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There is an innocence and brutal honesty that my three-year old exudes every single day. And as much as I strive to instil my knowledge and experience on to her, she still manages to teach me so much.

Some of her words of wisdom, I’m somewhat less fond of, like: Mom, you have lines on your forehead, so I guess you must be getting old. I guess. Or: Mom, you should wear more pink, it makes you look more like a girl. I hate pink.

But most of the time, in her purity, in her determination to do things her way, she reminds me of the little things in life that I apply to my daily routine, and in turn, to my adventures in affiliate marketing.

Here then, are four tips from my daughter, which bring me back to basics, and make for great affiliate marketing lessons.

1. I want to be everything when I grow up
My girl says this regularly, and neither my husband nor I have the heart to break it to her, that she just might want to narrow down her focus—at least a little. And really, why should we.

Thinking big is essential to making it big, in life, as it is in affiliate marketing. Now, that doesn’t mean that when you’re starting out as an affiliate that you should launch endless websites, promote every single brand you come across and dip your fingers into PPC, SEO, blogging and social media all at the same time. It means you think big, and you want big, and then you come up with a plan to get you there. One step at a time, and patience, patience, patience.

2. When I wear a (pink) dress, I want it to twirl!
I have a hard time getting my girl in anything else but a dress—and skirts don’t count. And not just any dress; it has to be a dress that twirls when she dances and spins. Sometimes, in the craze of the early morning rush to get out the door, this demand can be difficult to meet. But then again, who can blame a girl who knows exactly what she wants.

Knowing what you want out of your affiliate business is paramount to reaching success. How else will you know when you’re there, if you don’t know what it is that you want? Once you’ve established what you want, tell the people around you, so they can help you make that happen. Your affiliate manager is a great person to start with. Maybe you want to know about all new promotions, new marketing creatives or new opportunities that fall within a specific sector. Having expectations is a good thing. Make sure you’re teaming up with the right people to help you meet those expectations.

3. That kid’s bad news
My daughter is in daycare and there are six other friends in her class. When I ask her how her day was, I ask her about her classmates, and if they had fun together that day. She’s not a big fan about one particular boy, and goes so far as to say that she doesn’t like playing with him. I know who he is, and sure enough, he spells trouble—and is often found in time-out because he’s done one bad thing or another.

In affiliate marketing, bad news often comes in the form of black hat SEO. Keyword stuffing, hidden text and page cloaking are just some of the many black hat SEO techniques that may seem like a fast-track to stardom, but in the end, can cost you your website and indeed, your business. And while you may experience a boost in traffic, this is usually only temporary. White hat SEO techniques will have a much more positive and long-term benefit for your website and will help you get to where you want to be in search engine results—and help you stay there.

4. But I like my old teacher…
My daughter’s daycare is divided into classrooms, which are divvied up based on age. Next September, she will be moving up to the 4-year-old level, and she’s a little hesitant about leaving her beloved Johanne, her teacher, behind. To prepare the children for this transition, her class has been spending about an hour every day in the big-kid class, and low and behold, she seems keener now for the move.

For many of us, and affiliates too, we have a routine that gives us comfort. Whether that be hanging with the same people or using the same familiar marketing techniques, humans are often creatures of habit, and that can act as a disservice to your affiliate marketing business.

Breaking out of your everyday routine may sound challenging, but it really is quite achievable. Just like my daughter, try doing something for an hour a day, that you have no experience in, that you’ve always wanted to find out more about—but never have. Attending conferences, for example, is a great way to meet new people, learn new techniques and be introduced to programs that you may never have thought about before. You’re not going to give up the methods that have proven fruitful for your business, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t add to them, and maybe discover something equally good, or better.

We’re continually inspired by wee ones. Check out one of our earlier posts called, All I Need to Know about Affiliate Marketing I Learned in Kindergarten.

How do your kids inspire you in affiliate marketing? Let us know in the Comments section below.

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What My Three-Year Old Teaches Me About Affiliate Marketing

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A team of Canadian scientists, at the University of Montreal (just down the road from us) is developing software that will measure the emotional responses of people viewing Web pages. They’ll be measuring facial expressions, eye movement and body heat, all to analyze how those users are relating to their online experience. Why is this important?

