Afraid of Competition? Competition Is Good!

Staying Ahead of the Competition
Wherever there is opportunity, there will be a demand for supply. Internet marketing and affiliate marketing is generating thousands of dollars of income to individuals who are making this their business and taking that business seriously.

Research Your Competition
While there is a tremendous demand for affiliate programs, joint ventures (JV), it is not so easy to decide which one is best for you. Using the tips in my series on affiliate marketin basics gives you a lot of information you can use in making this decision. But the one topic that we are going to focus on in this section should be considered as well: researching your competition.

KISS
Most people already have an idea of a product or service they would like to promote and sell when they begin to explore internet marketing or affiliate marketing programs. Generally, in the beginning while you “learn the ropes” of affiliate marketing, it is a good idea to use the KISS rule: “Keep It Simple Stupid”.

By far the most popular item on the Internet- free and sold - are information and software products such as utility programs, e-books, e-course, downloadable CD or audio programs.

Their popularity with internet marketers, affiliate marketers and JV’s is easy to understand; you do not need a lot of money or space for inventory to get started. Consider your interests or expertise and the scope of the product, who would be interested in the subject matter. For informational products it is best to choose a subject that give you room to specialize such as:

· money management
· relationship issues
· business operation
· health and fitness

These general topics appeal to most people. From this point you can begin to narrow your focus, using the research you’ve done with Keywords or Key Phrases. From the point of “expertise” it is important to keep in mind what you know is your motivation.

You Write - Communicate Enthusiastically When…
Enthusiasm is contagious, it is easy to talk about the topics that interest or excite your imagination. Here is where you can find the answer to the question of which information products do you want to promote and sell - What Are You Passionate About?

It makes sense to choose something that interests you, because you will be spending many hours learning about how to accomplish the goal of creating the income you desire with this business. Here is your opportunity to break away from the tedious working for a paycheck doing tasks that you do not like.

Once you have made your choice of what you want to learn about and help others learn about, you will be surprised by the liberating feeling you will experience after you make this decision.

And this passion for your work is a vital ingredient that will carry through to your target audience; in your website content and your other promotional material, the life and vitality that you have for your product will be felt. You will be more believable because you are sincere in what you are saying. As time goes by this energy will be instrumental in building trust and sales with your audience.

But…What About Competition
Let’s look at the other side of the situation; your competition. Because informational products are easy to promote and sell, you will find that there are many others who share your perspective and in many cases, your passion for their affiliate marketing business. Many of these marketers have been in the business for years. How can you compete with them?

Study Your Competition
You do not have to, it is much more to your advantage to study what they are doing, how they do it and then test their methods to see if they will work for you. Keeping the idea of targeted niche marketing in mind, research your competition and the product they are promoting.

Visit their website and study the design, sign up for their newsletter and review their sale material. Check their website stats on Alexa.com, run a search on Google and see where their site ranks.  If you take the time to do this type of research on your product, competition and prospective customer base, you will be in a better position to begin earning an income once you website is up and running.

It is also important to keep your finger on the pulse of the events that affect whatever topic of interest you choose to use as the basis of your internet marketing business. For example, if you are fascinated by video production, it is a good idea to subscribe to newsfeeds that cover this area to stay current on the new developments, products and services being offered and install them on your website for your visitors.

Market What Your Competition Lacks
Understanding that you have competition is one thing. Approaching your customer base with confidence comes from offering them something that the competition is lacking.

Be aware, that just like you are watching the competition, they are watching you as well.

In operating your business in an electronic environment, your website, product and services are just as accessible to them for review as theirs is to you. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself in the game of “who can do it better”. Take the challenge in stride and enjoy the ride!

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com

But My Pictures and Images Are Awesome!

Pictures and images are pretty, some of them even dance, but I my opinion; the fewer images on your website the better. Don’t worry, your visitors will not miss them, they have seen plenty of graphics on their way to your site. From the testing that I’ve done, the more basic and “underground” looking a site is the more credibility you have.

