Link Master

I have finally started on the Download Page. There is more to come, but I wanted to get it started with something great and packed full of information for you. I hope you enjoy the downloads, and what is yet to come. Take care for now.

Don’t forget, if your looking for something specific, try our Link Master Store for anything you might need.

Mark

Hello Everyone,

I just wanted to wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving if you are in the United States. I hope you have a safe holiday. Black Friday is tommorrow, so have fun shopping this holiday season. If you want to avoid the crowds and traffic, do your shopping online to get your Black Friday Deals.

No hassles, no traffic and no crowds to deal with. Shop the easy way to get your Black Friday Deals.

If you don’t live in the United States I want to thank everyone for stopping by and visiting my site. I will have the Resource Page done very soon and also have some great books and info for you coming up.

Talk to you soon,

Mark

In Affiliate Marketing Blueprint 3 we went over SEO, Domain Names, Hosting etc., so lets continue on with our plan of action. Creating our site is pretty easy if you chose to use a blog. If you are going with a static Website then you must know some html to get you started. There are a lot of templates and themes available to get you off to a running start no matter what route you want to take. Just make sure that the template you use is not restricted to non-commercial use, because some do come with restrictions on what they can be used for.

Creating Your Site

You are going to want to write some articles, or have someone write them for you. You want to use your Keywords throughout the articles for your content. If you chose a Niche that you are familiar with then it should be pretty easy to get this done. If not just do some research on the Internet about your Niche to come up with topics surrounding your Niche that you can write about? You want to write about how your Niche is going to solve someone’s problem, or fulfill his or her needs. You need to express the features and benefits of your product to your visitors and what it is going to do for them.

With a Blog you will get indexed fairly quickly, whereas with a static website it usually takes a little longer. With a Blog you have what is called pinging. What that is basically is announcing that something new was added to your blog. Blogs are social websites where the content tends to change frequently, and pinging is a way to let everyone know that you have added some new content. I have pinged a static website address as well, but it is used mainly for blogs.

Getting Indexed

What do I mean when I say getting indexed? All that means is that the search engines know your site exists, not that you are on the top page of search results. How do you know if the search engines have indexed your site? If you do a search for your Domain Name in quotes like “golfswingtipsandmore.com” and your site is not listed, that means that they have not indexed your site yet.

How do you go about getting indexed in the first place? You have to give the search engines what they want, Content. But not just any old content will do, that is where your work with SEO, Keywords, Site Title and Description along with your articles all comes together to become relative content. Is that enough? No, because the other thing search engines like is a website that it sees as an authority on the topic it is indexed for. That means a website that other websites have links to. Those links are called Backlinks and give your website more authority then by itself.

Ok, I know what your thinking. Sounds like a lot of work and just how are you going to get all of these Backlinks to your site. Well, it will take some work on your part, but what will doing nothing get you? Be honest with yourself. Can you go to your job and do nothing and get paid for that? If so then great, you have the best job in the world, although I think I would be bored. On the Internet a little work can go a long ways and has the potential to pay long after the work is done. Ok, enough about that lets keep going here.

Adding Your Links

There are a number of ways for you to create backlinks to your site. You can write a press release. Write articles and summit them to article sites. You can join youtube and create some videos or, join a couple forums that relate to your Niche. You can create a free blog at blogger.com and Wordpress.com and you can bookmark your site using socialmarker.com all of which you can then link back to your Website. All of this will do two things for you. It will create the Backlinks you need to give your website more authority in the eyes of the search engines, plus free traffic from those sites as well.

Don’t just link to your main site, but also to other pages within your site to give you depth in your Backlinks. It wouldn’t help you to link everything back to your main page. Be creative and have a number of accounts each with different email addresses. Write a report and give it away for free at your site or on your free accounts for some viral links back to your site. You could even write a short ebook and give that away the same way. All with links back to your site or product.

Some of the best titles for reports and ebooks like this are 10 things you must do to blank, The 5 best ways to do that, 3 Secrets to something else. People loves list of things that show or tell them what they need to do to do something. Or to have a question answered, and How To’s are all good giveaway viral items. Plus it can help you build a list if placed with a sign up form.

Promotion

Once your Website is indexed by the search engines add your Affiliate Links to your content. By doing everything we just talked about you are also promoting your site and driving traffic to it as well. Once your backlinks start to build the search engines should start rating your site better. Use as many of the tactics I mentioned above as you can and you should see the traffic level increase to your site. It won’t happen overnight, but if you keep building more and more Backlinks it will happen.