According to Professor Defresne, “With e-commerce and the multiplication of retail Web sites, it has become crucial for companies to consider the emotions of Web users.”

We know that users react at both a conscious and subconscious level to Web pages and there is a lot that goes into making the online experience a pleasurable one for users. And the most important task an advertiser (read: affiliate) has is to make an emotional connection with their audience. So, how does an affiliate make that connection? Here are five simple tools to help affiliates make emotional connections with their customers.

1. The eyes have it

How many times have you left a webpage because a bunch of ‘smileys’ kept blinking on your screen and shouting, “Oh my god!!”? Use colors that create a sense of well-being, security and trustworthiness. The goal on your website is to make users feel welcome and comfortable, not to annoy them into leaving.

While that seems like an obvious goal, I see a LOT of websites that don’t seem to have this concept down. Look at your favorite sites and ask yourself what you love about them. Take note of what you look at first, and what your eyes end up focusing on.  Remember that coffee shops aren’t able to sell coffee at three or four bucks a pop because it’s such amazing coffee. They have managed to create an experience.

2. Establish trust

This seems like a whole other topic, but it is at the heart of making the emotional connection with your customers. Without trust, there can be no sale, as, at the very heart of a sale, is the trust factor. How does one go about establishing trust?

For blogging affiliates, this one can be a simple task, so long as it is carried out properly. Using your own personal experiences, or being honest about your experience with a particular item can be a very powerful tool for establishing trust. Don’t be afraid to say that you don’t like something, or would prefer an item to have more functions, etc. Relating your experience in a personal way goes a long way towards making that connection.

If you have credentials, use them. Letting people know that you are an expert in a particular field is a great way to build trust.

Most importantly, don’t be afraid to admit when you are wrong. People relate to honesty, and as we’re all capable of making mistakes, your customers will relate to you.

3.  Give the people what the people want

Approximately 3 billion searches are carried out per day on Google alone. If you’re lucky enough to have someone click on a search engine result that directs them to your website, make sure that you are giving that person what they are after. Getting relevant information to the user is such an important part of creating an emotional connection.

4. Be courteous

Keep pages focused on the matter at hand, and don’t allow for too many distractions on your page that keep people from concentrating on what you brought them there to do. Someone looking for an online education program wants to be able to see what they are looking for immediately. If they do not, they tend to grow frustrated and find their way  to your competitor’s site as this will be deemed as discourteous by the user.

Think of your website as valuable real estate. And we all know those three most important rules of real estate: Location, location, location! Test your sites to find the best way to make this happen, and don’t stop testing. Keep trying to improve that winning formula!

5. The technology exists – Use it!

We are now blessed with so much great technology that can create positive interactions with customers. From Flash to HTML5 and everything in between, if you are clever enough to create something that your users can interact with and relate to; if you can make them laugh; if you can create the emotional response that you are after through the use of technology, by all means, use it!

Read the original here:
Five Tips for Making Emotional Connections with your Customers

Search Engine Keywords:

• emotional connection
• eotional cennection to customers
• make emotional connections with women?

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In the last part of this series on free affiliate marketing tools, we’ll look at three tools that can help with your online business. A tool that checks the keyword density, to the favoured free program used by bloggers everywhere, and one that tests your ranking in search engines are featured in today’s post.

Keyword Density Checker http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/

There is a website called WeBuildPages that offers a free keyword density tool. All you have to do is enter the URL of the page you wish to research into the prescribed field, and the results will show you the percentage of your keyword density.

How dense should your keywords be? There is a lot of debate about this topic, but the general consensus is that one’s keyword density should stay at less than 10%. Most SEO experts encourage content producers to aim for at least one instance of the keyword every 60-80 words, or so.

The great part of this tool is that you can limit your search in several ways. You can choose to ignore words with a specific number of characters or less, and set the tool to search for a minimum amount of occurrences. You can choose to include meta-tag information or not. They also have “stop word list,” which is a list of words that they have deemed to generally not fall into keyword structures that people are using, but check the list to make sure that what you’re looking for isn’t on the list.

