It is absolutely pointless writing about a topic if it has no relevance to your website, but equally, if your website is about plugs, which can be a particularly dry subject, you may need to make some effort to produce articles that are interesting and stimulating and keep the reader’s attention.

The better the quality of material you post on your website, the more backlinks you will receive, which will help your site rank better. Links are very valuable for your website’s ranking within Google, so by writing interesting content you’re enabling your website to receive free links and thus free traffic, which in turn should make your website more profitable.

It is therefore worthwhile taking some time to research your topics thoroughly in order to write a good quality article which may ultimately gain your website higher rankings in Google results, not to mention being an additional page that will rank for longtail search queries.

Gillian Chilton
Writer/editor

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This is what starts to worry me. Some people expect success and wealth to fall into their laps without actually doing any work. They think that by enrolling on a course with Computeach they’re automatically entitled to a £35K per year job in the IT industry. They’re not. They need to actually do the work first.

It’s the same within the Affiliate industry. If you spend any significant time on some of the major web marketing forums such as Sitepoint, A4U or V7n you’ll get question after question from people asking how they can get rich quick. How they can make money with no effort. How they can become millionaires without doing any work.

Anyone who knows how to make money with no effort isn’t going to share it on a forum. That’s completely the wrong idea and indicative of the ‘lottery’ culture in which we live. “I don’t want to do any work; I just want to be rich”.

The real sad thing is that once Google has indexed this post it will start to rank for search terms like ‘make money with no effort’ and the people who read this will be looking for that get rich quick solution to their lives.

There isn’t one!

As with all things in life you get out of it what you put in. If you want a £35K a year job in the IT industry you need to work to get it. You could take a course like those offered by Computeach, but unless you do the work to complete the course you’ll get nowhere. Effort and dedication are required to succeed.

That’s the same with Affiliate Marketing. The biggest earners out there are always switched on, always looking for the next niche, always tweaking their PPC campaigns. They don’t just spend their time watching Trisha and hoping to be rich one day. They make it happen.
Go out there and make it happen!

Darren
Affiliate Marketing

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I wanted now to show a working example of this to demonstrate how, as a merchant, your website and products can be promoted by affiliates. The new website Just buy Toys has been set up promoting the different toy ranges available on merchants such as Toys R Us, Woolworths and the Entertainer. The website receives product feeds direct from these merchants and categorises them into various toy ranges, such as Doctor Who, Transformers and Dora the Explorer. As soon as a merchant updates its product feed the website automatically updates with the new products.

The Shop Window script itself has been customised and merged with Wordpress to allow it to be promoted with content relating to the toys, and for the addition of offer codes that, this time of year at least, are frequently created by the merchants.

The website could also be promoted with a PPC campaign for product specific ranges linking directly into the product pages, but to begin with the site will be promoted through organic SEO.

As one of the best ways to encourage your website to be indexed by Google is to consistently update it with unique content, the creation of articles on Just buy Toys will be fundamental to its success. So (shameless plug coming up) if you’re looking to buy toys for your offspring this Christmas, just buy toys.

I know, it’s a rubbish slogan but it’s the best I could come up with at such short notice.

Darren
Affiliate Marketing

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If you didn’t know that, you shouldn’t be allowed to have a bank account. Please stop reading now.

If you did know that, what you might not realise is the term ‘cashback’ when related to a website DOES in fact offer you cash out of the goodness of the hearts of the website owners, in exchange for using them to shop.

Surely that’s nonsense you might be thinking. Well no, in fact it’s not. If you’ve ever seen advertisements promising such unlikely offers such as ‘earn money while you shop’ or ‘get paid to buy your groceries’ there’s a good chance they are in fact real.

How does this work? How can I get some of this free cash?

A cashback website is basically a shopping portal website that is affiliated with numerous online retailers, usually high street brand names such as the aforementioned Tesco, Sainsbury’s and yes, even Asda. The owners of the website earn affiliate commissions whenever someone (you) purchases something via their link, but unlike regular affiliate schemes the cashback website offers to share the affiliate commissions with the buyer (yup, you again).