In addition, too many graphics will make your site load slowly. Slow loading pages will cause a visitor to click “back” in just a few seconds. As a marketer or an affiliate marketer, you’ve got to make sure the layout and “time to load” of your website is quick! You’ve got to answer this question in 10 seconds or less: “What’s in it for me?”

Simple Layout
Make sure that your website design uses a simple layout with a prominent, easy to find link to each major page or category on your site. When your visitor comes to your site, show respect for their time; make the experience as enjoyable and uncomplicated as possible.

If you offer a newsletter, make it very easy for people to sign up by having the subscription details on every page of your site. As you publish your newsletters, offer your visitors a newsletter archives section on your site.

The content on your marketing or affiliate marketing website should be focused on a theme: if you are an affiliate for a beauty company, your website content can be supplied by 10 different writers – as long as the articles are all beauty related. For the articles you write, include your sales links at the bottom of each page your articles appear on.

Tell people about yourself through a ‘Contact’ page. Remember that you have to take every opportunity to build trust with your visitors. Make yourself accessible and they will instantly feel more comfortable and more likely to click your affiliate links!

Search Engine Technology Changes Rapidly
Stay alert to the Internet technology changes, particularly the search engines and web hosting. Review your website design every three months at a minimum. Incorporate new design elements when it is necessary to “comply” with the newest search engine changes. Continue to update and add new content to your marketing website, visitors like to see new things, and updating your site regularly will encourage them to come to your site more often.

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com

Communicating Benefits and Solutions For Maximum Confidence

Copy in our marketing must communicate Benefits and Solutions, resist listing “facts”!

Gain Trust and Reliability
One of the best ways to encourage people to buy a product through your marketing business is to gain their trust and to establish a high level of credibility. Once you manage this, the products you support as an affiliate marketer will look more credible and valuable in your visitors’ eyes.

However, before you can use trust and credibility to your advantage, you must develop a basis for it. Ethical business practices, solid quality products or services, informative website content, well-written materials, good marketing, third party testimonials and other strategies are all components that work together to help elevate you to a level of trust.

From the thousands of ways you can increase credibility, do not lose sight of the importance of what to do once you have it. Ideally, a solid reputation will make it easier for visitors to take the time to click on your referral link.

The more positive exposure you gain through your various marketing activities, the easier it will be to make sales. In depth knowledge of your product or service enables you to make personal recommendations for them.

If you take a shy approach to endorsing the products, you are short-circuiting your income potential as well. Acting in this manner may allow you to earn some money, but unless you are willing to commit and commit fully to your action plan, and make a name for yourself the profits that could be yours will be going to someone else.

Select your affiliate marketing products using this criteria:

1. Would you use this product?
2. Would you recommend this product to a family member?

If the answer is yes, use the product and study it. Once you have first hand experience with the product, your website content and promotional copy about the product will have a more personal touch. There is a big difference between generic sales copy and a personal review.

And what your website visitors want to see is how the product may be useful for them; what type of experience could they expect from this product? Rather than saying, “Over 1,000 people have used our product”, and meanwhile your visitor is asking, “Who are they and did they like it?”

Choosing products that you believe in and use yourself give you the confidence to put your name on the line and personalize your offer. This is one of the fastest ways to boost your customers’ confidence and any promotion you create in this way is sure to have a good response.

People understand that although a marketer has an incentive to endorse a product, but they also know that only a few of them will go the distance be willing to risk their reputation for it.

It is up to you to decide which type of affiliate marketer you are going to be. Do you want to project the image of an insecure, frightened individual without a face and name or is the image of yourself a person who is an informed, credible and respected expert that provides beneficial, firsthand reviews of product use?

Obviously the best choice is to work and act in a way to be the credible, respected expert that provides concise, firsthand reviews.

Maximizing customer confidence starts with you, and as a marketer you want your visitors to click on your referral link and give you the opportunity to earn a commission. The more receptive you are to your visitors needs for information and solutions to the issues that concern them, the more receptive they will be to your offer.

As a marketer, your primary tool is the written word; website content, newsletters, solo ads, sales pages, auto responders, ezines, these are all written materials. Content is important to your visitors and that makes it incredibly important to learn how to use words to your advantage.

