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

Target Your Niche or Miss Your Market

Making the Niche Marketing Connection
One of the advantages in taking the targeted niche market approach is that is affords you the opportunity to link to high traffic websites that will generate traffic for your site.

The traffic at these sites will vary, but regardless of the amount of traffic they receive, whether it is 10,000 or 100,000 visitors per year, the important thing to remember is that by linking to you or recommending your products and services you are sharing their website visitor traffic.

This is a powerful strategy and a strategy that takes time to accomplish. The reward of securing a quality link from a high traffic site to your own website is that once in place it will stay in place working around the clock and sending traffic to your website, day after day.

Be aware that there are different types of links along with linking strategies. The two most common links are:

· In-Bound Links – Are where another website points TO your website. This link has been found to be the most important. Read the finding of the study that was conducted by Fortune Interactive at the website of WebProNews.

· Out-Bound Links – Are where the link points AWAY from your website. This link has an impact on your website ranking as well, but they are not as desirable as inbound links. You can find a comprehensive report on how both inbound and outbound links affect how search engines see your site in a Google Page Rank survey from eFactory’s website.

Keep Your Linking Strategies Legal
In regards to linking strategies, there are many different theories floating around on the Internet, so you need to be careful. Here are five basic points to remember when you are considering a linking strategy:

• Consider the links you want to make with other websites carefully. Remember is it not the quantity of links located on or pointing to your site that will enhance your Page Rank, but the quality of the link that has the most impact. The links on your site should be considered as part of the resources that you make available to your visitors.
• Find and apply different types of linking strategies that adhere to the guidelines of the major search engines. Be aware of the power that is inherent in NATURAL LINKING to your site and work diligently to increase it.
• Steer clear of programs that promise you hundreds of incoming links overnight (link farms). More likely than not, a link farm scheme will adversely affect your search engine page ranking.
• When creating an outbound link, avoid using automated linking programs. In many cases, this type of software prevents the other site from receiving “credit” for the incoming link. How can you tell if this is true or not? Place your cursor over the link and hold it there. Then take a look at the status bar at the bottom of your monitor screen. If you see their link showing in the display, your software program is a winner, if a longer URL appears, there is no benefit being received by the site you are linking to.
• Since website links have a direct impact on your valuable search engine listing, the best source of information on how to implement a linking strategy for your website for the best results can be found by going directly to the source. Google offers a wealth of information that will steer you clear of potential problems when it comes to linking to another site. Read the Webmasters Guidelines.

Google webmaster guidelines are a great resource for all kinds of website “positioning” strategies!

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

CAUTION! What You Are About To Read May Increase Profitability!

Key Word / Key Phrase research, in my opinion, is the FOUNDATION for all marketing / web site design,  layout and COPY. Key Word / Key Phrase research is also foundational in off-line marketing.

Why you ask? I’m glad you asked!

Key Words / Key Phrases is foundationally important when:
1. Choosing your website URL
2. Writing COPY
3. Creating Web Site design and layout (photo “alt tag” info)

Foundational because knowing what your market is looking for, what problem they need to solve or what desires they have, guides you in: 
1. Website URL selection
2. Framing and developing site “copy”
3. Developing photo “alt tag” info so that…

          Your copy speaks directly to them.
     They (your market) can say, “Wow! This is speaking directly to me!”

Search Engine Basics: Why Key Words / Key Phrases are important

The Big Secret is There is No Big Secret
It’s true: the ‘big secret’ of search engine optimization is that there is no big secret. It is all about understanding what is going on, followed by the hard work and attention to detail that are common to many business activities.

Inside the Guts of a Search Engine
For simplicity’s sake, let’s say there are three pieces of software that together make up a search engine - the Spider software, the Index software and the Query software.
If you understand what these three do, then you have the foundation for getting your website to the top of the search engines.

Spiders - Crawls the web looking for new pages to collect and add to the search engine indices’. This is a metaphor. In reality, the spider doesn’t do any ‘crawling’ and doesn’t ‘visit’ any web pages. It requests pages from a website in the same way as Microsoft Explorer, or Firefox or whatever browser you use requests pages to display on your screen.

The difference is that the spider used to only index text, links and URL’s. Today they also idex images using the “alt tag” for the image. 

A spider loves links because a link leads it to other web pages that have the things that it loves, guess what? Text, links and URLs!

Index - The index makes sense of the mass of text, links and URLs using what is called an algorithm - a complex mathematical formula that indexes the words, the pairs of words and so on.

Searching “Google” or “Yahoo” is what we use when you go to a search engine - it is the front end that everybody thinks of as a search engine - familiar ground at last. It may look simple but it presents the results of all the quite remarkable search engine software that works away invisibly on our behalf.

The “SEARCH” query doesn’t search the web - it checks the records that have been created by its own index software. And those records have been made possible by the raw material the spider software collects.

What You Need to Understand About Search Engines
The words people use when they search therefore determine the results the search engine presents.

So search engine optimizers want to know the words people use when they search – KEY WORDS / KEY PHRASES.

How to do Key Word / Key Phrase analysis

1. Collect / Gather
2. Evaluate and Quantify
3. Educated Selection

Collect / Gather
Use FREE or paid Key Word (KW) research tools to gather all the KW that could apply to your business (pay special attention to the areas where you did not think would apply).

I like to use these FREE ”keyword tools”:
Google Keyword Tool 
SEO Book Keyword Selection Tool 
Trellian Free Search Term Suggestion Tool 

Also, a real good “Paid” Key Word / Key Phrase tool is:
NicheBot

Rank the key word / key phrase results based upon your business goals, potential target markets and “competition” based on how many pages are currently serving that keyword/keyphrase.

Evaluate
Take time to review all the current web sites that show prominently on the search engines. I normally only use Google, because Google carries the bulk of search engine traffic/searches.

Review the websites that already rank high for the key word / key phrase you are evaluating and make a judgement call on how well that website “serves” the search term. (This is a judgement call you have to make, there really isn’t a “formula” to figure this out).

Educated Selection
Based upon your evaluation, which Key Word / Key Phrase would best fit your business / internet marketing goals (or future target markets)?

Then ask yourself this question:
** Can any of these areas be Niched? **

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com