Search Engine Ranking Report http://www.sitereportcard.com/checkranking/

Curious to see how well your site is ranking in search engines for specific keywords? You can find out using this free marketing tool from SiteReportCard. You enter the URL of the page in question, and then the keyword(s) you wish to research. You can enter in up to three other URLs to compare to your own.

The drawback to this tool is that it only returns results from Google, Yahoo and MSN (Bing). This isn’t going to give you a huge amount of information, but it will let you see how well your page is ranking in those search engines, which lets you know whether or not you’re being competitive in that avenue.

WordPress (http://wordpress.org/)

Of all of the free blogging tools currently available, WordPress is one of the most popular.

What makes WordPress so popular? In my opinion, it is the literally thousands of plugins that you can use to customize your blog. Not to mention the amazing templates that are available to get you started blogging quickly and with little or no design or web programming knowledge.

As for plugins, you can choose from tools that help you eliminate spam comments, resize photos, optimize the SEO on your blog, back up your data and add polls to your site. You can pay a few dollars for customized templates that have many of these features already built in, but using a free template with these free plugins is a great way to get started in affiliate marketing.

WordPress will host your blog for free, or if you’ve already bought a domain name, you can upload a free version of WordPress that will get you started producing content in mere minutes. For newbies, this is a great affiliate marketing tool that can be used to reach a lot of people.

There are a lot more great, free tools that can be used as free affiliate marketing tools. Which ones are you using? Do you have any suggestions on tools that you would like some more information about? Let us know in the comments section below.

If you missed the other posts in this series, you can check out Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Related posts:

1. Free Affiliate Marketing Tools and Website Promotion Strategies for Newbies: Part 2
2. Free Affiliate Marketing Tools and Website Promotion Strategies for Newbies: Part 1
3. What Tools Do Affiliates Need to Succeed?

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Free Affiliate Marketing Tools and Website Promotion Strategies for Newbies: Part 3

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Miracle Traffic Bot is a one click SEO and traffic automation software created by Internet Marketer Paul Ponna and his team.

The software submits your videos, articles and websites to dozens of article directories, social bookmarketing sites, and video submission sites.

With the unique combination of simplicity of use and speed of submission, the software makes
getting top rankings on search engines a breeze.

In addition, Miracle Traffic Bot is completely white-hat. This allows the software to perform very fast
in the background and get you long-term results that last.

Plus, the software suite also comes with complete step by step video training on not only how to use the software but also trains you on how to get traffic and make money using the software.

The benefits of the software are three fold:

1) The software gets you top 30 or more rankings on top search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and others search engines.

2) The software also gets your website, blog or affiliate page hundreds of quality backlinks that not only increases your Google PageRank but also catapults your website to rank high for most keywords of your choice.

3) Miracle Traffic Bot also allows you to spread your message because the platforms and sites that the software integrates with syndicate their content to several hundreds of other websites.

This ripple effect ensures that one simple article, video or URL for bookmarking of your sites will
turn into hundreds of one-way backlinks and thousands of visitors to your website, blog or affiliate page.

Hence, you do not even need your own website or product to get the most out of the software as once you get the traffic, everything else becomes easy.

Miracle Traffic Bot is a powerful software suite and what’s better is that it is the only software of its kind that sells for a low one-time fee which makes it a must for every online marketer to have it in their marketing efforts.

Watch this video for some shocking details:
http://www.agenzy.com/MiracleTrafficBotBonus

Search Engine Keywords:

• how to sell miracle traffic bot
• make money sell your traffic
• make money selling internet traffic
• selling internet traffic

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Know what you want…

Seems simple right? In my experience, dealing with hundreds of clients over the last 12 years, very few can actually quantify what they want.

Some tell me they want marketing help (far too vague), but when I ask about success metrics, they almost invariably cite traffic as their primary success measure. Now, not to discount traffic, but that’s not what pays the bills is it?

ROI shouldn’t be calculated on traffic*, but by counting other other measures. If your aim is engagement, count comments, reviews, buzz. If your aim is sales, count overall revenue increases, direct conversions, increase of average sales…

In an SEM campaign in particular, knowing what you want is vital, because every click costs you. Your campaigns should be highly segmented, helping you know where each dime goes, how each ad performs, how each keyword you’re buying contributes to the goals you’ve set.

