Instead of putting a link to your site in the resource box, you can place your affiliate link there. When a reader clicks on the link, they’re sent to the merchant’s site where they can buy. Rather than using your resource box to build your expertise, use it to pre-sell the product and tell them, ‘click here.’

Before you start submitting articles, however, be sure to read the directory’s TOS. Some directories don’t allow DTM (direct to merchant) links (i.e., your affiliate links) in their resource boxes while others do.

Why create a website when you can set up a Facebook fan page? This is a free platform that you can use to create a niche site or a site about the product you’re promoting. Create the page, get fans, and start making money. You can embed your affiliate link directly on your fan page in wall postings and profile information.

You can also use your fan page for building a list of subscribers, and then use email marketing to sell them products. In general, people aren’t on Facebook to buy; they’re there to socialize and enjoy their hobbies and interests. Although you can sell directly through a fan page, most people find that it’s easier to use for list building, and then sell through email.

Starting your own YouTube channel is another great way to do affiliate marketing without a website. Create short videos that solve problems for your audience or pre-sell them on your affiliate product. You can then put affiliate links in video descriptions and on your channel’s profile page.

Using an info-product to promote affiliate products is another alternative to a website. Create a free eBook or report and put your affiliate link at the bottom of every page. Encourage your readers to give the report to anyone they like so that it’ll go viral. A great strategy for writing an eBook for this purpose is to teach them how to solve their problem using the product you’re promoting.

With a website landing page, your mission is to sell. With each of the above ideas, it’s a little different. What you need to do is provide useful information, solve problems, answer questions and teach your audience how to do things. At the same time, your content should pre-sell the product you’re promoting. Focus on providing value rather than hard selling, and you can create a wildly successful affiliate marketing campaign without a website.

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Unlike Pay Per Click and other affiliate marketing models, this is a model that most Internet marketers are inexperienced with. Here are some tips on navigating the learning curve and making your Pay Per Call campaign a success.

Spend some time choosing which answering party you’re going to promote. You need to make sure that they’re good at what they do. In other words, they’re going to keep the prospect on the phone long enough to give you your commission (many networks require a minimum number of minutes before you get your commission).

When it comes to Pay Per Call, affiliate networks are much pickier about who they accept. This is because there have been many scams in the past using this method. When you apply, you may have to go through a lengthy process before you get accepted. A good idea is to call the network and talk to a representative personally. They can then instruct you on what you need to do to become an affiliate.

There are some niches that do better with Pay Per Call than others. Before you choose a network and product, you should make sure that yours is one that does. For example, debt settlement is a profitable Pay Per Call niche. Spend some time on affiliate marketing forums and do some research.

It’s recommended that you keep your advertisement under 35 characters if possible. Make it as short as you can while still delivering your message. One way to do this is to write your ad and then cut unnecessary words. Focus on action words like ‘get,’ ‘save’ and ‘help.’ When you tighten the wording, the ad will be more focused.

You can use paid advertising or free traffic generation methods. Whichever you choose, be consistent with your traffic strategy. Target your market well and create a long-term strategy that will get you steady traffic. Monitor your progress and make changes when they’re needed.

The great thing about the Pay Per Call model is that it’s much easier to get someone to make a phone call than to buy. It’s even easier than getting them to click on a link. Many people are suspicious of offers they see on the Internet and they’re more comfortable talking to someone over the phone. Pay Per Call affiliate marketing is a highly profitable model where you have little pre-selling that you have to do.

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Print your URL on business cards and leave a few behind everywhere you go. You can have business cards printed cheaply online or use software that lets you print your own. Leave them at local businesses where your target market might hang out. Give them to absolutely everyone whether you think they’re interested or not, because it’s a numbers game.

The same goes for flyers. They’re cheap and easy to produce by yourself. All you need is a printer. Leave them in stores, under windshield wipers, on kiosks and bulletin boards, and anywhere else where eyes are looking. You can also hire people across the country to distribute your fliers for you. Give each its own URL and track sales to see which locations are the best.

All of your offline marketing materials from posters to brochures should have your redirect URL printed on them. If you create promotional merchandise like t-shirts, mouse pads or coffee mugs, make sure they have your link as well.

