Affiliate Drama|Drama in an Affiliate Marketers life.

There are many opportunities for earning money
from home – from buying into a turnkey business opportunity system, finding work at home employment, starting a home-based business, or even buying a home-based franchise. The key is to know what interests you, what you’d like to do, and what your resources can allow you to do.

Here are some opportunities for earning money from home:

Start a home business. One option to earn money from home will be to start a home-based business. Your home can be the location of your full-time job and the primary source of income. Or it can be a part-time venture providing for an extra income for the family. A home business allows you to make your own hours, commute to work in seconds, make your own choices and become your own boss. Our business ideas channel offers a number of possible businesses you can start from home.

Start a home-based franchise. There are a number of franchises that you can operate from your home, from business consulting
to home-based pet services to home services. Home-based franchises typically have lower cost to entry compared to traditional franchises given the lower franchise fees. The fact that these franchises can be operated from home allows you to save on the overhead costs of running a storefront.

Start an online business. The Web offers huge opportunities for those who want to earn money from home. You can gather all your junk and sell them on eBay or Craigslist. You can also sell online and open your own Web storefront. There are also many business opportunities that are available on the Web where you buy into their system of making money (just beware of the scams out there, though). If you love to write, you can also earn from blogging and monetize your web site with online advertising.

Turn your hobby into a revenue source . It’s great to delve into an interesting hobby such as artwork, photography, or crafting paper jewelry. It’s even more exciting (and financially rewarding) to turn your special talents and passion for your hobby into a successful home-based business . If you are an amateur photographer or simply someone who loves to dabble in photography, you may be able to earn money from your stock photography images. If you have created a blog or web site to talk about your hobby,consider turning the web site into an income generating vehicle by putting ads or affiliate programs . If you love to shoot videos, consider turning this hobby of video production into an income-generating opportunity

Turn your skills into an income-generating opportunity. The skills that you employ (or used to employ) in your day job can be used to help you earn money on the side. Whether you are doing web design , writing, desktop publishing , or computer repair , you can use these skills and work on the side, possibly on a part-time basis. However, be sure to read the policies of your employer particularly if you have a non-compete agreement (just make sure that you are not touching their clients and that you find your own customers).

Participate in market research. Market research pays, though not very much. You can get paid from participating in marketing research panels and studies, plus get the chance to know about upcoming products or services. The amount you earn will not get you rich, but the income may allow you to at least put some loose change in your pocket. You can sign up as a mystery shopper where you can pretend to be customer in order to evaluate customer service metrics of businesses such as restaurants or clothing shops. Or you can sign up with legitimate online paid survey companies (be careful of the scams out there) and be included in their consumer panels and be paid answering market surveys. . Another way is to participate in focus group discussions , where a small group of participants selected from a broader population is gathered and interviewed.

Google has it’s webmaster tools and developer community so with Bing Microsoft definitely wanted to join the bandwagon. Bing released it’s Toolbox site. The Toolbox is nothing more than a collection of existing tools. Microsoft is going in the right direction in trying to open itself to the developer industry.

Bing™ Webmaster Center Tools enables site owners to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of sites, submit sitemaps and view statistics about their sites. Webmasters can also review data on how many pages of their site(s) have been indexed, backlinks, inbound links and keyword performance. There is also a new Bing API Web Page Error toolkit that features an improved architecture, and easier deployment. Webmasters are also able to remediate detected malware.

The Bing Toolbox will be a valuable resource for all developers that could used for requesting and managing an AppID to receive programatic access to Bing when building or enhancing a site or applications.

Google is known for their unique company culture, and along with this, they’ve introduced or popularized some interesting phrases. Not all of these terms were coined by Google, but all of them have been used by Google. See how many of these you’ve heard before.

Zac Johnson talks about a new contest promotion by Motive Interactive on his blog.

Motive Interactive a new affiliate network based out off CA are having their 2nd contest promotion. Their 1st one was a huge success. Unlike the first contest which was only for new affiliates, this one is open to everyone who follows them on Twitter or blogs about their contest. This contest promotion runs through the month of May, and there is NO LIMIT on the amount of winners/prizes for their tiered earnings portion. One Twitter winner will be announced, for three weeks, along with one blogger prize at the end of the month.

Three Ways to Win:
1.)  Join Motive Interactive and Earn within any of the Commission Levels above during the month of May. Contest tier prizes only awarded to new Motive affiliates signed up through this blog during May 2009.

2.) Follow and Tweet this contest on Twitter.

Just “tweet” the following from your Twitter account and you are automatically entered to win a new iPod Shuffle or 8GB iPod Nano.

RT to Win: Follow @motive and @moneyreign to make money and win big prizes! http://xr.com/zjmotive

3.) Blog about this contest promotion on your site.

If you have a blog, simple link back to Zac Johnson’s blog post (link to his post) and talk about this contest and you will be entered to win a new 16GB iPod Nano.

 
Motive Interactive Contest Rules & Conditions:
For international publishers (residing outside of the US), in the event that we cannot find a company that ships your prize internationally to your country, Motive Interactive will compensate by sending a PayPal payment or bank wire payment (depending on the prize value) for the value of the prize.

In order to be eligible for the competition, publishers must be new referrals who sign up under our Motive Interactive referral link during May. No exceptions.

 Any publisher caught doing illegal measures such as fraud or being in violation of the Motive Interactive’s Terms of Service will not be eligible for a prize.

 Prizes for the tiered prizes will be sent out after final numbers are confirmed for May.

As our expertise in affiliate marketing and seo increases, we tend to take the basics for granted. This weekend I was asked to review a site to check their optimization. To my surprise, I found that a few basic techniques werent implemented. I walked them through it and thought about sharing it. This might be mundane for the seasoned professional but should be helpful to beginners.