Search Engine Guide has an excellent post up today about segmenting your keywords:

There are four distinct keyword segments each representing a different phase of the searcher’s buying cycle. After going through the process above you should be left with one or more groups of keyword that can be optimized into a page or several pages. The next step is to take each group and segment them even further based on those keyword segments.

Once you know what you want, you can do A/B testing to determine where your money’s going and whether or not your plan is working.  Know what you want and you have a heck of a lot better chance at getting it.

*there are a few, rare exceptions to this rule

Social Bookmarking

See more here:
Online Marketing Goals

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Trendspotting Market Research came out with a report about predictions for social media trends in 2010. I found it interesting that the predictions were in 140 characters, Twitter style. It definitely makes it easy to read. From this report, the major trends predictions in 2010 were suggested as mobile, location, transparency, measurement, ROI and privacy.

Some of my favorite predictions included:

• “Mobile becomes a social media lifeline.”
• “Companies get serious about social media, elevating their focus to social business.”
• “By the end of the year we’ll have a new interface for status updates that looks nothing like a microblog.”
• “Search will get more social: real time content in results, information from social network friends to results, using collective information from other web users.”
• “Social media in 2010 will cease being the shiny new object and instead, become part of the everyday lexicon on business.”
• “We’re going to see an explosion of things that use location.”

Are you ready for 2010? Do you have any trend predictions of your own regarding social media?

Read the rest of the report below:

Read more here:
2010 Trend Predictions in Social Media

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A regular workout routine is recommended for a healthy lifestyle. Though, sometimes we forget that working out is not only for the body but also for the mind. Have you flexed your brain lately?

When we blog, we don’t usually think of what is happening in the background but blogging affects us in many different ways. Beyond producing helpful content and connecting with great people, it is believed that blogging helps improve our cognitive learning skills. As we challenge ourselves with these interactions our brains are “flexing” and becoming stronger. Taking it a step further, the more involved we are with reading and responding to comments, the further our writing evolves and improves. Engaging through blogging also facilitates an environment in which we are able to expand our opinions and open our minds on different topics. As a result, many times we are exposed to a perspective we may never have thought of.

So let’s continue to produce great content and connect with others while getting that ever so important workout!

Read more:
Blogging: A Workout for the Brain

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According to a breaking story on Mashable, today brings big news from LinkedIn, which finally invited developers to contribute to its social media platform. The new LinkedIn Developer Platform is expected to spur the onslaught of new apps you can use with LinkedIn – much like those available for Facebook and Twitter. In fact, you can expect integration with TweetDeck as early as this week, according to the article.

What does this mean for Internet Marketing?

We’ll have to wait and see, but for those of you that currently leverage social media to network and market your business, it appears you will have even more options. Of course, instead of Roller Coaster Kingdom, Farmville, Mafia Wars and the other time-suckers you can find on Facebook, I hope we can expect more useful business oriented applications.

For starters, I’d like to see a way to sync all my friends (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) so I could group (segment) them more efficiently, and communicate (market) to them from one application, with the ability to choose my platform (medium)…

What types of apps would you like to see for LinkedIn?

Excerpted from:
What Type of Apps Do You Want for LinkedIn?

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With 2009 almost coming to an end, we tend to reflect on the past year to remember all those memorable moments. Taking that a step further, The Webby Awards has just released what it considers being the 10 most influential moments of the past decade.

Here’s a look at the top 10 moments:

• Craigslist expands beyond San Francisco (2000)
• Google AdWords launches (2000)
• Wikipedia launches (2001)
• Napster shuts down (2001)
• Google’s IPO (2004)
• Online video revolution (2006)
• Facebook opens up, Twitter takes off (2006)
• The iPhone debuts (2007)
• U.S. presidential campaign (2008)
• Iranian election protests (2009)

With technology continuously evolving, let’s see where the next decade brings us in advances.

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The Webby Awards Announces the Past Decade’s Top 10 Internet Moments

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You may or may not yet have experienced the new retweet feature of Twitter, but the service has confirmed it is in the process of rolling out the feature to everyone. This feature and its attributes are progressively surfacing. Some interesting functions include:

• It can be turned off on a per-user basis
• The retweet area will have three tabbed sections: retweets by others, retweets by you and your tweets, retweeted
• You can still use the “RT” style for retweeting
• There will be a retweet timeline shown just below the individual tweets (perhaps a cleaner look)

The mechanics of the features were first explained by @Biz in a post entitled, Project Retweet: Phase One. Of course, all features have their pros and cons and will take some getting used to. Some additional information can be found at TechCrunch.

