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……………

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.