Using QR codes will get even more people checking out your site. The QR code is the modern bar code. It’s a square black-and-white code that people can scan with their smartphones. Instead of having to type in the URL, the code directs their smartphone browser directly to your site. People are much more likely to check out your site if you make it as easy as possible for them. QR codes can go anywhere, including the promotional merchandise mentioned above.

Take out an ad in your local paper (or papers in cities where your niche is big). Write a quick, compelling advertisement that emphasizes the benefits your customers will receive and give them the URL with a strong call to action. This is a small expense that can bring you great profits.

You don’t need a sign on the driver’s side door. All you need is a small sticker placed in a noticeable spot with a few words and your URL. Noticeable spots include your back bumper, the front windshield and next to the brand name of your car or your stereo system.

All of the above strategies are great because they involve human, offline contact. But what’s even more effective is when you get out there and talk about your product face-to-face. Wherever you go – the mall, the gym, the bar, the park – get to know people and talk to them about your business. Spread the word and your target audience will find you.

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While there is a good deal of consensus on many issues, there is also a good deal of disagreement among SEO experts on the relative importance of various techniques. If you put three SEO experts in one room, you are likely to get five different opinions about what is important.

Google keeps its search algorithm very secret. This is quite deliberate on Google’s part. They also present a moving target by making lots of changes all of the time. Google has acknowledged a few items involved in their search algorithm, but for the most part we are left to do experiments and to make intelligent conjectures about what is really going on.

It is in Google’s best interest to keep everything secret. They want to present the best search results possible. They do not want to facilitate people playing games with the search results. By not revealing the details of their algorithms, especially including the relative importance  of various elements, Google is better able to optimize the search results to detect and display “good” websites.

One of the problems is that SEO experts are human. As humans we have a natural tendency to believe that what has worked in the past will work in the future. When it comes to something as complex as SEO where nobody really knows the full truth then we can be in major trouble.

“What has worked in the past” is something that is up to interpretation. When there are hundreds if not thousands of permutations and factors it is easy to be mistaken about exactly why we got results that we did.

We also tend to adopt a particular position and then to try to defend it instead of being completely impartial. There are lots of names for this and lots of symptoms of this. It can be over generalization, use of anecdotal evidence, using sample sizes that are too small, or filtering information based on our preconceptions called confirmation bias.

I do need to note though that there are a lot of very intelligent good people with drastically different ideas about what is important in SEO. Many of these people argue quite passionately for their positions. I have seen discussions about relatively minor issues in SEO become quite heated.

The best thing to do, and indeed what I’ve tried to implement in this article, is to use best practices from a wide variety of sources. I get very pragmatic when it comes to SEO results – just show me what works. When it comes to particular suggestions I find myself asking “what does it hurt?” In other words, as long as the effort to implement something  is not excessive, and as long as it doesn’t hurt my website, so go ahead and do it.

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1.Authority SEO

Authority SEO consists of making yourself an authority in a given niche or particular topic in order to increase your rankings.

2.LSI SEO

This consists of understanding how Google uses words related to the search terms in calculating the relevance of the search results.

3.Site-Wide SEO

This refers to techniques used to improve your SEO standings that are applied across your entire website.

4.On-Page SEO

This refers to SEO techniques that apply to the content on one particular page.

5.Blogging SEO

this refers to techniques which use blogs and blogging to improve your search standings.

6.Local SEO

This refers to SEO techniques that are particularly useful when promoting a website that is associated with a local business or organization.

7.Search Results SEO

This refers to things you can do to improve the way your site appears within the search results. The other types of SEO focus on changing where you appear within the search results. This type changes what the search result listing for your site looks like.

8.Off-Site SEO

While this version does break this down a bit more than the previous one, I considered breaking up this category even further because it contains so much. This type of SEO includes things that you do outside of your website in order to improve your standing on the search results pages. For the most part this consists of ways and places to get links from other websites to your website.

9.Viral SEO

Viral SEO consists of techniques used specifically to cause people to share and re-share your website content. When this is done well the sharing can multiply exponentially.

10.Social SEO

This refers to specific techniques to promote your site within social media such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter.

11.Video SEO

This refers to techniques which use videos to improve your traffic and search standings.

12.Press Release SEO

Finally, this refers to techniques using press releases to gain additional traffic authority and to improve your standings in the search results.

The post The Twelve Types of SEO appeared first on Digital Marketing Trainer and Consultant.

