I changed it all over to blog formats because I know how much easier it is to update my content or have a virtual assistant be able to get it all done for me. And I can tell you it’s a HUGE relief!

I’m so very excited about what the future holds, I’ve been approached by another magazine to write and I’m just thrilled with it. This is what I truly love to do.

Affiliate marketing, in a nutshell, is when a website owner promotes other people’s products for and receives compensation (commissions) for doing so.  Think of a car salesman to help grasp the concept.  The company who makes the cars puts them on a car lot and the hires salesman to make the sale.  Once that occurs the salesman then makes a commission on the sale.

Like the car salesman who doesn’t take the cars home at night, affiliate marketers do not keep an inventory of the products they promote.  Nor do they determine the sales price or handle any of the actual sales.  They simply promote the products in various ways that make their customers want to buy.  The product owner handles everything else including giving their affiliates promotional tools and tips to help them.

Here are a few tips to help you make the most of an affiliate marketing business.

1.  Have a website centered around a specific niche.
2.  Research products that fit well into that niche.
3.  Diversity…don’t just pick one or two products to promote and think that’s enough.
4.  At the same time, don’t try to promote products that your target market won’t be      interested in.
5.  Test different types of promotion and see which ones work the best for you. 
6.  Most importantly, don’t think affiliate marketing is simply a matter of posting links on a website and waiting for the commissions to role in. 

Basically, look for affiliate programs that match your website, say you have a scrapbooking site, you’ll want to look for scrapbook ebooks or products to add to your site.

You have to put some thought and elbow grease into your promotions in order to make a good income with affiliate marketing.
 

When deciding what type of contest to have, take a look at the type of business you have and who your target market is. If your goal is to create traffic for a website devoted to cooking, you can hold a “worst cooking disaster” contest where entrants can write in about their biggest kitchen mishap. If you have an information product on a subject related to babies, hold a “pretty baby contest” where contestants can send in a picture of their infant.

You can also do a search on the internet for unknown holidays or other events that are taking place that may have something to do with your business. For instance, June is National Iced Tea Month. In using the above example of a cooking-related website, you could hold an Iced Tea Recipe Contest. June 18 is National Splurge Day. You could create a contest that asked the contestants to name their favorite “food splurge,” such as ice cream, cake, etc. Or you could create a contest asking entrants to describe the biggest splurge they made on a cooking appliance, such as a Panini Press.

You do not have to offer an expensive prize for the winner. If you are creating the contest to gain publicity for an information product that you have created, perhaps you can give a free copy to the winner.

Another option is to find sponsors to help contribute prizes to the contest. Find some websites that offer complimentary products or services to what you are promoting. For instance, if you have a website that provides information on how women can start their own business, you can find a virtual assistant, transcriptionist, life coach, etc. who may wish to donate a couple hours’ of time as a prize. In exchange for their donation, make sure you give them lots of publicity on your contest page and in your communications with the media.

Send in press releases to the media several weeks before the contest will begin. Follow up with a press release while the contest is in full swing. Then send in another release after the contest is over and the winner has been announced. You can also ask your sponsors to send in press releases to their local media and to the winners’ local media.

Don’t forget to follow up with the people that entered the contest but did not win. Send them an email and let them know you appreciate their efforts. You can make them feel like a winner by offering them a special discount on one of your information products, for instance.

A quick and easy way to increase the number of incoming links to your site is to add these links to your blog. You can add links to articles and other helpful information that you have featured on your site.

You can also add incoming links to your site in the signature lines of forums that you are a member of. Many people will read your posts and click on the links to see what your site is all about.

Writing articles and adding them to article reprint directories will also help you increase the number of your site’s incoming links. When you write an article, you can include a section at the end that tells the reader a bit about yourself and you can include a link to your site. Each time a website owner or blogger publishes one of your articles, an incoming link to your site is added.

If you have a product or service for sale, establishing an affiliate program will add to the amount of incoming links you have. As affiliates join your program, they will be promoting links to your site. If one of the people that come into your site through one of the affiliate links purchases one of your products or services, you will give your affiliate a commission on that sale.

You can also choose to form link exchanges with others. Think of your target market and the other types of sites they may be visiting. For instance, if you have a site that features information about kitchenware, try approaching websites related to cooking, meal planning, recipes, etc and explain the benefit of linking to your site. You can point out articles or other information their readers may find helpful. Perhaps you have a “how-to” article on your site about storing recipes that people have printed off websites. The recipe website owner can see why their visitors would find this information helpful, and will agree to post a link on their site to the page on your website that features this article (or post your article with a link back to your site).

