That tool is called Affiliates Alert, and we believe that it
will literally change the way people choose the products
they promote. Let me explain.

Until now, if you wanted to promote a product as an
affiliate you had one of several choices.

1. Start promoting *after* you heard about the
product from someone else.

2. Promote products that are so popular that
everyone else is promoting them too.

3. Try to guess what products would sell well and
hope you were not wasting your efforts.

Not a pretty picture.

Now here is the good news!

[Read More!]

The Tools of the Trade
By Sumantra Roy

Before you start optimizing your site for the search engines, you would need to arm yourself with some tools to help you. What follows is a brief review of 4 software programs that we find invaluable when we are optimizing our clients' sites.

Wordtracker: The first and most important step in any search engine positioning campaign is identifying the keywords for which you should optimize your site. WordTracker's keyword research service is the only one on the Internet that will provide a comprehensive and powerful database of the most popular keywords in your industry. It has features that all other keyword research tools lack - for instance, it will help you identify related keywords that you would otherwise never have thought of, it differentiates between singular and plural keywords and tells you which version is more popular, it helps you identify popular mis-spelled keywords (which generally have very little competition) in your industry etc. It has a free trial version which will help you identify a few keywords. However, we recommend that you subscribe to its paid service as otherwise, you will not be able to discover quite a few keywords that can turn out to be extremely valuable to you. You can find more information on WordTracker at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?3982&wordtracker/

Optilink: Link popularity has quickly become one of the most important factors that influence your rankings in the search engines. What is important is not only the number of sites linking to you, but the quality and relevancy of the sites that are linking to you. If you are trying to improve the link popularity of your site, until now, there has been no easy way of checking the quality and relevancy of sites that are linking to you or the quality and relevancy of sites that you are thinking of asking for links from. You could have done it manually, but it would take a tremendous amount of time. However, a new software product called Optilink automates this process to a large extent. In addition to doing an excellent job in helping you determine the quality of sites that already link to you or might link to you, it also does the following:

i) analyzes the link structures of your top ranking competitors and tells you why they rank well, so that you can emulate the same tactics that your top ranking competitors are using.

ii) allows you to do "what if" analysis - it tells you what sort of rankings you can expect if you adopt a particular linking strategy.

iii) monitor the sites that you have exchanged links with to ensure that they are still linking to you and are linking to you the way you want them to.

If you are thinking of improving the link popularity of your site, or are already doing so, we highly recommend that you obtain this product before you proceed. You can find more information on Optilink at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?3982&optilink/

Zeus: An excellent way of improving the link popularity of your site is to exchange links with other sites that are related to yours. However, the main problem with this method is the sheer amount of time that is involved in identifying sites that you want to exchange links with. You may often find that the number of links that you manage to get is not worth the time that you spent in trying to get those links. Zeus will allow you to locate and exchange links with sites that are related to yours and manage those links on an ongoing basis in a fraction of the time it would take for you to do it manually.

You can download a free trial version of Zeus at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?3982&zeus/ While the program does take a while to get used to, the results that you can obtain with it are simply phenomenal. We highly recommend that you download the free trial version and try it out.

In fact, we recommend that you use both Optilink and Zeus as they are complementary to each other - while Zeus helps you quickly locate hundreds of potential link partners, Optilink tells you which of these sites are worth getting links from and which of these sites you should avoid.

