, otherwise you could lose your account and any earnings. Familiarise yourself with the Adsense terms and conditions before publishing content.

• Adsense uses a complex algorithm to track clicks and is aggressive about looking for fraudulent clicks. Don’t click your ads and don’t suggest to visitors that they click on your ads. Clicking needs to happen “naturally”.

You’ll find a lot of resources online to help you and you can look to sites that are ranking well in the niche you’re interested in as an example of ad layout, content style, and call to action. It can take time to hit that initial $100 payout but while you work toward it you can learn a lot about how to make money with Adsense.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2010

A lot of newbies to the world of affiliate marketing don’t realise that there are quite literally dozens of ways of making affiliate commissions.

One often overlooked way is the newsletter or mailing list method. A newsletter / mailing list can help you market in a very targeted way.

By building a mailing list, you can have a list of people to communicate with directly. Instead of targeting new business exclusively through organic SEO, pay per click, and through social media optimisation, you can get right in front of people who you’ve qualified as interested in buying whatever it is that you are selling.

What Can You Do With Your Mailing List?

• Email marketing – Launching a product, got a special deal, fire sale, or promotion going on? Send an email out to your list. It can direct them to your “buy now” page.

• Write a newsletter – Weave interesting articles into a weekly or monthly newsletter that intrigues people into buying from you.

• Make an e-course – Set up a weekly course that helps your customers learn something. There may be products or services that go along with that course that you can benefit from. And, giving that value can also help you build trust so that future sales can happen.

• Set up an autoresponder series – Through a mailing list, you can walk potential customers through a sales pipeline repeatedly. As long as they remain opted in to receiving communications from you, you can link them to various sets of messages, such as: invites to courses / product launches / webinars, offers, white papers, and more.

With mailing lists, another great benefit is that success can be measured. You can utilise tools that help you understand read rates, click throughs, and other statistics so that you can hone your skills and tweak your approach.

Marketing through direct emails and through autoresponder series is just one of the many ways you can make money online. There are many ways of building a mailing list and there are some do’s and don’ts. Learn all you can about successful list marketing techniques and this can be another way to build credibility and create income and wealth.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2010

There are countless free blogging and publishing platforms online. In many cases, a lot of people who are new to affiliate marketing do find success in earning generous affiliate commissions without ever having a website.

So.. is affiliate marketing without a website or blog possible?

That depends. For the most part, yes, it sure is. There are great tools out there that you can take advantage of. You may not get all the revenue from ads and you may not get all the power over design but what you do get is: established traffic, existing pagerank, at times there is a built-in community that you can take advantage of, and you get more ways to build links, gather followers, and improve your online presence.

Affiliate Marketing Without A Website – Examples

• Building traffic to a free hosted blog with links and advertisements through your content and social media marketing as well as off page SEO strategies.

• Creating HubPages, Tumblr pages, and Squidoo lenses and directing traffic to a free blog that acts as a landing page with links and banners and even an opt-in.

• Using social media tools to drive traffic to your affiliate links.

• Using free tools that let you create opt-in lists for newsletter and email marketing.

Kicking Your Affiliate Marketing Efforts Up A Notch

While a lot of newcomers to affiliate marketing get started exclusively with free online tools, the top 10% or more of earners will say that you need your own self hosted blog or website to take your earnings to the next level, though.

It takes a lot of work to build consistent and passive income and when you use free tools, you are relinquishing some control and leaving some money on the table because you’re giving away part of your profit potential.

Many will use bum marketing techniques, such as article marketing, and directing to affiliate links from free blogs such as Blogger and Wordpress.com exclusively for a while but eventually they look for their own piece of online real estate that they’ll have 100% control over. While there are great free publishing and blogging tools out there, the most successful internet marketers use them in conjunction with some tools that require an investment.

Many of even the most successful affiliate marketing pros will use free blogs and other free tools for multi-way linking strategies and for SEO purposes to build rankings for their landing pages and blogs. They will use as many tools as possible, but in the end they will direct traffic to their own self hosted blog or website so they have maximum control over their income and their success.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2010

There are dozens of social media tools that can help you make more money from affiliate marketing. Here are some of the great ones that you should definitely be using to your advantage.

