Ways to make money now

Contextual link building is often touted as one of the best and most effective forms of SEO. However, you won’t get those benefits unless you use the technique properly. Many Internet marketers tend to make incomplete use of contextual link building, and so waste both money and hosting space. Here’s how to maximize what you’re getting out of your contextual link building campaign.

Look for Popular Blogs

Given the way that Google calculates your page’s ranking, the benefits that you’ll get from contextual link building will be directly proportional to the rankings of the blogs that carry your articles. The more popular the blogs, the greater your rise up the rankings ladder will be.

Quality-conscious contextual link building service providers have minimum standards – typically between PR10 and PR3 – for blogs that will host your links’ articles. That way, you’re assured of at least so much improvement with regard to your site’s rankings.

Don’t Stick to Just One

While finding one good blog or article site is good, it’s far from sufficient if you want real and significant results. You’ll need at least a short list of blogs – yes, that’s plural – if you want your site to move up any noticeable amount. Limiting yourself to just one will require you to wait a very long time before you see anything happening.

This is something that good contextual link building service providers know and try to address. A good provider would have at least a few blogs available for any niche, or a contingency plan in case it doesn’t have a certain niche covered. Some are affiliated with entire networks of blogs so that your links make it to as many places as possible quickly.

Keep It Interesting

Even if your link building service provider posts new articles everyday, it’s not going to work if all that content just talks about the same things. There’s nothing to motivate your readers to keep coming back to your site, and that minimizes the effectiveness of your link building efforts.

Variety is the key here. Your provider has to make every post look unique and fresh so that readers have a reason to visit again and again. After all, if there’s something new to read everyday, then readers will be more likely to make return visits. And remember: the more people visit the sites that have your links, the likelier they’ll be to click those links.

Find a Good Provider

In order to be able to do the job properly, your contextual link building service provider must have all the groundwork already laid out. For example, the blogs must already have been contacted and set up for your links. Content must be prepared early on to ensure quality and variety.

Even if they tend to be slightly more expensive than no-name providers, established and brand name providers are worth getting for contextual link building. Just remember that you’ll be incurring an extra expense because you’re paying for their contacts and their resources. After all, in the world of contextual link building, it’s the most popular and visible one that literally comes out on top.

By Cleva Smith

Having been a successful Internet marketer for several years now I can tell you without hesitation that affiliate marketing is one of the most lucrative online business models you can use to generate online income. In fact, there is so much to truly like about this form of cash flow creation when you consider that there are no employees to watch, no inventory to handle and no customer service or refunds to occupy your time.

However, as with all good things there are some potential issues that can drastically affect your business in a negative manner if you are not aware of what they are and how to avoid them. This article covers three of those issues:

Affiliate Marketing Issue #1: Promoting the wrong products

This is one of the most common issues that many online marketers new to affiliate marketing make and it can literally break their spirit and desire to run a business on the web. Before promoting any product or service the proper research must be conducted in order to ensure their is a demand or need for the product. Other factors to consider include the appearance and copy of the sales letter, the affiliate commission paid out and the customer service provided by the merchant.

This is one of the most common mistakes beginning affiliate marketers make. Instead of going with gut instinct on whether a product is popular, it is important to research the demand for it. Is it already selling? What are people buying in the marketplace? Does the sales letter look professional? What kind of customer support is provided? All these questions are important to answer before you proceed with promoting the product.

Affiliate Marketing Issue #2: Looking for the quick sale

When many affiliate marketers first start out they are only concerned with obtaining a sale as fast as possible for various reasons with the primary one being that they need to generate income to keep their online business afloat. Unfortunately, what many fail to realize is that they stand to make more money on the back-end of their affiliate marketing efforts. They can effectively do this by capturing the email addresses of their customers through an opt-in page also known as a squeeze page. Don’t dismiss the power of building a list of proven buyers because many of the top marketing gurus have made fortunes just from promoting products to their list.

Affiliate Marketing Issue #3: Jumping from one program to another

Here is another pitfall that many marketers (both new and experienced) suffer from on a regular basis, the problem of jumping from one program to the next without first seeing if they can achieve any success with their initial affiliate marketing campaigns. By focusing their efforts of two or three products instead of 10 or more they will be able to refine their methods and strategies and once they start seeing a profit they can then move on to another promotion.