Traffic

You could also place ads at free advertising sites, buy solo ads in ezines and newsletters. You could start a PPC ad campaign to drive traffic as well. Depending on your Niche you could even place ads offline to drive traffic to your site.

Once you have built your backlinks, joined a couple of forums related to your Niche, etc, etc. you can look back at what you have done to see how things are working. What can you do more of, what can you change, or do differently? What can you farm out to others that would free you up to start your next project?

Evaluation

Evaluate your site and see if changes need to be made. If so make them and re-evaluate, or If things are looking good do it all over again with your next project.

I know this series of posts have been a condensed version of some ideas to get you started. The main thing is just that, to get started. If you never start what have you gained? It doesn’t matter what you do, just do it, and change things if you need to later. You don’t have to be perfect and you can learn anything you need to know as you go.

I hope this has helped. Being that space is limited I am going to be putting a Resource Page together for all the links I couldn’t fit here within my posts. I will gather up some great Free Ebooks for you also that may cover some of these topics in greater detail if you are interested in getting more information. See you soon.

Mark

In Affiliate Marketing Blueprint 2 we went over researching our market and finding a product. We talked about Keyword Research to get our Keywords, SEO and discussed whether to use a Website or Blog, or even both. I offered a Free Book on SEO for you to download and I hope you enjoyed it and had a chance to read it. If you missed the download you can get it Here, or go back to Affiliate Marketing Blueprint 2.

What’s In A Domain Name?

Now we move on to the foundation or our site, which is our Domain Name. Now there is a lot of controversy on what is and what isn’t ok with choosing a domain name. Keyword Rich, doesn’t matter, Hyphens Ok, Hyphens not, keep it short, .com or other. All of these questions to deal with, so what is the answer? Who really knows? Google maybe!

Keywords?

Unless you are going to be hosting a eCommerse site where you may be targeting hundreds of Keywords then I would stick to a Keyword Rich Domain Name. For the eCommerse site you might want to come up with something catchy that would be remembered but for what we are after a Keyword Rich Domain Name would help us in the eyes of the search engines.

Hyphens?

I would not use hyphens, although I have. I have found that they haven’t helped me. Do a search on any topic, and see if there is a Domain Name listed in the Top of the Search Results with a hyphenated Domain Name. My experience says there won’t be, but you try it yourself.

Is It Short?

As far as short domains go I don’t think that is an issue any longer. Most keyword rich short Domain Names have been used up and as far as Google is concerned I don’t think that matters to them. They want content. By doing our keyword research and drilling down into a Niche we come up with what is referred to as long tail keywords. You want to use your main keywords for your Domain Name, at least to start your Domain Name.

A Few Extra Words To Better Your Odds

If your having trouble finding a Domain Name with your main keyword you can add other words to the end of it if they fit. Some words that can be added to the end of your Domain Name are, site, guide, guidelines, review, by (your name), more, plus more, etc, now, today, info, information, plan, resource(s), 2009, strategy, strategies, course, free and many more. The main thing is to have your keywords up front in your Domain Name. You could come up with many other words to add if you try.

I would also stick with .com for your domain name. If I had to make a second choice I would choose .org, but you should try to get a .com domain name if at all possible.

I used an example about drilling down into the golf market in the Post “Where Do You Start” because golf is too competitive. I used golf swing tips as my Keyword Phrase. Just for an example here lets say I wanted to get a Domain Name for that. I would try golfswingtips.com, if that was taken I could use one of our other words like and more so we would have golfswingtipsandmore.com, if that was taken I would see if the org extension was available for either of those. You get the idea here.

I use godaddy.com for my domain names, as you can probably tell from my sites.

Hosting

Once you have your Domain Name you need to think about where you are going to host your site. I do my hosting at Hostgator.com. Unlimited Domains, Subdomains, Disk Space and Bandwidth. Hosting is the easy part of all of this, but if you have never hosted a website before there are a few things you should know.

Lets take the above example. Lets say I registered my Domain Name at godaddy.com,, which was golfswingtipsandmore.com, and I hosted with hostgator.com. I would have to change what they call Name Servers so my new Domain Name will point to my new hosting companies servers. Don’t let this scare you; it isn’t that hard to do.

Name Server Information

When you registered your Domain Name at godaddy they assigned Name Server information to your Domain Name. When you get your Hosting from Hostgator they will give you Name Server information that you can use to point your Domain Names to their servers. All you do is take the Name Server information that you get from your Hosting company, sign in to your account where you registered your Domain Name, and change the Name Server information for that Domain to the Name Server information from your Hosting company. It is that simple

One thing I like about Hostgator is they have video tutorials on just about anything you will use with their Hosting. That helps a lot for someone who is new to this sort of thing.

