Maybe the single greatest part about affiliate marketing is the incredibly low initial investment you need to start earning money for yourself. All you really need is a website. That’s it. There are so many free programs out there that will walk you though basic web design, even if you know nothing about it, you can be up and running in the span on a day. All that’s left at this point is finding an affiliate marketing program to subscribe to.

Here are a few tips on starting up your affiliate marketing campaign today:

• Never pay to join
  There are tens of thousands of affiliate marketing programs you can subscribe to. The list is essentially limitless. An important piece of advice, though, is that if an affiliate marketing program wants you to pay money to sign up, you might want to think twice. I personally don’t like signing up to a program that will make money out of me anyway. Unless the initial investment is very small, there are many other choices that you could make.

• Join a program that cares about you!
  Some of the big time programs will even train you and give you tips on the right keywords to put on your web pages so random web surfers will find you, click on your link, buy a product and earn you money! They support you, help you and teach you. I have found a few of them but one that really stands out is Moreniche and Trafficsynergy.Moreniche offers the most amazing help with keyword, landing pages, techniques and the list just doesn’t stop. What I have experienced with Trafficsynergy is their awesome support from affiliate managers to anybody working there. So go on and give them a try!

• Don’t use a low-quality webhost provider.
  This can be a tough choice for those looking at keeping their costs at zero or as close to zero as possible. Your new money making website need stable and good hosting, not some free hosting site that crashes all the time. Your web site is a money-making machine for you, don’t trust it to a company that isn’t going to do everything they can to make sure it’s up and running 24/7.

  There are a few good and affordable web hosts like Thinkhost and Hostgator that has great packages and deliver great customer service. I personally host websites at both of them and I’m a very happy client. The last thing you want is to buy some ads to run and in that time your site goes off!(it’s happened to me). Use them and rest easy knowing that your website is in good hands.

As you can see, there are a few ins and outs to affiliate marketing that everyone needs to know. But the key here is the fact that you can earn money with not much work involved. It can get complicated, but that’s why you need to work with great companies like Moreniche and Trafficsynergy.

If you haven’t ever tried affiliate marketing, why not give it a try?

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1. Free Hosting (5GB) – Ad free and no strings attached!
2. Free Keyword Research Tool
3. Affiliate Lounge Official Launch!

Have any of your Diggs been buried by some know it all idiot? And then at the end of the day he actually was wrong about the point he made for his reason to bury it.

Well… It gets me /

No related posts.

In that time (the 90s) they started building websites for people all over (which is real ugly) and all the websites had a link back to this town website Secunda.co.za.

So the other day I was looking at a couple of websites built in that time and I saw the backlinks which were mostly images with “alt” in the image tags. All the links pointed to Secunda.co.za and another website and the anchor text was “club Internet” and “club Internet link”.

“Club Internet” you might think! Well it was in the 90s so to have internet was like being in a club, very small.

This is what shocked me:

The Secunda website ranks #1 – #2 in google south africa for this phrase and there is NO text like this inside the whole website! I mean none! No Club Internet here!

I was truly amazed with this, I have underestimated the power of the ANCHOR TEXT. I am now experimenting with anchor text to this blog, “affiliate marketing”. If all goes well I will be ranking #1 in google south africa with the next pagerank update.

Well, let’s see…

Related posts:

1. Google pagerank update – March 2008
2. Provide the solution to a crisis – and make money!

So some of the local business saw the opportunity and started buying bulk generators to resell here to other business etc. A smart move from their side but for people like me with lots of computers equipment generators can harm it and also it’s a bit expensive. I decided to look around if there is any other options around… So I found it with a bit of a surprise.

www.powerboxes.co.za is a company that sells power boxes that gives automatic emergengy power for 8 Hours. It works great for PC’s, servers, TV’s, VCR’s and most electronic equipment. 8 Hours is perfect cause the power just goes down for 2 – 3 hours.

The best thing about this is that they have an affiliate program and because the current & great need here is power it will sell. People is looking for answers about this crisis and all you have to do is follow it. They might search in google for “Eskom” or “Eskom power crisis” or even “power generators” and all you have to do is have your little ad up “Forget about Eskom, get 8 hours of power, safe and secure” and you will start selling big soon.

I know most of you live outside South Africa, so look for a need / or a niche and work on that.

Related posts:

1. You wanna make money? Forget about it!

1. Crawler Based Search Engines
2. Meta Search Engines
3. Human Powered Search Engines
4. Pay for Performance Search Engines

Crawler Based Search Engines

Examples: Google.com, Yahoo.com, Msn.com

Exactly what the word says, they crawl the web using what they call robots or spiders. They continually follow links from websites to other websites and then again links to other websites… When they visit a website they look for all the on-site links and saves it into an Index.

When a search is done using that search engine your pages that was indexed will be displayed in the search. The position/ranking of your pages is determined by a lot of factors including relevance, keywords, title, description, content and backlinks (links pointing from other websites to yours).