So basically you get the Affiliate commissions on offer through an affiliate scheme just by using the cashback site when you shop.

The cashback site then earns its money either by taking a subscription from its users (sadly this time it’s also you, sorry) on an annual basis, or by deducting a percentage of the affiliate commission. If you happen to spend a lot of money online then paying a £5 subscription every year is small change. You’ll earn more than that just by purchasing an iPod for example.

So, if you’re looking to do your Christmas shopping online this year it might be worth your while looking for a decent cashback site first, you could save yourself a few hundred pounds in affiliate commission.

What the emergence of cashback sites means for the affiliate marketing industry is another matter though, one that has stirred up quite a debate about the direction of the industry as a whole; but that’s for another blog.

Darren
Affiliate Marketing

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The below figures show the same week in October throughout the five years I have been running Google Adsense on a series of content driven websites. You will notice a steady and constant rise for the first four years until the last year, where the increase becomes a little steeper.

The first year in 2003 saw very low earnings from Adsense, where acheiving over $1 in a day was a cause for celebration.

2004 saw the earnings rise by 300%. Still nothing to pop the champaign corks over but this constituted decent progress, especially as the traffic levels had only risen by 100%.

2005 saw the traffic level off and the earnings rise only slightly. At this stage it was reasonable to assume that Adsense had a limited earning potential and I had reached it.

2006 and the traffic had risen only slightly from the previous year, but the earnings had gone up by 300%. This was done by onsite optimisation which I have described in detail in previous blogs about affiliate marketing.

Finally 2007 and a 50% increase in traffic was dwarfed by a 500% increase in revenue from the previous year.

So how did I do that? What amends could have possibly caused such a spike in revenue from a network of websites? There were in fact two simple changes made to two websites in particular.

Firstly, an ASP based website that received on average 2,000 visitors per day was converted to Wordpress and hosted on an Apache server with search engine friendly URLs. This resulted in much faster page loads, better organic listings and consequently more ad views and clicks; a simple solution perhaps, but a very effective one. This in truth wasn’t responsible for the huge jump you can see in the figures; the real reason for the spike was an even simpler change made to the second website…

One of my higher trafficked websites, and by higher I’m referring to several thousand visitors per day, had been constructed using a dynamic SQL database. However, because of the level of traffic the strain on the server accessing the database for every visitor was immense, which caused a noticeable delay on the loading of the homepage, thus the adverts were delivered slowly. By taking a snapshot of the dynamic homepage and making it into a static HTML page, the website was delivered far quicker, which meant faster page loading times, more page view, more ad views and of course far more clicks and earnings.

Having a dynamic site is great and saves a lot of time with updates, but unless it’s absolutely necessary you should question whether you need your main page to be dynamic and whether in fact a static page will radically increase your revenue.

Yes this means that the front page doesn’t get updated instantly whenever new information is added, which means a little extra effort on my part – but as you can see the rewards far outweigh the increased workload.

A similar solution was used when I worked on the website for a major high street retailer. The traffic outweighed the server’s ability to cope thus the dynamic home page was served as static for a few days until the new server could be configured.

It’s not a kop out solution, it’s not a workaround. It’s a sensible way of drastically increasing your revenue in a very short space of time. The figures presented support this.

Want to increase your Adsense revenue? Make your website’s homepage static.

Darren
Affiliate Marketing

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So, as that blatantly isn’t happening, have I been misleading everyone on this blog about how to make money online? No, not at all. You see, the reason every man, woman, dog and the dog’s hamster isn’t doing this is quite simple. They can’t be bothered.

Making money online is easy yes, but it does require a little initial effort. It requires a person to learn new things and to take a risk; to actually get out there and do it. As I often reference my flatmate in these scenarios, it would be prudent to do so again. He sees what I do on a daily basis, hears me harp on about how I make money online and how I try and show others how to do it. He even sees my stats (both traffic and earnings) for various websites and networks.