Writing content calls for you to play many roles; storyteller, educator, advocate all of these hats you may have to wear at one time or anther. The bottom line is that information rules the day if you want to have a successful online affiliate marketing business.

Whether you do it yourself or hire a pro, you will certainly need to keep your eye focused on quality. And with articles the key to whether it will deliver the goods is in the headline.

Pay special attention to the headline for any advertising piece you write, for this is where people make their decision to continue reading or to push that button with the green arrow within seconds of reaching your page. First impressions are always the strongest, so take care in handling this powerful tool and make it give the impression you want to project.

Remember this: What is the first thing your visitors see when they visit your web page? It’s the headline-and it has to get their attention and hold their attention for it to work.

And just how do you create a headline that does that? Headlines have to stop the reader in their tracks and make them think. While they are thinking the clock is ticking and with an effective headline you can keep the visitor on your website discovering the answer to the question that started them thinking.

Make your headline strong. Who wants to read a wimpy headline? Make your headline proactive. Words like “if” and “may” are not words for a headline. The headline is the domain of the power word - the kind of word that will sparks interest and drives people to take action.

The headline has to tell your customers enough to keep them interested. The headline of “Satisfaction Guaranteed”, may give the customers just enough information to motivate them to keep reading to find out what you are talking about.

There is no magic formula for winning headlines. Different situations call for different strategies. The important part is that the headline creates a compulsion to keep on reading.

Your name and your words, these are your two most powerful tools to build customer confidence and your sales via your marketing efforts.

Make the most of both of them by using quality content with strong, honest headlines that capture attention and keep your visitors reading until the very last word.

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com

Niche - The Marketing Secret of Millionaires!

You’ve been encouraged to focus your attention on the keywords that apply to the products or services that you have to offer on your website.

Targeted Niche Marketing is all about finding SPECIFIC solutions to the problems of a SPECIFIC customer base.

What is a Niche?
A niche market/audience is a group of people who share a common interest, pain, desire or problem.

A niche market is a group of people who are already searching internet for a solution to a problem – and not finding good results

When your marketing website is strategically designed to delivering a clear understanding of what benefits your customer is looking to receive from a product or service, then it is easier to connect the dots to the product that provides the solution to the problem they are facing.

As simple as this may sound, there are thousands of online businesses that have yet to grasp the importance of this one principle.

No matter how great your product may be, the focus must always be on what the customer wants from that product; how it will enhance their lives and give them what they want.

It is essential to thoroughly research the concept of targeted niche marketing – where the idea is to be one thing to one group of people instead of the shotgun approach that is responsible for the failure of most affiliate marketers - trying to be “all things to all people.”

Your Niche Market Customer Base
Just as we linked keywords from your domain name, to your search engine information in your website design, to the website content, giveaways and promotions, the same approach holds true for identifying your target niche market. It is not enough to simply offer a product that solves a specific problem. In a marketplace as large as the Internet, generalization is the fastest road to oblivion.

Connecting the dots from your product or service to its prospective users is important in order to get their attention, present a solution to their problem and a means to take action. Using the advanced technology that is available to affiliate marketers to find their customer base, there is no reason why you cannot take advantage of these resources for the success of your online business.

The sharper your focus, the easier it is to hit the bulls’ eye of the target. Keep in mind that the attention span of Internet shoppers is short and your affiliate marketing competition is growing everyday.

Keys to Unlock Your Customers Wallet
Start targeting customers by using demographics, the information about the basic qualities and characteristics of your market, such as age, gender, culture, employment, industry, income level, marital status and location. For example:
Does your product cater uniquely to men?
Is the product more useful to people in a certain profession?
What you need to know is; who buys the type of product or service you have to offer?

Affiliate marketers as well as other types businesses shoot themselves in the foot by assuming that what they have to offer will appeal to everyone. Resist the temptation to fall into this pattern of thinking. Even if the product or service you have to offer is used by a diverse market, there are many different factors that you can use to identify who is the perfect customer for you and create your promotional material.