Google has a number of different businesses. Many of these businesses have revenues in the millions of dollars. However, by far Google makes most of its money on advertisements. To make money on advertisements they need people looking at their pages.

They get people to look at their pages by providing quality search results for free. The better the search results the more people will look at their pages. If a user has an unpleasant experience with a particular search result they are a little bit less likely to use Google in the future.

Google strongly believes that efforts to artificially influence the search results make the search results worse. That is why they continually change their programs to screen out any websites that are found to be trying to influence the search results.

Any successful effort to manipulate search results is a problem for Google.  Even if it results in better search results in a particular case, the fact that it works means that it could be used to cause the search results to be degraded.

Google’s updates its software frequently. Typically, it updates its software a bit more often than once a day. Most of these updates are minor, but some of the updates are huge, and take on a life of their own.

Google updates its software to produce better search results. Sometimes this is a general algorithmic improvement. At other times, the updates are in response to changing conditions on the Internet caused by people trying to fool Google and game their search results.

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These programs use a large variety of different factors to categorize and rank the quality of content on the web. Google wants to provide search results that lead people to quality information tightly related to what they were searching for. By combining a large number of different factors, Google gets a more complete picture of the website. This allows Google to produce better search results.

Google keeps the exact factors that it uses proprietary and secret. While they have discussed some of the things that they look at when determining how to rank a page they have never revealed the exact details. They do this for a couple of reasons. First, there are other search companies competing to try to produce the best possible search

results. Second, Google deliberately does not want to make it easy for people to fool its program. If Google released its exact algorithm, it would make it much easier for people who are trying to manipulate Google’s search results.

Because Google uses a lot of different factors in generating the search rankings, it is wise for us to consider and use a wide variety of SEO techniques. By combining a variety of SEO techniques instead of relying on just a few we get a natural quality website profile in Google. The different SEO techniques work with each other in a synergistic manner where the end result is much better than any one of the factors alone could have caused.

One more thing to note is that for the most part Google ranks pages not websites. It deliberately tries to link directly to content deep within websites in order to directly access the content it thinks will be most relevant to the users search.

Because of this it is good to have your pages linking to one another. While an the internal link does not carry the same amount of weight as an external link, it still helps the relevance of the page which is being linked to.

The post How Does Google Produce Search Results? appeared first on Digital Marketing Trainer and Consultant.

The medium allows brands to send messages according to their own schedule and it allows consumers to respond at their leisure, while permitting a high degree of personalization that gives you the capability to adapt campaigns to the individual needs of every recipient.

Within the past 10 years, email has become a top revenue generator for many companies, and even with the meteoric rise of other media email remains at the heart of all online applications and will remain there for the foreseeable future

But, even so, times are changing…

New technologies such as smartphones and social media have emerged that are busy disrupting email’s traditional communication dominance and fragmenting audiences.

With that said, each channel has its own natural strengths and has been growing and advancing accordingly.

Mobile, for example, is an action-oriented medium where consumers are thought of as moving targets. The opportunity to engage consumers in a contextual, interactive manner based on knowledge of both time and location is unrivaled in any other medium in terms of delivering the most relevant messages.

There are 7 billion people on the planet. 5.1 billion of them own a cell phone, and in some countries there are more mobile subscriptions than there are people. Thanks to the instancy of mobile, it takes only about 90 seconds for the average person to respond to an SMS. And due to the fact that one’s mobile device is always carried, always on and always connected, mobile coupons can easily achieve 10 times the redemption rate of traditional coupons.

It’s no surprise then that 2012 has seen a boom in global mobile marketing efforts.

Taking a closer look at social media figures – today, one in every nine people on earth is a Facebook user and Twitter sees an average of 190 million tweets per day. This is according to one study published in September 2011, aptly titled “Stunning Social Media Statistics”.

Besides these impressive numbers, social media has shown a powerful ability to engage customers – right behind email. A 2011 Customer Engagement Report by digital marketing research group Insight Express shows that 72% of marketers surveyed cite email newsletters as most likely to result in a tangible improvement to customer engagement, 48% cite presence on social networks like Facebook and 46% cite micro-blogging sites like Twitter.

Mobile and social make good bedfellows

The growth of the social networks over the last few years has been matched by the mobile internet; with smart phone sales approaching nearly 500 million units in 2011, with more than 10.9 billion app downloads happening within the past 3 years and with 50% of all page views on mobile phones in 2011 accounted for by social networks.

