guest post by Emily Murray

Of course we all know that the first goal you have as an Internet marketer is to drive potential customers to a website, but traffic can only get you so far. How can you ensure that the traffic you are getting is relevant to the product or service you are selling?

Most businesses will eventually hit a plateau of daily visitors, at which point it becomes prohibitively expensive to gain more. The only way to increase profits after this is to optimize sale conversion rates. Learning how to keep visitors through the completion of a purchase can seem daunting, but often it is not so much about holding their attention, as avoiding driving them away.  Read the rest of this entry »

guest post by James Ged

It's been almost a year since Google's Panda update hit, and we're all still reeling a little. Although I work as an SEO strategist at a great marketing firm, I also work with a number of other companies during my free time, and I've seen many of them stop and retool their SEO strategy over the past year because they've seen their rankings (or the rankings of their clients) drop. Basically, Panda was a huge wakeup call to all those SEOs out there who were still relying on article spinning and keyword stuffing as a way to get good rankings.

Now the focus is on creating top-notch content, which often times means linkbait. The theory is that if you can make awesome content - articles, graphics, videos, and more - people will naturally link to you, and that's what Google likes to see: nice, natural link profiles.

Formulaic Linkbait

Unfortunately, many SEOs are approaching linkbait in the same way they were approaching article spinning. For example, they've figured out that great linkbait articles are usually 800 words or more, in list format, with pictures for each heading. So they commission 100 writers to write 100 articles with those vague parameters. Read the rest of this entry »

guest post by Christian Willis

Whether you like it or not, social media has become a valuable tool in any business's marketing toolkit. While you might think that sharing your most personal details on LinkedIn or Facebook is pointless, as an affiliate marketer you cannot overlook the business potential of these sites. The trick is learning to use social media effectively to build your brand and community.

Using Social Media –The Right Way

First, what counts as social media? Social media includes social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as YouTube, Twitter, and your blog, among others. It gives you the chance to interact with people who are interested in you and your products, and attract new customers to your business. Read the rest of this entry »

guest post by Tyler Moore

Google Alerts has quickly become one of my favorite tools and SEO software for building backlinks. It's well-known that relevant backlinks are worth more than non-related backlinks. That is to say, if you're promoting your discount golf club website on a golfing forum or blog, that link will be worth more than if you'd created a backlink on a blog about weight loss or online marketing. "Content is king," as any good SEO will remind you, and you should definitely keep this in mind when you're building links.

However, it can be tricky finding new opportunities for promoting your website. Let's take a look at using Google Alerts to automatically send you alerts for possible opportunities for building relevant backlinks.

Grab the keywords and search terms you'd like to start targeting and head over to Google Alerts. Google Alerts monitors search terms and will send you emails when these terms are being used on the internet. You simply create a new alert, then enter a few options to tell Google what kind of alert you want to make. Here's how I like to build a new alert: Read the rest of this entry »

guest post by Stephanie Staszko

For many online marketers, sourcing and contacting guest blog locations is a major part of their link building campaign. The concept for guest blogging seems fairly easy: you source a decent, relevant blog, write a guest post for them, get it published and obtain a backlink to the website of your choice.

This however, is much more easier said than done as actually getting a blog owner to agree to publish one of your posts is probably harder than the actually task of writing the post itself.

Know your Recipient

Guest bloggers have begun to try and use more personal address in their outreach emails, often directly addressing the blog owner in their quest for a guest location. This email may include, name of the recipient and the recipient's website name/URL. Although the method of using personal address seems an effective way of defining the outreach email from a spam email which was sent to thousands of people, getting the recipient's details correct is important! How many emails have you received which are addressed to a similar name to yours but the opposite gender? Getting your recipient's gender right can make the difference between sparking slight interest and downright offending someone!

Read the rest of this entry »

guest post by Joe Petchonka

Everyone knows that you can do SEO and an assortment of marketing techniques to boost your blog's ranking in Google. While this will certainly drive more traffic to your site, you're missing on the other strategies that not as many people are using. You might think you're doing everything you possibly can to boost your site's traffic and ranking, but there are other lesser known tactics that you can use in tandem to help even more. Below are some of the lesser-known marketing strategies for helping your blog get more traffic.