Yes, you can make a large amount of money online if you know what you are doing and if you avoid the problems outlined in this article by following the methods of other successful marketers. Are you ready to learn how to become an affiliate marketing superstar? If so, then continue reading.

By Tim Gorman

I have been a web marketer for the last ten years; there have been many changes to the way people should go about promoting their websites in this time and it can prove to be a bit of nightmare trying to keep in touch with the latest web promotion changes. What worked only three years ago could now result in your site receiving a ban or penalty on the major search engines. Paid links and over-excessive reciprocal linking are seemingly a thing of the past. So as we move through 2009 what types of web promotion strategy should a webmaster be following?

Only a couple of years ago a webmaster or their web promotion specialist could simply purchase a backward link on a high power website and that on its own would catapult the site up the rankings. It did not even seem to matter if the site that was providing the link had anything to do with the site purchasing the link. We therefore saw online poker websites purchasing text link adverts on media and publishing websites which had a high page rank. A lot of people made a lot of money from selling these text links and a new marketplace formed.

But then the major power in the world of the search engines, Google, decided to move the goal posts by declaring war on this paid links market, stating that it was seriously distorting their search results. This upset a lot of people, this tends to happen when money is involved, with many accusing Google of acting as God. The reply from Google was short and to the point and went along the lines of; it is our search engine and we therefore decide our own guidelines; if you want to sell text links that is fine but it may result in some form of penalty as this goes against our current. They were basically saying you can do whatever you want with your website and at the same time we can do whatever we want with our search engine. Fair play, I say. I am actually very happy with the new guidelines; it was very hard to compete with webmasters who had deep pockets etc. Now the one-man band can compete with the big corporation; hard work, keeping up to date with the latest guidelines as well as learning from the SEO experts will once again prove to be very beneficial.

2009 brings about a new watch word in the world of web promotion; relevancy. What does this mean? Well quite simply the backward links that you attempt to obtain now need to be relevant to the site that you run for them to have a real benefit. Again this surely is common sense. If a website about gardening has a link pointing to a website about camping, is this offering any value to its site visitors? Not really.

2009 is also the year when those who are willing to work hard will finally get their rewards. Some of the old favourites such as article marketing are becoming more popular than ever but quality is now far more important than quantity. Only the best articles will be chosen to be published on other people’s websites and let’s face it they have enough articles to choose from.

Ensuring that your website is optimised correctly with the main keywords placed naturally within the text of the homepage will also be essential, be careful not to “keyword stuff” your homepage though.

Go into any internet marketing forum and you’ll read loads of theories about how to promote websites. Many of these come from people who have no experience or are just trying to promote their own services. If you want to know what works there is one sure fire way to find out. Conduct your own Website Promotion Exercise.

A website promotion exercise is a way of testing which promotion methods work best for you. It’s a simple process and time spent on it will pay dividends in the future. Here are some tips about how to run your website promotion exercise.

1. First you need to choose a suitable keyword phrase. Look for a phrase that doesn’t have many results in Google. You can use the phrase between quotation marks to ensure that there is not much competition. So you would go to Google and type in “keyword phrase” in the search box. If that only returns a few results then use that phrase.

2. Once you have your keyword phrase then you can start your testing. The easiest way to start is to create an article or a blog post. From there you can use services like Clipmarks and twitter to create more links and keyword references.

3. The final phrase of your website promotion exercise is to use services like Squidoo, Hubpages, Zimbio and gather and add content contain the keyword phrase. This will soon show up in Google and you’ll see which services rank well.

With a few hours of starting the website promotion exercise you will start to see results appear in Google. Whenever I run one of these exercises I usually find that Clipmaks is indexed in under an hour.

To make the whole process a lot more fun why not challenge a friend to see who can rank highest for the keyword phrase. Competition will make your promotion skills stronger, why do you think Ferrarri and other car manufacturers enter race series which can cost them millions of dollars? It’s because competition speeds up development and they quickly finds what works and what doesn’t. Enjoy your website promotion exercise and use what you learn to increase your Income.

My best advice if you want to build a regular 5-figure income online is to build your own Internet empire. Diversify into different businesses. Now, here is the catch: you have to start off by focusing only on one business. Once that business is successful, diversify into others. Keep on adding successful businesses into your portfolio until you have an online empire that never fails to crank out a never-ending stream of income. So how do you build your own empire?