Tactics for success in social are very different from those in email. But email and social are alike in a very significant way: they are two prominent permission-based channels. Marketers who are good at email head into social with a competitive advantage – since they already understand the principles of audience acquisition, relevance and engagement.

These facts highlight both the staying power of email and the rise of social media and mobile use. The key now is how to pull them together to create effective cross-channel marketing.

Even so, you may still be wondering why a company that has built its communications program on email alone should move its messages onto social and mobile channels.

The research encouraging cross-channel marketing does speak for itself, but disregarding all the figures temporarily, just ask yourself the following question: Is everyone you want to reach already on your email list? And if they are, are you able to provide them with relevant and dynamic communications 100% of the time?

The reality is that if you’re not in contact with your customers via email as well as through social and mobile channels; you’re probably not reaching your audience with contextual messages right where they live, work and play. And therefore, very likely losing out on valuable business opportunities.

When you isolate yourself to one direct digital channel – money slips through your fingers. This in itself is reason enough for anyone to consider marrying other platforms into their marketing mix.

The post The Role of Email Marketing in the Multi-Channel Evolution – Part 1 appeared first on Digital Marketing Trainer and Consultant.

At its most simple level, it’s merely about taking all the basic principles of email campaigns and consistently applying them to newer channels and platforms.

1) Start by embedding social media links into your emails

Social sharing is becoming a part of the web’s DNA.

According to a new study by website monitoring service Pingdom, 24.3% of the top 10,000 websites in the world now feature some form of official Facebook integration, and once you also include basic links to Facebook, the number goes up to 49.3%. Twitter is featured on 10% of homepages in the top 10,000 and over 13% of the sites surveyed in this study used Google’s +1 button on their homepage. Counting all kinds of links and official widgets, Pingdom saw 49.3% for Facebook, 41.7% for Twitter, 21.5% for Google+ and 3.9% for LinkedIn.

The use of social sharing via widgets is also one of the best email marketing tactics. But to avoid putting the cart before the horse, you’ll need to lay a solid foundation in social media.

It’s critical to identify where your customers are rather than making assumptions. There are many free third party tools that can provide insight about social site traffic by industry sector – to help you prioritize your social initiatives – such as Compete and Hitwise.

You can also make use of a data provider, like Rapleaf, who will append social data to your opt-in mailing list. This information is delivered at the individual email address level and gives you a snapshot of each consumer; including whether they are on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goolge+ and so on.

2) Discover how your brand is being discussed and in what context

Is there a buzz around a certain product or promotion? Are there complaints that need to be resolved? Are there suggestions or comments waiting to be addressed?

Start by monitoring blog posts and social conversations by setting up Google alerts and using a service such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social to see what content of yours is being shared and talked about on social networks.

Next you need to look at what draws your customers in and brings them back for more – in other words – the ‘sticking points’. This is what ultimately brings home the bacon and is the most important information you can have at your disposal to run successful cross-channel marketing campaigns.

Use Google analytics tools to see which parts of your website are the most active and which links, content, referral sources or conversations generate the most traffic.

Once you have taken these measures you can identify what motivates your audience and therefore design even more attractive campaigns in the future. With this data at your disposal you can also start thinking about deploying segmentation tools that will enable you to tie in campaigns across email, social and mobile channels based on individual preferences and analytic indicators.

For example, you can segment by gender, age, geographic location, or by preferred channel – which is critical to know when you’re looking to communicate with a specific customer.

3) Stay consistent from one platform to another

Email should work hand-in-hand with various digital messaging channels, and the efforts made on each one should complement initiatives on the other.

Here’s a simple structure for how to achieve integration:

Step A: Create your email campaign and define the message with your subject line

It all starts with a well-made marketing email. One point to focus on especially is crafting a short and sharp subject line, at 50 characters or less; which should clearly state what your readers can expect from your email, what’s in it for them or what you want them to do as a result.

Step B: Translate your message to Social

If you have discovered that your subscribers are active on Twitter and Facebook, your task is then to convey the same message to this audience in a style that is appealing, according to the unique attributes of each platform.

By taking that message to the 120 character frame in Twitter, you can create more interest and clarify your call-to-action. Add a #hashtag and use a shortened URL to save on character count.

A Facebook post gives you the opportunity to entice fans even more by expanding your message to 150 characters. Remove the #hashtag you used in Twitter and add a compelling graphic.