Another valuable tool to use in targeted niche marketing is called psychographics.

There is a tremendous amount of research available on the emotional and behavioral characteristics of your target market that cover everything from the thinking process behind the purchase decision, the rationales that are used to their buying histories of a certain type of product or service.

This data is collected from their areas of interest, the organizations they join, the types of products that they have consumed or the type of services they have used. Even the history of their loyalty to a certain company is tracked, from their initial contact with a company to the end of their relationship.

Where demographics profile those who need a certain product, psychographics define where the product is wanted as well. Starting with the question of who is your perfect customer you can use these tools to fill in the blanks.

Market Research Information in Action
For example, using demographic information, acne medicine manufacturers typically cater to teenagers who are most likely to experience this problem. In other words, teenagers specifically are potential customers because they need clearer skin.

Now let’s make the focus sharper using psychographics. In this example, not only do the targeted customers need clearer skin, but they want clearer skin as well.

This is an important fact, for there are some teenagers with acne who may need clearer skin, but it is not important enough to them to really want it - all of this is based around what are the priorities of the person, much like the other choices we make, from the type of work we perform to the style of clothes we wear.

The bottom line for the manufacturers of the acne medicine who wants to target this specific market as accurately as possible to generate higher quality leads, is that they must use the psychographic profile of their potential buyers along with demographic information.

With this information in hand, they can locate the websites that their potential customer visits and present their information about the benefits of using their products. For instance, there are many forums that address the common image problems facing teenagers.

The most important rule of thumb in targeted niche marketing for your affiliate business online is that less is more.

If you want to increase your earnings, decrease the customer base you are trying to reach until you have the most likely audience defined and then concentrate your efforts on satisfying these potential customers.

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com

Like It Or Not - Words Sell!

Speaking to the Heart of Your Market
Once you have the basic content you will use for your marketing website or your affiliate marketing website, you can maximize its impact with the use of “power words”.

Power words are also referred to as “triggers” because they can motivate the reader to take action. Using them effectively can help you build customer confidence. Here are ten different benefits people want and the power word that relate to them.

1. TIME: The pace of daily life for most people makes time their most valuable commodity. When they come online to shop, they are looking for products and services that will save them time. Power words: FAST, QUICK, i.e., fast delivery, fast ordering or quick results.

2. SECURITY: Everyone wants to be sure that they will not be at risk of losing money by accepting your offer. Power words: RISK FREE, MONEY BACK, GUARANTEED, i.e., 90 day money back guarantee, risk free, guaranteed, without obligation.

3. EXCLUSIVITY: When there is only a limited amount of an item, it gives the impression of being more valuable. The more valuable your product or service appears the more people will appreciate what you have to offer. Power words: RARE, LIMITED, SPECIAL, EXCLUSIVE, i.e., exclusively for the first 100 subscribers, special offer, limited edition.

4. SIMPLICITY: People appreciate clarity and ease. Show them how your product or service will reduce their stress. Power words: EASY, SIMPLE, CONVENIENT, STRESS FREE, i.e., stress-free ordering, simple instructions, convenient to use, easy payments, etc.

5. PROOF: People like to know what other people think about your product or service. Power words: TESTIMONIAL, REVIEW, CRITIQUE, COMPARISON, i.e. buyers’ testimonial, consumer review, buyers critique, industry comparison.

6. SPECIAL OFFERS: People want to find bargains in the form of rebates, one time sales or percentage offers. Power words: SALE, DISCOUNT, REBATE, ONE-TIME, LIMITED TIME, i.e., one day sale, special discount, instant rebate, one time offer, limited time price.

7. INCENTIVES: People love getting gifts before they do business with you. Power words: COMPLIMENTARY, GIVEAWAY, BONUS, GIFT, REWARD, i.e., your complimentary subscription, order bonus, special e-book giveaway, a gift for you.

8. RECOGNITION: People want to know that you understand their concerns. Power words: YOU, YOURS, i.e. the benefits you want, the solution to your problem.