Site Layout

Ok so lets move on to Site Layout. What I mean by that is what is our plan of attack for our website. Is it going to be a How To website, A story, or a review site. You will want to know what type of site you are going to have before you start putting it together. Are you going to be using a Blog, or a Static website or both. This would also be a good place to read SEO Made Easy by Brad Callen again to keep the SEO ideas fresh in your head.

If your going to be using a blog, there are plenty of themes for you to choose from, just make sure it goes with the product that you intend to promote. You want something simple, but professional. You want something that is clean and not to busy or dark. You want your visitors focusing on the content of your website, and not the design.

Write Like You Talk

You want to write your content, or articles like you talk. Like you were talking to someone sitting across from you. Keep your paragraphs short, and a space between paragraphs. White space is good. It makes it easier to read. You also want to use headings throughout your content. People are all basically skimmers and will skim through your content to see if they actually want to read it.

Use Headings

Make your headings so that they flow through the progression of the Story, the steps of the How to, or the features and benefits of the Review, or Product. You want a person that skims your content to be able to understand the story, the procedures, or the benefits without actually reading the whole page. At some point they will decide if they want to actually read it or leave, but they will have an idea of what your site was about without having to read everything. They maybe back, or not. Express the points you want to convey to your visitor in a flowing manner. Take a look at how I have used headings in my Posts and you will see what I mean.

Italic text and highlighted text I would stay away from. Most people get carried away with using these two things and I think it lessens the value of your site. I believe it is better to make your text bold, underlined, or bulleted to stress a point verses using Italic, or highlighted text. Use the same font throughout. If you want to use a different font, use one for yout content, and maybe a different for your headings. Other then that i would stick to one font.

Bullets

Even better use bullets, or bullet images to highlight the benefits and features you want to point out. They give your text a more streamlined effect and look more professional then the Italic, or highlighted text. Just don’t use some animated bullet file that flashes, spins, or whatever. Remember you want your site to look clean and professional no matter what your topic is.

Images

If you use images in your content then above the image you should use a heading and then have the text flow around the right side of the image. A lot of sites add bonuses that will be received upon purchase of the product. You use the heading to point out the bonus. An image for a visual reference to what that bonus is. Then wrap that image with the text that explains the bonus in more detail.

Even if the image was not for a bonus I would still use a heading above the image, and wrap the corresponding text around that image whenever possible.

All That Legal Stuff

Make sure you have your legal stuff at the bottom of the page. You should have a Term Of Service, Privacy Policy, Disclaimer, Anti-Spam Policy, and maybe even a Copyright Notice. You could also have an About Page or Contact Page, which are good as well.

Link Structure

Lets move on to Link Structure. You want to structure your links in a way that is going to utilize your keywords. Contextual links carry more weight then say a list of links because the contextual link is part of the text that make up the content. I am not going to spend too much time explaining this section because I think by reading the book SEO Made Easy by Brad Callen this will have been covered already.

I am going to have to wrap this section up with that last paragraph because this is getting to long. But I want you to think about what is coming up next and what your ideas are on the type of site you want to have. Do you want a static Website? Are you going to use a Blog, or combine both into your plan of action?

Coming Up Next: Our last section.

Affiliate Marketing Blueprint 4

Creating your site

Getting Indexed

Adding your links

Etc.

I also plan on setting up a resource page of some of the sites I like to use, and maybe they can help you too.

Plus I have a couple more great books for you to download if you are interested.

Ok in Affiliate Marketing 1 we came up with a basic Blueprint that lists a plan of action. We have a starting point, and a Step-by-Step Guide to an end. We then evaluate to see if any changes are needed. If not we repeat the process.

Finding A Product

The first step in the process is finding a product, if you don’t already have one. There are four basic places for you to find a product, or you can type into a search engine your topic and add the words Affiliate Program after it. For our time here though we will concentrate on the four major players in the Affiliate Marketing arena for products. If you really want to make your Niche search easy there is a tool called Micro Niche Finder, which will allow you to find little known Under-the-Radar Niche Markets. Here are the links to search for a product or Affiliate Program that you would like to promote.

Clickbank

Commission Junction

Linkshare

PayDotCom

Micro Niche Finder

If you have Your Own Product then you can list it through Clickbank, PayDotCom, or even PayPal. Just Sign Up as a Vendor and you are good to go. You could even start your own Affiliate Program and have Affiliates selling your product for you, but as I mentioned before you should start with promoting someone else’s product if you are just starting out, or don’t have your own product.