The first step is to create your own product. This can be a free product that you give away to build your list. Once you have a list, promote affiliate offers. This is how the real big guns, the super affiliates, do things. Don’t send your traffic directly to an affiliate link. If your prospects don’t buy, you have lost them forever. Use your traffic to build a list, and then promote affiliate products.

After that, you will want to consider creating your own paid product. If you have done a good job with your free product, people will want to buy your paid stuff. You need to research what people are dying for at this moment. What information do they desperately want or need? Figure this out and then give it to them.

Once you have a successful product out there, you can leverage it by getting joint venture partners to promote your product. Promote major partners first, so they will be more receptive to promoting your product. You have got to do something for them first. Far too many marketers just send out canned emails that basically say “I have a great product, JV with me!” The far better and more effective approach is to build a relationship with other marketers in your niche and do something for them first.

Does this sound like a lot of things you have to do? Indeed it is. If you want to create an online empire, it is going to take some initial effort.

Banner ads have been around for almost 20 years and are a very standard part of the Internet any more. They have been standardized in many ways though, adhering to careful rules about site advertising, costing a lot more than they used to, and requiring quite a bit of flare and imagery to capture the doggedly jumpy attention of the Internet masses. So, how do you make extra money online with a banner ad? You make sure to follow the three steps outlined below to optimize how it looks and performs:

1. Split Test Your Banner Ads – Always have a series of banner ads to work with so that you can learn which ones perform better and which ones are a drain on your budget. Run two of them at a time in similar demographics if possible (AdWords makes this easiest) and see which ones makes you the most extra money. Constantly revise and look for ways to increase CTR and conversions this way.
2. Carefully Integrate Text with Images – Banner ads are flashy – that’s what they’re for, but you need to have enough text to tell your potential customers what they’re even looking at. Do this by integrating some text and images together to showcase both your visual identity and a little description of what you are selling or doing to draw their attention.
3. Have a Call to Action – To truly make extra money online though you need to have a call to action in every banner ad you place. Too many times have I seen banner ads that are flashy enough and attention grabbing but make little or no sense. Sure, there are plenty of people who will click on those just to see what you’re selling, but more will ignore them because they see them as fishing lures to a random site they probably won’t be interested. Know how to identify your visitors’ needs and convey that in your banner ad as simply as possible.

When you do all three of these things, you not only draw the attention of more people to your banner ad, you ensure that you keep it held tightly and that when they click on your ad, they are aware of where they are visiting and you are not wasting your valuable advertising budget. Done right banner ads are a tremendous tool and you will start to make extra money in no time.

Banner ads are a tremendous tool for your online business and will help you make extra money online quickly if you know the basic tenets for how they operate, how people see them, and how you can format them more effectively. But, they can also be a drain on your budget if you are not careful, so let’s take a look at what works and what doesn’t work when you start creating new banner ads for your site:

What People Want to See

People want to see things that are going to help them, entertain them, or give them something. A banner ad needs to convey at least one of those three things and if you’re really good, it will convey two or three of them.

To make extra money online, you need to showcase in your ad something you think your specific audience will need. Some markets use flash type games, others use free offers, and others still just tell the truth and show them what you’re selling. Whatever you do though, you need to be sure that what you showcase in your ad is something that your potential customers will be intrigued enough to click on and read more about.

On the flip side, stay away from cheap tricks to get new visitors. When someone is tricked into clicking something, they are much less willing to give you the benefit of the doubt at your site. Instead, you should create leading ads. Promise something free or entertaining and when they arrive, continue to showcase that promise as you lead them toward your product.

This will ensure that you not only generate new traffic to make extra money online, but that you do not waste that new traffic by scaring away or angering all that new traffic you just paid for.

The Goal to Effective Traffic Boosting

If you want to be effective in boosting your traffic, creating a more pleasing banner ad, and ensuring that they not only click on your ads each time through but that they are not disappointed by what they find, you need to integrate both catchy imagery and unifying text. Together, you will find that these two things will create a symbiotic relationship that will entice hundreds of people to check out your site that might otherwise have passed. You’ll make extra money, they’ll find a good product and everyone will ultimately be very happy.