e-lottery Affiliates

Congratulations to Independent Affiliates Roger and Paula Galloway, who reached the dizzy heights of Executive Coordinators last cycle. Here’s what they had to say to everyone else out there who aspires to reach this level:

“We were very excited about reaching the Executive Coordinator level and receiving the GRS bonus. Above all you have to help others reach their next levels, so it is a real TEAM effort, and not an individual one. So ‘take your eyes off yourself and focus on your team’. The GRS income was well received and definitely put smiles on our faces. Put the effort in and see if it puts a smile on yours!”

Well done to Roger and Paula, and to all of the other Executive Coordinators out there. So, for those of you who have not yet had a taste of GRS, how can you too qualify to the Executive Coordinator level? Well, you will need to achieve Active Status, and maintain £600 of volume from the subscriptions paid by your Personally Sponsored Players and Personally Sponsored Active Affiliates. This amount of volume only actually means having 15 Personally Sponsored Players playing in both the UK Lotto and EuroMillions draws. You will also need to have two qualified Executive Affiliates in separate legs of your downline, within your first 7 levels.

So, what will you get? You will earn 20% of the subscriptions received from your level 1, and 5% commission from your level 2 down to level 7. You will also earn a share of “Global Revenue Share”, which at this level is a massive 20%.

This really is the position to aim for – many of the most successful and well known e-lottery Affiliates are at this position. Why not make that extra push and join them?

Finding Alternative Keywords

How do you find out what the best keywords are for your niche, and what do you do when you find that your most popular keywords are being used by thousands of your competitors? As an example in my case for promoting the elottery syndicate Euromillions or the UK Lotto could be considered two of the more popular words, but may not necessarily be the best keywords to target.

You need to  think outside the box!

A quick an easy way to get a rough idea of the competition for your niche is by checking out the following:

• Seobook
• Traffic Estimator
• Trends
• Insights
• Sktools

If you are using Mozilla Firefox you will have access to these from the toolbar. These are free to use and will give you an approximation of the competition for your keyword phrases. I use a combination of these to get a rough idea to see whether the market I wish to enter is viable before moving onto to more indepth research.

We are looking for keywords that have sufficient searches to make it worthwhile, whilst not having an enormous amount of competition so as  to make it near to impossible to obtain a top ten ranking

Wordtracker is another alternative and is by subscription, a great way of finding niche markets. One of the best ways to  Find the Best Keywords for Your Business and Drive More Traffic to Your Website. You can try the full packgage for 7 days for free so you can give it a whirl to see how it works for you.

Keyword Generation Software

In my armoury of tools at my disposal I have  Keyword Elite: This helps  generate 1000s of keywords in seconds, and if your looking to do some pay per click advertsing allows you to find extremely profitable, high paying Adsense keywords. It analyzes your PPC competition to find exactly which keywords are making them the most money, as well as which ones are losing them money. You can get a quick glance at how competitive a market is in terms of organic search engine listings, as well as PPC listings.

There are some really good videos explaining the process, and that have some extremely informative information on what you should be looking to achieve. They are well worth a look  at even if you don’t intend to go ahead at this time.

If you are an eBay affiliate there is a quick way to see what products are selling and the average price they are going for. You can go to Terapeak then do some keyword research and if the odds are looking good then you can enter your niche market.

Happy hunting……..

Using Squeeze Pages

One of the things that hasn’t been discussed yet is the use of squeeze pages. For the uninitiated squeeze pages are a simple method of capturing a visitors details and or directing them to a main affiliate website. The elottery has already included these in the back office of the affiliate site. You can design your own, or purchase one from a variety of sources that suits your needs.

A lot easier to setup then a full on website but requires a different marketing approach. As a single page on it’s own with virtually zero content it will usually not rank well if at all. One of the advantages of using a squeeze page instead of the website supplied by your affiliate company is that you can alter the html. ie. meta tags, and add background content which doesn’t show to visitors but is picked up by search engines.

Exceptions To The Rule

There are always exceptions to the rule, as I have had Squeeze pages show up on the first page of Google. It depends on the size of your niche market and the competition. It’s easy to rank well for a term that no one is searching for. You are looking for keyword phrases that have  a lot of searches with minimum competition. In the main go for multiple keyword phrases. In this example instead of just using  Euromillions, use a combination, say Euromillions Lottery, Euromillions Results or even a three or four word combination i.e  Euromillions Lottery Results. Apply the same  method to your niche market. The longer the keyword phrase within reason the more likely the person searching is serious about purchasing  a product or service from you.