Original post:
The Reinvented Retweet

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In the past eleven years, Google has been pushing out product after product, many of which collect personal information from the users. There are now so many products that many of us use, that it is hard to keep track of what you have registered for and where to find it. Once you are using Gmail, Reader, Calendar, Picassa, and a plethora of other Google interfaces, monitoring your security settings can become a very tedious task. Now, however, there is help.

Last week, Google launched Google Dashboard, a user interface that provides a simple and useful summary of all the products you are signed up for. When signed in to your Dashboard, you are presented a list of all your Google products and direct links to your personal settings for each. Now is a good time to brush the dust off of some of those Google products you haven’t used in a while by logging into your Dashboard. For help understanding Google Dashboard, watch this video.

Credit:
Manage Your Google Products

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Brian R. Walton, who led online marketing for brands such as Sandals Resorts, Beaches Resorts, Walt Disney World Resorts & Disneyland Resort, will be hosting a free webinar to discuss the following topics:

- Identify where the consumer is in the Vacation Planning Cycle
- How to use the right online marketing tactics and message based on which phase of VPC
- Consideration/Information Gathering
- Itinerary Planning
- Experience
- Return Visits

The event will take place on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register please visit: Online Marketing for the Hospitality Industry

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InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Online Marketing for the Hospitality Industry

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Most SEO experts will tell you that “Content is King.” And it’s true… Both search engines and people visit Web sites for the content. Unlike a search engine, however, users are looking for content to help them solve a problem or complete a task.

When you provide your visitors with the information they need, in a format they can easily digest, you’ll discover your conversion rate improves, along with your bottom line.

Unfortunately, people don’t really read on the Web – they skim. And if your content does not convince them to take the next step – whether it’s to buy an item, download a file, or click through to the next page – within a few seconds, they’ll quickly move on to one of your competitors.

Help your users (and your site’s performance) by feeding them the information they need, in a format they can easily digest. In other words, make it as READABLE as possible.

10 Tips for Improving Web site Readability

1. – Make it easy for users to find what they need by providing accurate, descriptive headings.
2. Avoid “word clutter” – Be concise. Don’t use two words, when one will suffice.
3. Keep paragraphs short – Long blocks of copy intimidate users. Keep blocks of text short – about 2 to 3 sentences.
4. Use lists – Aid comprehension by presenting information in a numbered or bulleted list.
5. Separate thoughts – This helps users find the information they need quickly. Limit the copy to one theme per page, and one thought per paragraph/section.
6. Leverage illustrations – Used wisely, images can convey your message quickly. Support your copy with visuals – just don’t overdo it, or oyu will create a distraction.
7. Utilize white space – Organize your page layout. Does it look neat and clean? Keep your design simple, and your copy will be easier to digest
8. Check your facts – Readers want up-to-date, reliable and accurate information, If your information is bad, it won’t natter how easy it is to read!

For more tips on how to improve the readability of your Web site, check out Letting Go of Words by Janice Redish.

More:
10 Ways to Improve Web site Readability

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Jay Berkowitz will be hosting a free webinar to discuss the following topics:

- How to get a virtual sales force selling for you
- Selecting the right solution
- Recruiting affiliates
- Best practices for program management
- How to stay current on new programs and technologies
- Payment strategies

The event will take place on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST and to register please visit: Ten Golden Rules of Affiliate Marketing Webinar

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InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Ten Golden Rules of Affiliate Marketing Webinar

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You may have seen a plusbox below some AdWords ads that displays several products right on the Google results page. This is because Google has been giving certain advertisers a chance to participate in their beta test of combining AdWords ads with Google base to display product feeds directly below ads.

If you want to be a part of the test, however, you are out of luck because the test is coming to an end. Google will now be assessing feedback from the advertisers that participated. Look out for availability of this feature in the near future.

More:
Product Plusbox Beta Test Commencing

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