The website owners that agree to add your links may want you to add a reciprocal link to their site in exchange. When adding links to your site, it is okay to be picky. If a site doesn’t offer anything of value to your audience, pass on that exchange and form a partnership with a site that does offer some type of information your readers would find helpful.

All goals should have a few things in common. A goal should define what you are trying to accomplish and when you want to accomplish it by. Goals should be realistic and there should be a way to measure them. All goals should be written down and available for viewing on a regular basis. Simply writing the goal down will significantly increase you odds of achieving it and having it displayed as a visual reminder will also help motivate you.

Even if you have never taken the time to set goals for your business, you are actually very familiar with the process. At some point in your life, you have more than likely taken out a pen and paper and mapped out a plan for accomplishing some type of task. Writing out goals for your business is no different than writing out your grocery list.

By clearly defining your goal, you are telling yourself where you are going. Instead of having a goal of “I plan to spend more time promoting my Virtual Assistant business”, clearly define the goal as “during the next three weeks, my goal is to spend 10 hours per week promoting my Virtual Assistant business”. The second goal tells you what you are going to do and for how long you are going to do it.

Once you know where you are going and when you want to be there, you can figure out how you are going to get there. Using the example above, you know that for the next three weeks, you need to be spending 10 hours per week promoting your business. Now you can start defining mini-goals, such as writing articles and submitting them to reprint directories, emailing past clients and letting them know you are accepting new projects, sending press releases to the media, and so forth.

Goals can also serve as a great way to challenge yourself. Are there some things you have been meaning to do, but keep putting off? Start setting weekly challenge goals, such as blogging one post each day for a week straight or adding a new message each day to your auto responder or even writing an article each day and submitting it to a reprint directory.

Have fun with your goals and reward yourself with a gold star when you accomplish one of them. Once you have collected 10 gold stars, treat yourself to a spa day or some other indulgence. By setting and achieving goals you will find your business taking off and will feel a great sense of enthusiasm and accomplishment.

Affiliate marketing, in a nutshell, is when a website owner promotes other people’s products for and receives compensation (commissions) for doing so. Think of a car salesman to help grasp the concept. The company who makes the cars puts them on a car lot and the hires salesman to make the sale. Once that occurs the salesman then makes a commission on the sale.

Like the car salesman who doesn’t take the cars home at night, affiliate marketers do not keep an inventory of the products they promote. Nor do they determine the sales price or handle any of the actual sales. They simply promote the products in various ways that make their customers want to buy. The product owner handles everything else including giving their affiliates promotional tools and tips to help them.

Here are a few tips to help you make the most of an affiliate marketing business.

1. Have a website centered around a specific niche.
2. Research products that fit well into that niche.
3. Diversity…don’t just pick one or two products to promote and think that’s enough.
4. At the same time, don’t try to promote products that your target market won’t be interested in.
5. Test different types of promotion and see which ones work the best for you.
6. Most importantly, don’t think affiliate marketing is simply a matter of posting links on a website and waiting for the commissions to role in.

Basically, look for affiliate programs that match your website, say you have a scrapbooking site, you’ll want to look for scrapbook ebooks or products to add to your site.

You have to put some thought and elbow grease into your promotions in order to make a good income with affiliate marketing.

Without it, your domain is only as good as the paper the name is written on. So, what is hosting? Why is it necessary and how do you know which hosting company to choose for your business.

In order for your web site to appear on the Internet to those who enter your web site address (domain), you must have the site hosted on a server. In other words, you need to rent space from a web host in order for your site to be displayed to Internet users. There are many different types of hosting, but for the beginner we suggest using a paid virtual hosting option.

Virtual hosting companies have web space that they allocate to their customers. They will assign you a set amount of space on their server for storing your web site files.

By hosting your website this way you don’t have the high cost of having your own dedicated server, but you aren’t stuck with restrictions and advertisements that tend to come with free hosting companies.

When choosing a web host, you should be sure you find a reliable host who has excellent customer service and reasonable rates. There are hosting companies that charge as little as $15 a year to host your site. The rates range based on various options, including the amount of space you need for your site. You can also find hosting that allows you to host multiple websites under one account that allocate your space among all of your sites.

Good customer and technical service are extremely important in a web host, because as someone new to the online business world, there are many more things you should be concentrating on and your web hosting doesn’t have to be one of them, when there are plenty of services who are more than willing to help you with this process.