Promoting a squeeze page can be done through a mailing list, pay per click advertising, banner ads, off line ads, classified ads, directories, article directories and word of mouth. Do a little each day and after a while you will begin to see the results.

Here a  couple of squeeze pages supplied by elottery, one promoting the Euromillions the other the UK Lotto.

They are both working squeeze pages that can be promoted but this is not the best way to use them. If you click on the images you can see that the url is the affiliate url supplied by the company.

The better way is to set them up as previously mentioned,  on your own hosting account with your own domain name so that you can change the meta tags, add your own niche keywords and optimise them accordingly.

If you know a little about html already you can design your own, and by adding  a few graphics will make it look a bit more professional.

Next time I will be discussing how to find alternative keywords when the competition is too large on your popular ones.

Marketing  Our Affiliate Programs

Now that we have our personal affiliate website uploaded to our hosting space we need to make sure that it is visible to our potential customers. At the moment our site is just sitting there. We have to start marketing our affiliate programs, and do some work to get it indexed by the search engines if we are to have any chance of making money in affiliate marketing.

Once I have built my own sites,  I have around seventy at the moment, I submit them to the major search engines. There are thousands out there but the main ones I use are, which account for most of the traffic coming to my sites.

• Google USA
• Google UK
• Yahoo
• MSN
• Alexa

You are at liberty to add your domain to as many search engines as possible but I find the ones above account for most of the traffic. I have hot linked to the submission pages so you can go directly to them. There are several companies that offer a submission service for a price, personally I would recommend you do it manually, it doesn’t take long.

Moving Along…..

It also helps to get backlinks to your website from other sites that are offering services that complement your own. There are plenty of companies that offer software and services for obtaining backlinks. I have used many over the years. Including but not limited to :-

• WSN (Stand alone software)
• Arelis (Stand alone software)
• Links Manager (Monthly Subscription, first 30 days free)

Also software programs that incorporate a link program such as XsitePro, and SEO Elite which also carries out a number of other useful functions. If you do a little searching you will find there are numerous articles and opinions on linking, this can be confusing to say the least. Backlinks from reputable sites will do no harm at all, just don’t try to fool the system. So called Blackhat systems may work in the short term but eventually will fail and all your hard work could be for nothing.

If funds are low and you have the time you can manage the links manually yourself, but after a while you will find that it can become an extremely boring  process. Nevertheless adding just a few links over a period of time will increase the amount of traffic coming to your site.

The saying is that Content is King, so we need sufficient articles/text to build a good website. If you can generate your own that’s the best route to take, if not you can choose to use other people’s articles, the criteria here is that you would normally have to retain a link back to the authors site. The alternative is to either outsource or purchase Private Label Rights. If you know where to look you can get plenty of articles for free although if you have a small niche market you may have to search for some time to find the articles you are happy with.

Another method of obtaining backlinks is to write articles and post them to the top ezine sites. This will not only give a one way link back to your site but over a period of time if your article is well written it will be picked up by other webmasters looking for additional content and using it on their site.

Even Microsoft says reciprocal links build traffic and may improve search engine return position. The Microsoft How To Get Links To Your Site page is totally direct and out front on this, stating that “your business may have the most finely crafted, informative, and useful Web site ever, but it won’t do you much good if no one can find it.  That’s why you need to know about links.  They’re what guide users from one Web site to another.”

You must be aware that the Internet continues to evolve and you must keep up with the times or you will inevitably fall behind.

If you want earn a residual income from a reliable affiliate program our elottery program is the ideal money maker, a massive market even in these tough market conditions.

Keep on learning,  and it doesn’t hurt to experiment with your own ideas thrown into the mix……. More next time………..

Moving Forward – Developing Your Affiliate Website

Last time I suggested that Wordpress or XsitePro or a combination of both would probably be the best way to approach marketing an affiliate business. If using the ebay affiliate program, Bans or PhpBay pro.

I won’t go into how these programs actually work because  the information that is supplied on the companies own website is very comprehensive, and in the case of XsitePro there are some great videos as well.

Suffice to say that in the case of XsitePro a lot of the donkey work is done for you and /or leads you to complete certain tasks,  then you can run an analysis to see how your site stacks up. This is a major time saver, particularly if you are  new to all this. There is a large selection of professional templates available to choose from, or once you are proficient you can design your own.