1. Promote Your Blog Via Forums

Many people seem to forget about this completely, but if you provide great advice and information to particular forums in your niche, you can possibly drive traffic to your own site.

If the visitors of a forum see that you know exactly what you're talking about with a certain subject or several subjects, they'll be more likely to visit your site and see what else they can learn from you.

In addition, you can place your blog's link in the signature section of the forum you're visiting (which is often available), so people can go straight to your site without feeling like they're being persuaded to go. Read the rest of this entry »

guest post by Jess Spate

With the roll-out of Google's new analytics interface, there has been a lot of talk about the key features that make the new Version 5 more powerful than the last, but the road to full functionality rarely runs smooth. There are plenty of people in the analytics community who aren't too happy with what they found in the new version. Let's start with the good stuff first.

What works

Real time data in its simplest form

For most large websites the most interesting new feature in the new versions is the real-time data, which allows for a much more detailed look at the responses to social activities and quicker testing of campaign tracking (among other things). There is no doubt that this feature is a winner, especially when combined with Twitter's move to the t.co domain, which makes it much easier for analysts to see referrals from shortened URLs.

The Social Engagement tab is also a very handy addition. It shows how many visitors are arriving through social sources and summarises +1s, Likes, and other popular social actions. Some extra setup is required but if you consider driving social activity to be a valuable goal - and these days most companies really should - it's well worth it.

Other worthwhile goals, e.g. file downloads that don't trigger a URL change, can now be tracked in their own right without creating a fake pageview. While the old method worked it was a little cumbersome and caused some accuracy problems in other metrics. Again, you'll need to spend a little extra time on setup but improvements to event tracking are certainly welcome. Read the rest of this entry »

guest post by Pedro Cardoso

Would you like to receive a big fat check from Google each and every month? Does the thought of earning a steady stream of revenue from your website traffic sound appealing? If so, there is much you can do to ensure your AdSense earnings grow steadily month after month.

Not all of the following advice is quite intuitive and obvious, but it is the result of an extensive trial and error process. After years of experimentation and optimization, most webmasters will agree there are four main pillars in the strategy of any profitable AdSense website; here they are:

1) Split/Testing and optimizing ad placement

This is possibly the most obvious strategy that all serious webmasters should be using. And not many do, which is too bad since this lack of commitment usually translates in substantial wasted revenue.

When it comes to ad placement, making a small change can lead to tremendous performance improvements. And while there are best practices that should be considered as general guidelines, each website will have a different "sweet spot" that can only be found through persistent experimentation and split testing of alternatives. Read the rest of this entry »

guest post by Kim Willis

Blogging can be a very rewarding hobby, pastime or even a full-time job. According to BlogPulse, there are around 180 million blogs currently populating the Internet – and thousands more being born each day. Unfortunately, not all blogs turn out to be successful. Only about 1-2 percent of blogs can be considered popular and profitable. In fact, most bloggers quit after two to three months of seeing no immediate results. Similarly, most bloggers avoid things that they should not avoid, things that they should be doing in order to leverage their blogging efforts.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing is by far the best way of marketing a blog over the Internet. Social media marketing brings the term "viral" into a much higher and different level. Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are just some of the best platforms for social media campaigns. Read the rest of this entry »

guest post by Andrii Demianenko

This article is written for newbie internet marketers who suffer from the "shiny object" syndrome, and who want to start making money. One of the most common problems people in the IM or any other business face is lack of focus. Let me explain what I mean by that.

We live in a fantastic age, where there is so much information available that it makes everyone's possibilities limitless. But there is also a big downside of having the power of the Internet at your disposal – you can get lost in all the knowledge.

When newbies take a shot at Internet marketing, they dive into tens if not hundreds of books, courses and videos, and when they are finished, they realize that all the pieces of the puzzle they've obtained do not fit together, and the resulting "picture" becomes unwhole and messy. Read the rest of this entry »