1. Choosing the Right Keywords

The most important and basic requirement is to optimize your site to a group of keywords. It’s very important not to keep the keywords generic. The keywords should be specific and targeted towards your niche.

eg: a web design website in Canada could target the keyword “web design”. This keyword has a huge competition and the chances of a new site to get a good ranking for this keyword is slim to none. It would be better to target the keyword “web design canada” or get more local and optimize for the city, like “web design toronto”, “web design vancouver” etc.

It important to see the competition you have for the keyword you are targeting and appropriate choose them. Type in the keyword in Google, Yahoo or MSN and see the number of sites that show up in the results. Larger the number greater the competiion. You will notice that the competition for longer tailed keywords is lesser.

You can use the also use a tool like the Google Keyword Tool for detailed traffic numbers for each keywords and get ideas for other possible keywords in your niche.

As a rough guideline, try to optimize every page on your site for a different search phrase. Each search phrase should contain 2 to 3 highly targeted keywords.

2. Your URL and Title Tag

It would be ideal to own the www.webdesign.com domain for a web design company or webdesigncanada.comfor a web design company in canada but typically all the domain names you are looking for are not available.

One way around this is to get a domain that could be web-design.com or web-design-canada.com etc. This might not be appealing to many because it doesnt sound professional as you might want the url to be www.yourcompany.com.

The most common way to make your domain/URL work for you is to include the keywords in the file name of each page. eg: www.yourcompany.com/web-design-canada.html, www.yourcompany.com/cheap-web-design-package.html etc.

It’s also important to include the keywords in your title tag. You cant stuff the title tag with keywords because it would look unprofessional. Incorporate the keywords into your message cleverly.

Remember to have different title tags for every page as you will be targeting different keywords in each page.

3. H1 tags and Keyword Density

The H1 tag no longer power that it used too. What exists is the fact that most search engines like Google, values the content between the H1 more than any other tag. You need to have keyword and keyword phrases in H1 tags at a few places in each page.

Yes, H1 tags arent pretty so you would need to use CSS to stylize them.

eg: H1 { color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px }

4. Alt and Title tags

Many developers and designers forget about these tags. Its important to put keywords in the image alt tags and href title tags. Once again avoid keyword stuffing as these keywords would be visible to the view when they mouseover the image or the link. Include the keywords in professional phrases.

eg: <img src=”images/logo.gif” alt=”cheap web design in toronto, canada”>

<a href=”web-design-rates.html” title=”web design rates in toronto”>

5. Keyword Density

The percentage of your keywords in the content of your page is the keyword density of that page. You can increase the keyword density by incorporating keywords in the various tags mentioned in the previous points.

Also, you can make sure to rephrase a few sentences in your page to highlight the keywords.

Remember, not to stuff your page with keywords. Keep the keyword density between 1 to 4 percent anything higher could be considered as spam by most search engines.

You can use the tool at Keyword Density or other such tools.

Of course, this is not the end. Link Building would be the next most important technique but Google and other search engines have come down heavily on link farms and other unrelated link exchanges. Its good to get a few direct link exchanges with sites in your niche but avoid inbound links from unrelated sites.

The easiest way to get link backs to your site is to start a blog on your site and use our social meida and bookmarking sites.

Hopefully, this gives some of the readers

I have burnt my fingers a few times by keeping all my eggs in one basket. I tend to get complacent sometimes when one campaign is going smoothy, I take it easy and dont focus on it too much. Of course, I tune it every now and then but thats it. Instead of researching other niches and finding more markets, I tend to get busy with “life” and find excuses like my full time work keeps me super busy etc.

To grow in the affiliate business you have to be committed to what you are doing. Life will always happen around you but you should always give atleast a few hours every day towards your goal of becoming a successful affiliate marketer and possibly quite your day job soon. Today being a Friday, I have decided to begin research of different niches and find one by Sunday. I intend to go live with atleast one new campaign in a different niche on Monday. I will let you’ll know how it goes.

Cheers

I am sure most of you are aware of it like I was. But this past week, I actually saw it happen.

I have been running this campaign for a few months now and it’s doing pretty well. I have been tweaking it much because everything seems to be working fine. Since the last week, things began doing down hill. The number of sales dropped by 80% per cent. I wasn’t loosing money but breaking even. I didnt care making money or not, just confused why I would see such a huge drop. There were a few new competitors in the niche but nothing that would serioulsy jeopardise the sales. I began venting about it at home when my wife told me something that I have been telling others. Just be patient and give it some time to unfold.  As long as you are loosing a lot of money, let this pattern continue see what you learn from it.  It made sense to me. I left everything as is and after 10 days everything is back to normal.

Now I have to idea what happened but I will be spending sometime finding what changed during this period. It will be a good learning experience to me and to some of you readers. For now, the train is back on the track.

My first post on my blog and it’s a cool signup bonus offer from Market Leverage. I have been seeing Market Leverage marketing their service like crazy. All the super affiliates have been talking good things about them. I have been looking to try a new affiliate network for quite some time now. This seems to be the right time to signup with Market Leverage as the offers on Zac Johnson and John Chow’s blog are real fun. I was sold. Yeah, I know I am cheap but when a person is doing just good in affiliate marketing, all the prizes and bonus go a long way.

Here are the prizes that you could win:

- iPod Nano

- USB Drive Pen ( 3 winners)

- $200 ML American Express Rewards card

- Flip Video Camera

- Bonus iPod Touch.

I hope you’ll signup with Market Leverage and get a chance to try out their offers. Of course, you could also win an iPod Touch doing it.

I hope their approval process is not too long. I was thinking about trying a few different niches and Market Leverage might have the right products for me.