Research

Next on our list was Research. Is our product marketable, and what is our competition. I kind of went over this in the last post so I don’t want to be repeating myself, but basically you want to take your main keyword or phrase and see if there are any ads that are being promoted. If there is a lot of ads, then what is the competing page count and do we need to drill down further into the niche to where we can compete.

This research does two things for us. One it tells us if we can make money with our product and two forces us to drill down to keyword phrases that we can rank for. There is no sense spending all this time getting a product and making a website for something we can’t get ranked for because the competition is too high. Golf is billion-dollar industry but we would never be able to rank for the term golf, so leave that for the big boys and drill down into the niche for your piece of the pie.

Keywords

That brings us to keywords. This is a subject that is a post or two in itself, but I will break it down here as best I can and give you some basic ideas. When you think keywords you should be thinking about what is called long tail keywords. What that means is keyword phrases that are made up of three or more words. By doing so you are drilling down within a market that is less competitive so you can rank better in the search engines.

Your main keyword is the topic, or product that you are promoting, but you will want to also include what I call secondary keywords that relate directly to your topic, or product that will be included into the content of your website. They too can, and should be two or more words in length. Have a list of a half dozen or so to go along with your main keyword.

If your website is going to have more then one page make sure that each page has it’s own main keyword phrase and secondary keywords. Keywords are important, so you want to take the time to get the keywords that work best for your topic, or product.

You are probably wondering how you are going to come up with these keywords. Now you could sit back and try to come up with as many keywords and phrases on your own, but there is better ways to get your keywords. Here are some tools for you to get your own list of keywords.

Google Keyword Tool

Wordtracker Keyword Tool

Keyword Elite – This is a very powerful tool that could save you a lot of time with your keywords and research.

SEO and Free Book

Next on our list is SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO involves everything we have already talked about and where to place it on your website. Once again, this is a topic that is hard to cover with just a post on a blog, especially one within one covering many points like this one. Therefore I figured it would be better to offer a Free download for you (SEO Made Easy by Brad Callen) to better explain this part.

If you want to really know what SEO is and how to harness its power I would read this ASAP and would also recommend his SEO Elite Software. When it comes to getting it right and making your site the best it can be for the search engines. It will equate to free traffic to your website. You don’t want to shortchange your Website SEO. It will be time well spent.

Enjoy the book; it is packed with all the right information.

Website or Blog?

Next we have Website, or Blog? What is the difference and why you need to consider which to use. The difference between a static website and a blog is pretty simple actually. With a static website you can create completely different pages for each part of your Niche Market. All of them can still have the same header or logo but the content and layout can be totally different.

You can have a different Title, Description, Keywords, Content, etc. which for some Niches might be better if there is a number of products that can be presented for the same general theme of your website.

Blogs on the other hand have a theme that is carried throughout the whole site. You can have more then one page on a Blog like an About Page, Contact Page whatever you want, but again the theme is carried to each page of the blog. That isn’t a bad thing, just part of how a blog theme works. They are easy to set up and easy to use. You have thousands of themes to choose from in all different types of layouts. They are generally easier to use for someone who does not know HTML, CSS and other coding used to create static websites.

You could also use both as I have done with this site. The Affiliate Link Cloaker site is a static page, which I can add to or just leave it one page with the Affiliate Link Cloaker for Affiliates to use to cloak their Affiliate Links. Then I have this Blog for my Affiliate Marketing and Internet Marketing Strategies to help out other marketers.

It is a little harder to change the Title, Description, and Keywords etc. with a Blog, but there is a plugin you can install after you install Wordpress which will help not only with making your Blog better with SEO, but also which other Plugins to use, and setting up your Title, Description and Keywords for your blog. Here is where you can get the Free Traffic Getting SEO Plugin. The site also gives Step-by-Step instructions on installing the Plugin once Wordpress is installed on your server.

In the Website, or Blog controversy I would recommend that if you are new, or don’t know how to edit and write HTML, CSS, PHP, etc to start with a Wordpress Blog and if you want to learn more about writing and designing your own website later, you can. It isn’t that hard to learn. If you want to learn more about Blogs, HTML, CSS and Designing Your Own Website you can visit our Link Master Store for all of your learning needs and more.

Coming Up Next:

Affiliate Marketing Blueprint 3

Domain Name

Hosting

Site layout

Our Blueprint Continues…