Agent Web Ranking: Once you have optimized your site for the search engines, you will need to continuously check your site's rankings. We have found Agent Web Ranking to be the most reliable tool for telling us how our clients' sites rank in the search engines. Apart from the major U.S. based search engines, it also supports plenty of European search engines. One problem with most such position reporting software is the fact that the search engines constantly change the way they display their search results. This means that most position reporting software get outdated very quickly and it often takes an unacceptably long time for the company producing the software to prepare an update. However, Agent Web Ranking is the only program which has a guaranteed 72 hour turnaround time - i.e. if any search engine changes the way it is displaying results, it will have an update for that engine within 72 hours or less. You can find more information on Agent Web Ranking at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?3982&agentwebranking/

Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. To have Sumantra's company place your site at the top of the search engines, go to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?3982 For more advice on how you can take your web site to the top of the search engines, subscribe to his FREE newsletter by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?3982&newsletter.htm

Testing and Tracking to improve your conversions
© John Taylor

Creating an effective sales letter page is an essential part
of your online success. However, unless you're testing and
tracking each critical element in your sales content and
your sales process, you may be losing a great deal of time
and money.

You can dramatically increase your sales conversions simply
by taking the time to test and track your results. Not only
will testing and tracking enable you to determine what's
working and what's not, but it will also help you to focus
your energy on the techniques that produce results.

When testing, keep in mind that, a technique that produces
results for one person or one web site may not produce
results for you or for your web site. There is no one size
fits all technique that works for everyone. You must develop
your own style and technique and test your results to
determine what works for you.
So, what are we measuring? Well, you may think that I am
over simplifying matters here but I believe that there is
only one real measure and that is simply the outcome of your
visitors decision when faced with a choice. Whatever your
most wanted response is your visitor will either say yes
or no.
Every decision, or call to action, that you want a prospect
to take must be tracked. The result of that tracking will be
a yes or a no. When you know that a specific number of
visitors took the desired action, and the remainder did not,
you can analyse your results. If you take the total number
of unique yes calls to action, and you divide them by the
total number of unique visitors to the web page you will
know your conversion rate. For example, if 1,000 people
visit a web page where you have an ezine opt-in form, and 30
people opt-in, your conversion ratio for that opt-in form is
3% (30/1000).
So what parts of your web page should you try to improve?
Here is a list of web page elements that you should focus
your attention on:
1. Headline
2. First few paragraphs
3. Follow up
4. Deadline
5. Scarcity
6. Delayed payment option
7. Price
8. Upgrade
9. Downgrade
10. Good until cancelled
11. Guarantee
12. Immediate back end sale
13. Bonus items
14. Reposition your offer
15. Alternative colours and graphics
16. Readability
17. Complementary product endorsements
18. Header graphic
19. Order page
20. Payment process
21. Navigation links
22. Everything else

When you are testing and tracking make sure that you only
work on one element at a time. If you change two variables
and you see an improvement in conversion ratios you will not
be able to identify which one factor made the contribution.
[Read More!]

What is SEO and what can it do for you?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and should be defined as "making your web site search engine friendly to improve your rankings and bring in more traffic".

Many people look at it as "tricking the search engines into giving me #1 rankings" however.

Understand that #1 rankings aren't your goal, boosting your qualified traffic is what you are looking for. Ranking in the top ten for a popular keyword related to your business will bring in much more business than being #1 for "Spanish Decorative Wall Paper" (especially if you sell golf clubs).

There are two ways to go about this, you can try to trick the search engines, or you can apply some basic tips to your site to improve your rankings safely.
[Read More!]

Sell like a professional!

Just beginning to develop a second income stream? Or are you an established affiliate of several programs? Doesn't matter... EVERYONE shares the same goal... to maximize profits. And this is done with a better business site!

So it's time to build income through content... i.e., to build a better business site that gets the CLICK!
Deliver VALUABLE content to your readers... *AND* tasty content to your spiders... With a Better Business Site!.

A better business site must be a WIN-WIN-WIN-WIN proposition for four parties...

[Read More!]

by Detlev Reimer 2001 (c)


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

While many people think it is enough to have web site to earn hundreds or thousands of dollars within a few weeks, it is much harder in reality to get people to your web site and then it is another thing to get them to buy something from you.

But that's a different story. Let's concentrate on the first aspect: Getting traffic and especially getting targeted traffic. You don't want to have cat lovers on your site when you are selling dog food, do you ?