I also use an FTP progam, this is required to upload/transmit your newly built website to your hosting company. I have a preference for Cute FTP but there are plenty to choose from. In the case of XsitePro it has one built in. I use both because I build a range of different websites with different software. The choice is yours.

To get your website to start to rank well you need content. This can be your own or it could be supplied by a third party, but it should contain your keyword phrases that you wish to rank for.

In an earlier post I mentioned the use of your keywords in the meta tags. Title, description and keywords. This is not seen by the visitor to your site but is picked up by the search engines.

In addition we now need to add our title in the content of our site. This is contained in html tags for example <h1>Elottery</h1>.  XsitePro makes this easy for you to do. The content should be of a reasonable length and should have your keyword phrases throughout, although take care not to overdo it. More information on html

If you are not sure what keywords or keyword phrases to use you can goto Seobook. This will give you an indication of the amount of searches being carried out. Wordtracker offer a free trial and Google Insights also will give trends. Use any of these with caution always using your own judgement as the final word.

You will need to build additional pages, each one using a unique keyword phrase and optimised accordingly. The affiliate program or programs should be linked from your newly built site. Take time to do this you’re not in a race. Putting that bit of extra effort will pay rewards in the long run and if you have a professional looking site visitors will be more likely to stay longer and either join you in your affiliate program or purchase through your site.

We should now be at the stage where we have our website ready to upload using an FTP program, or in the case of XsitePro, the built in one. Once it has been uploaded we need to check that everything looks ok and all links to internal and external pages are working as they should.

Depending on the approach I wish to take will determine the software I wish to use. In the case of  our site Gaming Junky I used a combination of  XsitePro for the front end and Wordpress for updating content for elottery. You can use Wordpress on it’s own if you don’t want to splash the cash, there are numerous plugins for all sorts of different  scenarious, either way it will work ok if you go about it the right way. You will see people all over the Internet complaining that it takes weeks or months to get indexed in the search engines but I regularly have pages indexed in a few days and if you are using Wordpress sometimes within minutes.

Affiliate marketing and website promotion evolves daily that is why I continue to try and test new software to find what works best for me.  For eBay Bans is a superb product that builds pages quickly and is easy to get to grips with even for someone who has had no prior experience. Here is an example of  a site on Archery and Compound Bows using a combination of Bans and Wordpress. Here is the front end to Gaming Junky using XsitePro with an existing template and minor modification. As you can see the blog has used a different template entirely.

A quick word here, only use Wordpress if you believe you can add information on a regular basis otherwise you are defeating the object of using this software.

If you want a full content management system that will grow as your business grows then the Memberspeed CMS could be the one for you, not cheap but arguably the best on the market. Here is an example of  a website I built a couple of years ago using this software.

We now have:

• Our Niche Market
• Domain Name
• Hosting
• Web development Software

We have built, uploaded and tested our site. We now need to submit our site to the search engines.

More in the next post……………

The Inital Steps In Building Your Affiliate Website

In the last post I suggested the first steps to be taken were to find your niche market, search for a domain name ( if you can use words in the domain name that reflect your niche it could add a few Brownie points and it will be obvious to someone searching the Internet what your site has to offer). Find a good webhosting company, and to utilise a software program to give you a professional looking website.

So…

• Your Niche (In my case elottery)
• Domain Name (I use 123-reg.co.uk but there are numerous others you could choose from)
• Hosting Company ( I use 34sp in the UK and Dataweb in the USA. Just find and use a reputable one)
• Website Software (Here again there is large choice and I have listed several below)

We will asume at this point you have now chosen our niche market,chosen a domain name and have found a reputable hosting company. Depending on how long you intend taking to build your website you may wish to design your site before setting up a hosting package.

So let’s look at a number of different web design programs. I will only go over ones that I have used or am currently using.

In no particular order……

• Macromedia (Quite Expensive and wouldn’t advise for a first time user)
• Secret Money Generator (Builds sites quickly but operates in select markets)
• Traffic Hurricane (Builds sites quickly but operates in select markets)
• XsitePro (Versatile, inexpensive, easy to use)
• Bans (Builds Sites Quickly, inexpensive, currently only works with ebay affiliate program)
• PhpBay (Builds Sites Quickly, inexpensive, currently only works with ebay affiliate program)
• Wordpress (Free,extremely versatile, a good choice)
• MemberSpeed (On the expensive side compared with some but extremely versatile, suit any business)
• Website Content Wizard (Inexpensive, a great tool for adding content)
• Website Article Wizard (Combines with Website Content Wizard, can be used to build and unlimited number of Google Adsense Sites in Seconds)

Each of the above software programs have their place in the market, but for our purpose of building affiliate websites I would choose from the following.