Does this inspire him to do the same? Well, yes and no. He obviously comes out with the ‘I need to get into this web stuff’ line quite a lot, but never actually does anything about it. That surprises me, but maybe it shouldn’t; it is after all human nature. I’ve even offered to set up hosting space for him, all he needs to do is to pick a domain name, buy it, and I’ll stick a Wordpress site up for him.

Still nothing, he just can’t get motivated. That sadly is the case with a great many people. They want to know how to make money online, they’re eager to learn, but when it comes down to actually doing something about it they fall short.

As Jedi Master Yoda once famously said ‘That is why you failed’?.

There’s no sense reading this blog and the blogs of the leading affiliate marketers trying to learn the best ways to succeed, the secrets of their success, if you’re not actually going to put into practise anything that you have learned.

So you want to make money online? I assume the answer to that question was a resounding yes? If so, do it. Not tomorrow, or next week, or when you’ve next got some free time between changing nappies and painting the living room (I never did finish painting my living room, too busy making money online) do it now. Today. This minute in fact.

Everything you need to know about making money online is right here. Read it and then act on it. Otherwise don’t bother reading it and get back to whatever you were doing. I wouldn’t want to waste your valuable time.

Darren
Affiliate Marketing

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Ensure that your ad unit with the highest CTR appears first in the HTML code.

This is something that few people seem to realise, but is essential to increasing your Adsense revenue. If you run multiple ad units on a page of content, as let’s face it most Adsense publishers do, you need to use custom channels to keep track on which ad unit has the highest CTR. The reason for ensuring that your ad unit with the highest CTR appears first in the code is simple; Google fills the first ad slot with adverts from the highest bidders for your terms. Therefore the ad that appears first in the code will yield a higher CPC than the ones that follow it.

You’re throwing money away if you don’t make sure that your ad unit with the highest CTR is first in the code. It’s important to distinguish however that just because the ad appears first in the code it doesn’t mean it appears first on the page. I’m not suggesting you move your ad units around, quite the opposite. I’m suggesting, nay imploring, that you should use div tags and CSS to ensure that your ad unit with the highest CTR is positioned first within the source code so that it is filled with the highest bidding ads.

If you don’t do this you run the risk of your highest converting ad unit being filled with low bidding ads, or worse yet the dreaded public service ads. That does nobody any good!

This is a simple tip, and one that could markedly increase your earning potential.

Try it out today, you may well find your website is drastically under monetised.

Darren
Affiliate Marketing

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

It does load for a second though, so you can actually see it. What does this mean? Well it appears that Google has pulled the page from view shortly after it went live. Maybe it was launched too early and we’re not supposed to have seen it. Maybe Google has had a rethink entirely at the prospect of earning Ad revenue off potentially copyrighted videos.

Whatever the reason it’s not live on the YouTube site at present.

The big question of course is what would this mean for affiliates and publisher websites if this does happen, as clearly Google had intended at some point? The option of choosing and customising a video player for your website to display content and then earn revenue from it seems too good to be true – especially if the video content is automatically selected based on the content of your website.

How would the revenue model work as well? Would it be Adsense style text links within the video player framework that relies on a click through to earn commission? Or better yet; an earnings-per-play system whereby you earn commission every time a visitor to your website watches a clip. The second option is by far more enticing from my point of view, especially if you owned a movie website and clips from the film were displayed via YouTube. The traffic viewing the clips would be highly targeted, making for some very high conversion rates.

Darren
Affiliate Marketing

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

Worse even still, if you’re a PPC affiliate you’re paying for clicks to drive traffic to the merchant, only to find they’re not selling what you’re paying for; so you might as well be throwing your money out of a moving train.

Luckily the network provider Affiliate Window has a solution to all of these problems. Their new Shop Window is now in Beta testing and it allows you to promote every product within their database, dynamically.