9. STATUS: People want to know how something will affect their life. Power words: ALERT, IMPORTANT, ATTENTION, i.e., important notice, attention please, special alert.

10. POPULARITY: People are always looking for new products or services that will improve their lives. Power words: NEW, FRESH, UPDATED, i.e., brand new, fresh off the press, updated report.

Of course, this list is not the “exhaustive” list of words to use. I like to research the forums, other current marketing gurus’ websites to learn what kind of “sales tactics” they are using. Don’t you agree that it is smart to learn from and “borrow” tactics from your competition?

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com

Regular “Touch” With Your Readers and Customers Made EASY!

Auto responders make it easy to always stay in touch with your subscribers, because you can schedule your mailing at regular intervals. Many marketers focus their attention on getting the sale, but it is even more important to contact your customer after the sale is made.

The beauty of using this system is that each of the components are affiliate marketing programs in their own right. Using these services to promote your affiliate marketing programs can have a double benefit for you. You can find affiliate programs for these services at the following sites:

Auto Responder Affiliate Programs

• AWeber
• Constant Contact
• Get Response

(This is not an exhaustive list, just the more common autoresponder programs I’ve seen used by other marketers.)

Whatever you do, make sure that you provide quality content to the visitors who have given you their valuable contact information. You can find hundreds of e-books to giveaway to your visitors at: Free E-books’ website.

Remember, your website visitors do not know you; you have to build trust with them. By giving them something valuable you can continue to build their interest in your marketing program, so that eventually, they will click your referral link and make the sale.

Once you have a few sales, it is a must to request the permission of some of your customers to display a testimonial from them.

A satisfied customers’ words underscore the benefits you have been promoting from actual experience of using the product or service.

Key point to remember: What a satisfied customer says about you is 100 times more powerful and believable than anything you say about yourself!

Testimonials from business customers that include links to their site can improve your marketing website link popularity as well as boost your credibility by reinforcing the quality of what you are offering.

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com

Free!! - Creating “Conversation” With Your Site Visitors!

Two of the ways to interact with and create real connection with your website visitors is giving things away and/or creating content that is so valuable they want to subscribe to.

Giveaways and Subscriptions
With all of the work you have done to get visitors to your marketing website, the task now shifts to making their visit one they will remember. Your objective is for the visitor to click your referral link, and one way you encourage them to do this is to give them something that they want without obligation. The idea is to extend the reach of your website content and give them a link back to your website.

A giveaway can be real simple, like an e- book, an article, a software program, white paper or an incentive like a discount coupon.

A subscription is an item that your visitor will receive at regular intervals; newsletters and ezines are two of the most popular types of subscriptions. Choose what you will giveaway or write about with your keywords in mind. Remember that whatever you use should be related to your marketing program website.

Forums
With the “plug and play” software available through most web hosting services and from independent software vendors, you can create your own discussion group or forum for the users of your affiliate marketing product or service.

Internet users are community oriented, giving them a place where they can share and exchange information that is important to them, gives them another incentive to visit your site regularly.

Giveaways, subscriptions and forums all give you the means to interact with your website visitor while they are on your site and after they leave. The best position for these offers or signup boxes is close to the top right or left corners of your web page and designed in a way that they are easily seen.

Make sure that all of your offers are “opt-in” where the visitor gives their consent to you to send email messages to them.

In addition, in accordance with the CAN-SPAM Act, each commercial email must include a means for the subscriber to “opt-out” or cancel their request to receive email.

These three areas of promoting your marketing program serve as “lead generators” helping you to build a list of the people who are interested in what you have to offer on your marketing website.

Underlying all of these efforts is the understanding that very few people take action of any kind on their first visit to a website. Be proactive in your approach to your visitors and make it easy for them to return - encourage your visitors to bookmark your site for future visits by incorporating a link at the top of your website to do this.

When a visitor requests a giveaway or becomes your subscriber, it opens the door for you to communicate new information about your products on regular basis. However, avoid the “hard sell” approach. Remember that most people are interested in improving the quality of their lives, i.e., saving money, having more leisure time or increased income.