As your business grows you will learn more and more about hosting as you go. One of the most important first steps in any online business is to get your website up and out there for potential customers to see.

I personally use Host Gator for under $10/month

When you hear talk of virtual real estate from an Internet marketer’s perspective you are talking about all the content web sites a person owns that were created for the strict purpose of making money with affiliate programs, Google™ Adsense, etc.  Even if you only have one site, it can still be considered virtual real estate, however most who speak of VRE have more than one site.

Just like in real world real estate, virtual real estate is a little piece of the Internet world that you own, that is worth something and can be bought or sold.  Any web site can be bought or sold, but how much you can expect to earn or pay for one is determined by many things, some of which include page rank of the site, number of visitors, amount of income the site brings the owner and more.

Some marketers have many sites in various niche markets that combined make up their virtual real estate.  One of their sites may be devoted to gardening and another might discuss Internet marketing businesses, and yet another may be all about sports cars.

Another example of virtual real estate is an Internet marketer who has one big network of sites that all cater to the same market, but each site is set up for a specific person in that market.  For instance, a business owner may zero in on the Internet marketing newbie market.  They may have one site that is strictly devoted to each part of building an Internet marketing business such as copywriting.  That site will be filled with content, affiliate products, Adsense ads, and other ways of making money that are all about writing web copy.

Then that same business owner may have another site that is set up the exact same way but that is entirely devoted to affiliate marketing.  And so on and so on.  The whole network of sites would be considered their virtual real estate.

As in real life real estate, the more the merrier and the better chance of making money.  That being said, it’s not always a smart idea to jump around in a lot of markets, especially if you are extremely new to Internet marketing and online business.  It’s easier to find one market and stick with it.  From there you can grow your business based around that market and their particular needs.

USP, which stands for Unique Selling Point, is something that every business, even brick and mortar businesses, should know before they even open their doors.  As business owner it’s important that you not only know what your business’ USP is, but also that you focus on it and base your business around it too.

A unique selling point can be determined by simply telling your potential customers what is is you do and how you do it better than everyone else out there.  It can also be incorporated into your personal or business branding.

The unique selling point of your business, can be determined by taking the time to find out what is going to set your business apart, especially from your competitors. You can determine your business’ unique selling point by answering one or more of the following questions.

1.  What is it that makes your business stand out above all the rest?
2.  Why should your visitors choose you over other businesses like your out there?
3.  What makes your business special or significant?
4.  Do you offer something to your customers that your competitors don’t that is unusual?
5.  Take into consideration what your customers want and need.  How can you offer it to them in a way that makes them want it more?

Each business unique, but if you don’t find out what it is that sets yours apart from all the others, the chances of your business thriving diminish.  Once you find your USP, don’t lose sight of it.  Focus on it, build your business around it and stick with it.

There are many parts to search engine optimization, but in this article we’re going to talk about the basics including what SEO is and why it’s important to your online business.  Once you see what it is and how it works you will see it’s not quite as difficult as it looks, but that it is important to your online business success.

SEO is defined by Wikipedia as “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.”  So, what does that mean you might be asking.

Here’s how it works.

When someone sits down to their computer and wants to find information on a particular subject they go to a search engine and type in a few words that describes what they are looking for.  These words are called keywords.

The sites or pages that appear in the search results are ranked in order of importance according to the search engine they used.  How a site owner has optimized their site, or specific pages (among other things, a few of which include the content on the site and the number of other sites linking to that site) for those keywords determines where their site ranks on the list that appears to the person doing the search.

As you know, if you’ve ever done an online search, most people will choose one of the first few sites on the list to find the information they are looking for.  So, ultimately you want your site to be listed as one of the top sites that appears for a particular keyword phrase.

You will need to not only determine what keywords fit best with your site, but also what keywords people are using to find the information you are providing.  Of course, as stated earlier this is just the basics of SEO.  There are more things that play a factor in optimizing your site for search engines and each search engine has their own way of determining a sites page rank, but once you understand why it’s important the rest will be much easier to put into place and comprehend.

Just as a word of caution, search engines should not be your only source of traffic as an online business owner.  The ways that the search engines use to determine your page rank are constantly being changed and improved upon.  You will need to determine what changes make a difference in your sites rank, but at the same time you can’t possibly expect to be 100 percent perfect for every search engine all the time.  It’s just not possible, besides you have more important things, like marketing your business, to tend to that will make your business flourish.