I say solution, but things like this have existed for years such as Amazon’s product feed that offered affiliates the chance to build applications to promote any product within the Amazon database. The problem there was that Amazon stores were difficult to set up and unless you used third party scripts such as the one from Mr Rat anyone without serious developer knowledge was alienated.

Affiliate Window however has created their Shop Window to be as simple as installing Wordpress. Actually, it’s easier than installing Wordpress because you don’t even need to set up a database. You simply sign up with Affiliate Window, download the Shop Window script unzip it and then upload it to your web server.

That’s it. No configuration required. You now have a working store that contains products from every merchant that offers a product fee in Affiliate Window. That’s over 3.5 Million products!

Of course doing this isn’t going to make you the next Amazon. You need to target niche markets and filter out the products you don’t want. For example, you could choose a domain name about Star Wars, upload your shop and create static pages that display only Star Wars products. As the Merchants include retailers like Toys R Us there will be hundreds if not thousands of Star Wars products, from toys to DVDs to Video Games.

Then you promote your new Star Wars store with some natural SEO, or some PPC for specific product names if you’re feeling confident, and wait for the money to flood in.

Obviously there’s a little more to it than this, but we’ll go into specifics for setting up the stores and promoting them in later blogs. Plus the code is still only in Beta testing, so things may change; but the principal will be the same and the potential is there to see.

Darren
Affiliate Marketing

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If you are one of their biggest earning publishers with Adsense, here’s some of the quality Google tat that you may have received over the last few years.

Google Lava Lamp

This little beauty was given out to publishers who helped Google trial their video ads as part of the MTV advertising deal. These are a little scarcer than the usual Christmas gifts because Google hand selected the websites it wanted to use for these trials. The content displayed via the fledgling video ad campaign was supposed to be relevant to the content of the participating websites but suffered from a lack of depth, so ultimately ads were repeated with annoying regularity.

This of course was all before Viacom decided to sue Google for the content on YouTube. The surprise bonus gift of the Lava Lamp was a little disappointing in truth as it wasn’t actually branded in any way with Google’s iconic logo, and mine broke after just two weeks. I’d even bought a UK converter to plug the thing in too.

Gutted.

I notice too from looking around the Interweb that the lamps varied in colour. Shoe Money for example received an orange one, whereas I had a blue one. Why am I telling you this? I have no idea, but if you received a lava lamp from Google let us know in the comments below, and what colour you received of course.

Google Digital Photo Frame

This was sent out by Father Google as a Christmas gift in 2006. With the Google logo emblazoned on the frame it represents a decent piece of Google branded tat that any Internet nerd would trade his World of Warcraft’ high score to own. On the digital frame you can store images and video clips; for my money their best present yet.

Google USB Set

Christmas 2005 and all through the house not a creature was stirring, except for the Google promoting nerds who’d received this bundle of joy from the Interweb’s favourite search engine. Checking on the forums I see that various versions of this set were sent out, some with wireless mice and some with different size USB sticks but the present was essentially the same.

The set comprised of a Google branded case, USB stick, USB hub, mouse, headphones and lamp.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking how much do I have to earn to receive some of this Google love? Well, it does seem to vary as some high earnings publishers reported not receiving anything, whereas some lower earning publishers have proclaimed to have received these gifts. We’re not aware however of any publishers earning less than around $2,000 per month who have received these presents.

So there’s your target. Of course with that kind of cash, you could just buy this stuff on eBay anyway. I know; that’s beside the point. On with the list…

Google Mood Radios

Christmas 2004 was the year of the radio (before Google video killed the radio star – sorry, couldn’t resist ) and Google shipped out mood radios to its most treasured of Adsense earners.

These little gems would change colour with the music and supposedly alter your mood to make you want to earn even more money for Google.

That’s Christmas past, what about Christmas future?

The big question is what will Aunty Google give us this year? Personally I’m hoping for a Google branded LCD TV, or maybe a notebook PC or Mac. That would be lovely, consider them on my Google Christmas list. I’ve been a good boy (largely) and promise to eat all of my vegetables.

Who am I kidding?

Darren
Affiliate Marketing

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