Focus your attention on how your product can solve a particular problem that your visitor may have.

Offering a special discount for your subscribers is a wonderful incentive to bring you visitor to your website again and (hopefully) purchase from your website.

Keep the tone of your email conversational, in the same manner you would talk to a friend. In the wording of your e-mail avoid using the word “free” that has become one of the most famous “spam triggers”. To check your email content and make sure it is free of spam triggers. To read more about spam triggers, Google spam triggers and educate yourself on what “words” trigger spam filters.

In addition to the value of each of these ideas on their own, linking them to each other may provide you with even better results. For instance, here is an example of how to link your offers together to maximize the number of people on your mailing list:

• A newsletter subscription box on your website homepage
• A newsletter subscription box on each of your website pages
• A link to your giveaway on the subscription opt-in page or confirmation e-mail
• A text link to your giveaway or subscription signup page at the end of an article on your website
• A hyperlink to your subscription signup page on the thank you page of your giveaway offer
• Your giveaway or subscription in an “exit ad”, a form of pop-up advertising that is activated when your visitor leaves your site.

If you decide to offer a giveaway and/or subscription to your visitors, you can make this task very easy for yourself if you deliver this content through an automatic mailer or auto responder.

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com

Finding the Balance between Content and Graphics

Building your affiliate marketing business around your domain name is much more effective than using a general approach, like using the “affiliate done 4 you website”.

The more specific your focus, the easier it is to get your advertising message to prospective buyers.

Most affiliate marketing programs offer banners or text links embedded with your referral link that you can use on your website. Be aware that using these graphics is not always the best idea because they will cause your site to load slowly. If you want to use the “program” graphics, do some testing on your web site to see if there is a slowdown with load time.

What your visitors really want to see what new information you can offer them; what makes your site different from the other websites that they have visited. How well you meet the expectations of your visitors and deliver information that is of interest to them can have an impact on whether your visitor clicks your referral link or not.

The informational content of your website should be compelling articles about the products or services you are offering through your affiliate marketing programs. They should outline the benefits that the visitor will enjoy through its use.

Using highlighting to draw attention to the special features of your product or service, gives you the opportunity to ask your visitor to take action and make the click on your referral link.

Article headlines can be used to encourage the reader to continue reading, contact you, sign up for your FREE Newsletter or direct their attention to a specific feature of your affiliate marketing program.

Writing content articles is one of the best ways to target the market you want. There are a number of article submission services that will distribute your articles to other websites to be used as content, giving your site increased exposure on the Internet, which will increase your link popularity and in turn your search engine ranking. By submitting an article to these services weekly, you can rapidly build targeted visitor traffic to your site.

Never having done any “Article Marketing” myself, I purchased a good content program to learn a little more about it. Josh Spaulding has a product called “Article Marketing Domination” that I purchased and recommend to anyone who would like to learn more about this subject. Josh’s ebook steps through how to focus and strategically set up article marketing in order to rank your sales website high in the search engines. You can check out his product information and sales page here: Josh Spaulding’s Article Marketing Domination.

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com

Secret To Marketing Profits = Attracting The Right Audience

Website Design and Layout
Take your website design and layout cue from the audience you want to attract: if the product or service you are promoting is targeted toward pets, then your website should reflect this.

A good source for ideas and website information, Webmasters World at http://www.webmasterworld.com/ is a discussion group that offers real world experience on all the issues related to website design.

Developing the Picture of Your Business
From your side of the story, having an affiliate marketing business online can be compared to putting together pieces of a puzzle to produce a picture. The “picture” in this case is the image that comes to mind when your domain name information is displayed on a search engine listing.

Remember from doing our key word / key phrase research we developed a URL, domain name that contained our chosen key word / key phrase.

The easiest way to begin developing this picture is to create a unique website to promote each separate product or service you are marketing. Displaying a large number of unrelated affiliate links all on the same website can detract from your credibility and generally this approach does not encourage visitors to click your affiliate link. If your affiliate marketing program is focused on office supplies, your website content should be solely about office supplies.