How do you get targeted prospects ? First of all, you must ... [Read More!]

by: windsong

Meta tags are useful in getting better listings in the search engines. However, not all search engines support meta tags. This means that some search engines ignore them. But include meta tags in your document for the engines that do use them. It will significantly increase your rating.

There are many, many different meta tags. The only ones you need to be concerned with are the "description" and "keyword" tags. (And "title" tag, of course.)... [Read More!]

21st April 2002

By Kalena Jordan

You may have heard that Looksmart Ltd have made some changes to their business model lately. In fact, Looksmart have made the profit-driven decision to move Looksmart.com from a Paid Submission based directory to a Pay Per Click based directory.

The first warning shot was fired on April 3rd, with an email to existing Looksmart customers announcing the impending launch of Small Business Listings:

"Based on feedback from customers like you, we've merged and enhanced the benefits of our 'Submit' and 'Site Promote' products into one product called Small Business Listings."

Hmm... we thought, smells like pay per click. Discussion boards and forums worldwide were rife with rumours, complaints and concerns. Feedback? What feedback? Nobody put their hand up to say they had asked for a PPC model.

Next came machine gun fire in the form of an email ... [Read More!]

by windsong


Optimizing for the search engines doesn't have to be a tough job. But you need to pay attention to detail. It is often the little things that you do to your pages that will improve your ranking in the search engines. Sometimes, it's also the little things that can get you banned from the same search engines. Pay close attention. First we will cover some things you can do to improve your ranking. Then we will get into what not to do.

[Read More!]

Stop Wasting Time Stuffing Your Metas with Keywords!

Often abused, regularly overused and completely misunderstood
the keywords tag remains, in error, the focus of webmasters
trying to rank high in the search engines.

============================
If Only It Were That Simple!
============================

Google has 1,610,476,000 pages indexed, imagine if site ranking
really was based on the keyword tags? There are tens of thousands
of sites with similar keyword tags so who ranks in top ten?

The search engines don't care about your keywords tag! [Read More!]

Today I saw an advert to "submit your site to 3,000,000 search
engines".

I'm pretty sure that not too long ago those kinds of service used
to offer a few hundred thousands of engines, and just a little
before that we were in just tens of thousands. So we're talking a
hundred fold growth in just a couple of years.

In the same time, the number of Internet users has at most
doubled or tripled. If this trend continues we'll be heading for
a situation where every man, woman and child (not to mention dogs
and cats) has to use a dozen different search engines before
breakfast just to keep up.

[Read More!]

The term "doorway pages" has become a term synonymous with Spam
as unscrupulous marketers have applied questionable techniques in
an attempt to achieve top rankings.

As always the search engines have caught on and the backlash has
been intense, any SEO company mentioning "doorway pages" is
immediately ostracized.

================================
What Are "Doorway Pages" Anyway?
================================
[Read More!]

In my series of articles on traffic, I would like to drop a few
lines on the secrets and mysteries around search engines.
Search engines are without any doubt a substantial source of
traffic and a desirable step to reach on the way to the online
success for every webmaster and netpreneur.

What I am going to say will be very annoying for some mystery
and secret hunters in the search engine matter. There is NONE. [Read More!]

A journalist asked me recently to name the most critical
element of any search engine optimization campaign. I didn't
hesitate to respond 'keyword selection'.

Like it or not, the keywords and phrases you select to describe
your site within your META tags and body text can make or break
your listings in the search engines. It's a sad fact that most
companies are targeting the wrong keywords and losing traffic
as a result.
[Read More!]

Remember those little quizzes you used to see in magazines with
headlines like: How Compatible Are You and Your Partner? or Are You Dating Mr Wrong?. Well, we thought it might be fun
to create a 5 min quiz for you to test the compatibility of
your site with search engines.

Your total score will give you an idea of whether your site is
destined for a high ranking honeymoon in the engines or
headed towards separation from the indexes. Pens ready? Here we
go:
[Read More!]