1. Twitter

Twitter offers great SEO potential for links that you post as well as the potential to find new followers. If you’re an avid tweeter, your follower list will grow. Rules of Twitter success include: follow and be followed, quid pro quo, and, POST. Get into conversations, re-tweet interesting links, talk to others, be helpful, and you can definitely benefit from this great tool.

Even a few minutes a day on Twitter can make a difference. And, you’ll find many tools that you use can automate Twitter posting for you so integration can save you time, like SocialOomph for example.

2. Facebook

Facebook offers some great opportunities to connect with others. Not only can you share links and start Facebook fan pages and discussion groups, but you can share a bit of yourself with your audience.

People like buying from people rather than companies in many cases. This works particularly well if you are in an affiliate marketing niche that’s built on relationships and trust.

3. FriendFeed

The great thing about FriendFeed is that it feeds in a lot of your activities from other online sites. In reality, you don’t even need to login often to benefit from the tool because it feeds your other social activities into this site, helping you from an SEO perspective as well as from a viral marketing perspective.

4. StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon gives you sites to look at based on your surfing activities. Set categories you want to see and vote up or down to tell the tool what other things to show you. Categorize your links so that people who are interested in those topics will stumble upon your links. If they find a link stumbleworthy, they’ll vote it up.

This tool has great potential for helping your links go viral. And, you can build a follower base and share links directly with those people as well.

5. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is definitely a more professional than casual networking tool so some wouldn’t expect to market to customers with it.

But… LinkedIn does several things for you. It establishes you as a professional, it allows you to present your professional abilities, it helps you network and connect with other professionals, and offers you social media tools as well.

With microblogging, networking and industry discussion groups, RSS feeds, question/answer sections, and a place to give and get referrals, it’s a great tool for helping you connect and establish yourself. Just think of the increased potential of your prospective customers looking you up and seeing a professional-looking profile with dozens of professional connections and recommendations.

There are dozens of social media tools that various affiliate marketing gurus and success stories credit with helping them get traffic, get followers, and make sales. Dabble with a few and then, track your results to help you see what works well for you.

I would love to connect with you on any of the above social media sites, you can locate my profiles by clicking on the following links: Twitter Facebook Friendfeed StumbleUpon LinkedIn. What social media tools do you find the most success with?

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2010

How can you use YouTube to your advantage with affiliate marketing? This is a free and powerful tool and unleashing its potential could definitely help you succeed with our online business.

YouTube is one of the most popular websites online, millions of people use it daily. They use it from their desktops and with smart phone technology, more than ever are using it on the go. In fact, new home entertainment systems come with YouTube so you can even market to people via video marketing while they’re on their sofa!

Let’s look at some ways you can use YouTube for affiliate marketing…

Tips On Using YouTube For Affiliate Marketing

• Create videos to direct people to your website. Your website URL on the video or commentary by you telling people where to learn more, get free info, get a free e-book,etc. will help you. Do commercials, presentations, tutorials, etc. Videos can also go viral so creativity could definitely help!

• Embed videos on your website. Video blogging, or vlogging, can help you attract an audience, especially if you have charisma. Not only will the video help your blog’s SEO but it also helps you appeal to people that prefer visuals rather than reading articles.

• Video testimonials. If people post video testimonials on your site or landing page, this is a good thing. The testimonials can also be posted on YouTube so that people could find them there and link through to your site.

• Link videos to your PPC (pay per click) campaign. Instead of sending ad clickers to a long sales page, a video sales letter could have more punch.

• Create videos for your mailing list and / or membership program. Webinars can be recorded and posted as well so that if you’re marketing via video, you can share it repeatedly.

Using YouTube for affiliate marketing can definitely help to get more traffic and increase sales, don’t forget to use social tools to market your videos as well. Embed them in your Web 2.0 pages, social bookmark them and spread the word via social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2010