Designing your website to be “search engine friendly” starts with understanding and applying the criteria that search engines use to create their index. Be careful here, because there is too much information available about this vital subject that is either outdated or can cause you problems.

One of the most trusted sources of working with search engines is Search Engine Watch, located at http://searchenginewatch.com/

Keep the viewpoint of your potential buyers in mind throughout this process. Remember, there are many other affiliates promoting the same product or service. You must exploit every opportunity to attract to visitors to your affiliate marketing website.

For example of “Windy City Widgets” can be used in the regional section of the search engines as well as the general index. This term “Windy City” is well known to the people who live in Chicago, and gives you an edge to reach them when they are ready to purchase their widgets.

Knowledge of your domain name or URL is your first marketing contact. On its own, it should be able to motivate a person interested in your product to your website. Visitors to http://www.saveyourmoney.com, already have an idea of what the website has to offer.

On the other hand, when someone visits your page from a search engine listing, they will see a brief description of your website content, which is generated by the “meta tags” on your web page.
The three pieces of information that search engines take from the source code of your web page to use in creating your listing on their index are:

· The title of your website
· The keywords
· The description

This information creates an expectation in the visitors’ mind that you must meet or else they will leave your site. Internet users are very smart, and a large number of them shop online regularly.

CAUTION: Getting visitors to your site using keywords that are totally unrelated to what you really have to offer on your site is a practice that is considered “black hat SEO” and can get your listing removed and banned from the search engine index.

As you begin building your affiliate marketing business, keeping your domain name as your focal point will prove to be very effective in all of your advertising efforts. The keyword that you use in your domain name should be used throughout your website content, as well as all of your online and offline advertising.

Your keyword usage should developed in a way that reads as we would normally speak or write. If you want to read some more on this, do a search on “Google Slap”.

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com

Cool and Awesome Domain Name - Go Get It!

Use the strategies covered in my previous post regarding key words and key phrases, use that information to develop a URL. They way I usually select a URL is:

1. Collect all the key words / key phrases that apply to the subject area I’m developing for the web site idea.

2. Go to a website that will allow you to check for domain availability - then start checking, putting in URL, domain names that capitalizes on the keywords AND would make a reasonable sounding web site name. (Usually I use GoDaddy for my domain checks - GoDaddy’s URL, domain name check will also give you more or additional URL name ideas).

Registering Your Domain Name
With your keyword list you can create several different domain names to check for availability to register. The simplest way of finding a reputable domain name registrar is to go to the source of registrar accreditation: the ICANN website at http://www.icann.org/ which has a listing of theri membership. You can go right to the list using this link:
http://www.icann.org/registrars/accredited-list.html, which has a listing of their membership.

Domain name registrations is one of the most profitable online businesses, the fee you will pay for this service can sometimes be included in a web hosting package as well. If you choose this option, make sure that you fully understand the web hosting features that will be provided will be sufficient to support your affiliate marketing website functions.

Once you have chosen a domain name registrar, you can check the availability of the domain names on your list and do not be surprised if many of your choices are already taken.

As you work through the registration of your domain name, you will begin to get an idea of the competition you are facing in the marketplace at large.

Locating Your Affiliate Marketing Website Online
Registering your affiliate marketing domain name is the first step in having an online business, now you have to find a reliable web hosting service.

Try to resist the temptation of using a free web hosting service. Most of these services require you to have advertising banners on your pages that will only confuse your visitor and may conflict with your marketing strategy.

Web hosting services do not have to be expensive. As mentioned earlier, there are many domain name registrars that offer service packages on web hosting and some even provide marketing tools like search engine submissions, website design and visitor traffic building software.

Choose your web-hosting provider carefully because your web hosting company is your silent business partner. Your website has to be accessible to Internet users in order for your business to make money. If your web hosting service goes offline, so does your business. Compare the features of the top web hosting service providers. Each of these links offer reviews of top web host providers:

http://www.top-10-web-hosting.com/

http://webhostinggeeks.com/

http://web-hosting-services.topchoicereviews.com/

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com