Step C: Take your message mobile

Every email and social marketing message presents the chance to provide relevant motivators in a contextual setting to your mobile-oriented consumers.

However, it’s often difficult or too expensive for smaller brands to have their own mobile applications developed.

The cheaper route is to look for a suitable mobile marketing service that offers mobile site creation and hosting tools.  Some of these services let you build as many mobile sites as you want, with editors that make it easy to upload videos, images – often rendered automatically to the appropriate size and weight per device type.

The key principle is to reduplicate your website experience to make it appropriate for the small screen, for readers who may be checking your emails on a smartphone and looking to check what’s on your domain for further information (in which case you will want to optimize your email for the mobile format, but more on that in part 3).

It’s really that simple. If you start with email as a campaign root, you have all the tools and resources already at hand to reach audiences anywhere and everywhere, with no need to create anything new.

The post The Role of Email Marketing in the Multi-Channel Evolution – Part 2 appeared first on Digital Marketing Trainer and Consultant.

You can’t just access the deep web from a normal web browser – like Firefox for example – you can only access the deep web through a deep web browser. The most famous of these deep web browsers is called Tor and this is the one we recommend you get if you’re looking to get onto the deep web. Downloads of Tor soared in August by almost 100% as the general population became more and more concerned about their privacy amid revelations about US and UK intelligence agencies monitoring web traffic. In short, more and more people are turning to the deep web to get their internet fix and protect their information.

This is because when you’re using Tor – or any other deep web browser – you are truly anonymous and your location cannot be picked up and neither can your browsing habits. Essentially nothing you do in the deep web can be monitored and as such the deep web is becoming a more attractive option for all internet users – those who know about it at least.
Want Tor to really work?

You need to change some of your habits, as some things won’t work exactly as you are used to.

Use the Tor BrowserTor does not protect all of your computer’s Internet traffic when you run it. Tor only protects your applications that are properly configured to send their Internet traffic through Tor. To avoid problems with Tor configuration, we strongly recommend you use the Tor Browser Bundle. It is pre-configured to protect your privacy and anonymity on the web as long as you’re browsing with the Tor Browser itself. Almost any other web browser configuration is likely to be unsafe to use with Tor.

Don’t enable or install browser pluginsThe Tor Browser will block browser plugins such as Flash, RealPlayer, Quicktime, and others: they can be manipulated into revealing your IP address. Similarly, we do not recommend installing additional addons or plugins into the Tor Browser, as these may bypass Tor or otherwise harm your anonymity and privacy. The lack of plugins means that Youtube videos are blocked by default, but Youtube does provide an experimental opt-in feature (enable it here) that works for some videos.

Use HTTPS versions of websitesTor will encrypt your traffic to and within the Tor network, but the encryption of your traffic to the final destination website depends upon on that website. To help ensure private encryption to websites, the Tor Browser Bundle includes HTTPS Everywhere to force the use of HTTPS encryption with major websites that support it. However, you should still watch the browser URL bar to ensure that websites you provide sensitive information to display a blue or green URL bar button, include https:// in the URL, and display the proper expected name for the website.

Don’t open documents downloaded through Tor while onlineThe Tor Browser will warn you before automatically opening documents that are handled by external applications. DO NOT IGNORE THIS WARNING. You should be very careful when downloading documents via Tor (especially DOC and PDF files) as these documents can contain Internet resources that will be downloaded outside of Tor by the application that opens them. This will reveal your non-Tor IP address. If you must work with DOC and/or PDF files, we strongly recommend either using a disconnected computer, downloading the free VirtualBox and using it with a virtual machine image with networking disabled, or using Tails. Under no circumstances is it safe to use BitTorrent and Tor together, however.

Use bridges and/or find companyTor tries to prevent attackers from learning what destination websites you connect to. However, by default, it does not prevent somebody watching your Internet traffic from learning that you’re using Tor. If this matters to you, you can reduce this risk by configuring Tor to use a Tor bridge relay rather than connecting directly to the public Tor network. Ultimately the best protection is a social approach: the more Tor users there are near you and the more diverse their interests, the less dangerous it will be that you are one of them. Convince other people to use Tor, too!

Be smart and learn more. Understand what Tor does and does not offer. This list of pitfalls isn’t complete, and we need your help identifying and documenting all the issues.

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