1. Wordpress (This is free to use, you pay extra for unique tempates although plenty of free ones available)
2. XsitePro (Inexpensive and this is probably a little easier to use)
3. Website Article Wizard (Inexpensive and relatively easy to use. They did have an offer running, may still be available)

If you intend marketing ebay then Bans and or PhpBay is the way to go. Memberspeed Content Management system is at the top end of website development software. It has numerous professional templates and plugins for almost any situation. Plugins for autoresponders, articles,video, audios, products, press release, shopping cart, coupons, one time offers, the list goes on and on. You have to read about it to discover everything that is possible. It is ideal for experienced webmasters or someone wishing to become one.(Not a good choice for a beginner and a bit of an overkill for marketing affiliate programs alone).

If you want to test the water before lashing out that hard earned cash I would give Wordpress a go, as I said it’s free and there is a tremendous amount of help readily available. If you want to something a little easier to use to start then my choice would be XsitePro.

Depending on what Market I am working in and how I intend to make an income will ultimately determine the software I use from the list above. Happy hunting…………..

Promoting Your Elottery Website

Both elottery players and elottery affiliates receive their own affiliate website when being in one of our syndicates. You can see an example here. The affiliate website is more comprehensive than a players website because it is for individuals who want to have their own work from home business. It includes amongst other things a geneaology program and group email facility to keep in contact with personally introduced members and a host of tools such as banners,squeeze pages with valuable information to help you promote your business. All good affiliate programs will have their own marketing tools for you to use.

Seasoned Internet marketers will already know the benefits of having their own personal website in addition to the one supplied by affiliate marketing companies. But for those of you who don’t I will share my experiences of why I believe you will get better results.

Most affiliate marketing companies do an extremely professional job of supplying a well designed, fully comprehensive and easy to navigate website of that there is no doubt. However with only a few exceptions most do not give a way to personalise your website.

That means that your affiliate site looks exactly the same as thousands of others, and except by extremely good fortune will not allow your website to rank well on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN amongst others, which could supply a whole lot of free traffic to your website, and we all need traffic to our websites if we are to continue to find new customers to grow our businesses.

You can still promote your company supplied affiliate website by word of mouth,online advertising,  banner ads and pay per click but we won’t go into that right now. You could use what is commonly referred to as a squeeze page, and whilst I don’t consider them the best option they are certainly a step in the right direction, and if done correctly will certainly add customers/members to your affiliate business.

So why exactlly do you need an additional website?

If you take a look at any website via  your browser and then goto view source you will see the text that makes up your webpage. It may look quite daunting at first glance , but you can see near the top of the page three important html tags.

<title> Keyword goes here </title>
<meta NAME="Keywords" Content="keyword sgo here">
<meta NAME="Description" Content="content description goes here">

You must be able to alter these meta tags along with body content if you are to have any chance at all of getting your website in a good position. This is by no means all that needs to be done, only to show you that you need to be able to change your personalised website to stand out from the rest.

Now here is an example with text inserted.

<title>Euromillions Lottery | Euromillions Results | UK Lotto</title>

<meta NAME=“Keywords” Content=“Euromillions Lottery, Euromillions Lottery Results”>

<meta NAME=“Description” Content=“Play the Euromillions lottery or the UK lotto with elottery”>

In this example keywords relating to the market I am promoting have been inserted, you would introduce keywords relating to your chosen market after you have done some keyword research( We’ll cover this at a later date)

In the body content you should see other important tags such as

<h1> </h1>

This is where you would include your keyword phrase and would differ on each page of your site. In our example we could use <h1> Euromillions Lottery</h1>

If you check  any number of websites you will see many where they omitted these tags altogether, and if they are in your niche market and ranked well, you should all other things being equal, be able to rank above them.

Generally when you get a company affiliate website you are unable to change meta tags and content, but if you want to take the first step towards ranking then you need to change these and the way to do that is by having your own personalised website.

These are just the first initial steps towards optimising your site and just a part of what is required, but by doing this you put yourself ahead of thousands of others that have not bothered.

What’s needed?

To start, the first three things you will need…………

• A domain name (These are cheap)
• Hosting (Somewhere to store your website information)
• Software to build your site (Plenty of choice, some software is free)

Go and do your own research, check out domain names that may be appropriate for your niche market. Find a couple of different hosting companies, see what they are offering and of course prices.

I will cover these  steps in more detail in the next post.

Building Affiliate Marketing Websites The Easy Way

Using websites to promote affiliate programs has now become an essential part of everyday marketing although it still remains a mystery to many people. But, it doesn’t have to be that way.

This is the first in a series of posts that will deal with building affiliate marketing websites, and although primarily I am promoting the Euromillions and  UK Lotto syndicates you can use the information for just about any affiliate progam.

There are many myths in affiliate marketing, which attract a lot of people into believing they are true. First is they think managing an online business is easy, and second they think that one can make a fortune through online marketing in an instant. Probably not even 10% of those who are into affiliate marketing became rich overnight. There may be some who fortunately achieved overwhelming success in just a short span of time after setting up an affiliate program, but anyone who is successful in this kind of business would say he worked hard to get to where he is right now. Success in affiliate marketing takes time and hard work, but it’s worth it.

If you are planning to start an affiliate program, one of the things you have to consider is having your own website, not just an ordinary website but a professional looking one. How do you build an affiliate marketing website? What are the easy steps to build one?

First, you need to decide on the theme or niche of your website. It would be better if you already have an idea what products or services to promote as this would help you plan the design and lay-out of your web pages. The next thing to do is to choose a domain name and get it hosted.

Search for a domain name

Powered by 123-reg.co.uk

The domain name is a unique name used to label the actual address of your website on the Internet.  In deciding what domain name to register, look into the type of products you are endorsing and the theme of your site. Having the right keywords in your domain name would give you better chances of drawing more visitors to your website. Also, choose a top level domain or extension, such as .com because it is more popular. In selecting your web host, consider the security of servers and up time guarantees.

Now, you can start creating your webpages, you will need software to help you with this. There are page generation tools and fast launch sites available online; you just have to search for them. Countless online sources can help you build an affiliate marketing website, though you might need time to study and learn the whole process. This is one of the reasons why your site or the products you are going to promote must match your interest. Building your marketing website for the first time would be a lot more fun if you know the theme of your site. If you don’t have time to make your own website, you can use templates or purchase readily available websites. The latter, however, is a more expensive option.

Creating an affiliate website on your own is cheaper and more interesting. In the process of building your website, you will also increase your knowledge in Information Technology and the use of computers, software and the Internet. As you educate yourself in these fields, you are increasing your advantage against other affiliate marketers. It helps  if you already know the basics in web page development  because you can make it business like, and more convenient to use  and navigate. Furthermore, if you are knowledgeable and skillful in this area, you can already concentrate more on the content of the page rather than the design.

The key to drawing visitors to your website is to have high quality content. There will be several other factors that contribute to the success of your affiliate marketing site, but good content tops the list. This is precisely the reason why users choose to enter your site in the first place

Write interesting articles related to your theme as this would make them frequent your site more often. If you have already looked for affiliate programs that complement your site, add links to other business sites and other very good informative sites. Links contribute to how well you will be listed in major search engines as well. Also, create pages for the products you are endorsing, but don’t just promote the products by putting hyped-up ads. Keep your readers interested by injecting lots of relevant and useful information.  Remember that no good content means no frequent visitors, no sales and ultimately, no commission.

Make your site simple yet not without a touch of class in order to make it appear more of a business website rather than a personal website. This is more pleasing to the eyes and more interesting to browse. To help you with the design, you can check some successful online stores to get an idea on how you can make your site look better. Make sure you don’t place too many banner ads since these could distract some site users; and  instead of clicking your ad, they might just leave your site and look for other interesting websites. After all, banner ads are not the only means of advertising your products. Now your website is complete, submit its URL to major search engines to increase your traffic.

Learn about the use of keywords for search engine optimisation and apply them in your content. Update your site regularly and add new webpages. Make sure to inform your prospects about the latest updates in your site. You can use newsletters to accomplish this if you wish. The Internet offers a huge source of information on just about anything, make use of it. Continue to educate yourself on how to improve your website and soon you’ll find yourself successful in affiliate marketing.

That’s it for now, don’t worry if hasn’t clicked yet I will go into detail on each aspect of website building and affiliate marketing in future posts………..