Meta Search Engines

Examples: www.metacrawler.com, www.dogpile.com

These are search engines that gathers listings from other search engines, rather than using its own resources and tools.

Human Powered Search Engines

Examples: Dmoz.org, www.sabest.co.za

These are typically directories where manual submitting is applied. You as the webmaster needs to select a category and enter all your website’s information manually. In most cases the directory editors validate and review websites before accepting, so in this case it does matter how professional and resources full your website is.

These directories is important for your pagerank and to get indexed when you start up a website. Crawler based engines such as Google.com regularly index these human powered directories and you need to get found.

Pay for Performance Search Engines

Examples: Google.com, Yahoo.com, Msn.com

This is typically a PPC (pay per click) module that is merged with most search engines. You can easily rank higher than your competitors without doing any Search Engine Optimization by paying a per click or flat fee.

For you as a website owner your main focus must be to get high ranking in crawler based sites. Why?

Cause the most users use them and it’s totally free!

Related posts:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) vs Pay per Click (PPC)
2. The power of the “ANCHOR TEXT”

So how good are you with Search Engine Optimization?

Well SEOMOZ.org developed the mother of all SEO Expert Quizzes to determine your expertise in this area. Take some time and take the test at SEO Quiz and let us know what’s your results.

I will post my own results in the comments (Just need to get some time to do the quiz)

Related posts:

1. So how does Search Engines work?

Guest post by Colin Kearney from Lifechanger.co.za

So, you say you want to make money?

Ask yourself, “Where does the money come from?” Does it come from the actual business or from the products and services you offer? Does it come from fancy marketing and promotions? Does it come from being smarter than the competition and offering better value for money?

The answer is a huge NO!

Money does not come from any of these. These are just the methods and ideas used to attract the money. The money comes from the people who are who have labored to get it. You can have any kind of business with any kind of product or service but with out the people you have no money!

So you wanna make money?

Forget about the money and take care of the people!

Offer what they need and desire. Offer the people what they need to make their life more convenient or to fix a problem or to help with their life issues. When you sincerely offer a real answer to their need or desire their money will flood towards you.

Does this mean you irresponsibly neglect the budget and not give your attention to the financials and bank statements? No! Any and all successful money earners have stringent control over their financial affairs. Does it mean you don’t market and don’t offer better value for money? Of course not! But if you are looking for more income then give your sincere attention to the people and the money will show up.

This means you must care more for the people than you care for the people’s money. Believe me people do not want to give up their hard earned cash! Tell me… you have a choice between two identical cars with a $5000 difference in price. Which one will you take? The cheaper one naturally because you don’t want to give up your money!

Now, the same two cars are available:

Car Salesman #1

The first salesman (with the cheaper priced car) who you have to search for in his enclosed office clearly doesn’t care. The car comes “as is”. You must find your own financing bank. And he dismisses himself for his coffee break with “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

Car Salesman #2

After a warm welcome and a brief discussion of what you need and want in a car he goes out of his way to find and order the car in the color of your choice. The financing agent is waiting in the next room. He informs you, “The car will have a full valet and will be delivered to your house before the end of the week with a bottle of champaign,” to celebrate. He adds, at no extra cost, the first engine-service when you are ready and before you leave he makes note of your birthday for which you know he will give you a call.

From which salesman will you buy?

How much do you care about your people? They have the money and like most people they do care where they spend it.

Related posts:

1. Provide the solution to a crisis – and make money!

We all know that people whom got it right to get on the Digg homepage received thousands of traffic to their site for a couple of days. Here is one example of many: JohnCow.com

But how easy or hard is it really. Well it’s actually very basic and understandable to get there but there are certain things that have to be in order like:

• The article must be original
• Must be a very good article
• Good images in article helps
• Blog/website must be appealing

And also lots of other things like getting 51 Diggs in 1 hour. You have 51 friends?

The Issue with Digg

While the concept of getting on the Digg homepage is very nice, it just not good traffic at all. Most people that landed on there said that the bounce rate is sky high and it just lasts for 1 – 3 days. So there isn’t much point on doing it, unless you have another strategy.

If you really want to look more into getting on there here is a very practical guide from Neil Patel: Beginners Guide to Digg

Then I found an alternative to the Digg Effect

It’s called Stumbleupon! No you won’t get 40 000 visitors to your site in one day, but you won’t also get those ridiculously high bounce rates. And all this time I missed out on some good traffic from Stumbleupon…

Last week one of my posts was stumbled and I received 264 visits from Stumbleupon in a matter of 10 minutes!

As you can see the bounce rate is very low and 96.21 people were new to my blog. That is some great traffic I think! And the good thing is, every day I still receive traffic from Stumbleupon.

After a bit of thinking I realised the reason I received that much traffic in 10 minutes was because I blogged about something that just happened and people on Stumbleupon was looking for it? That’s my theory.

I am most sure going to do some more research into Stumbleupon and getting the most out of it.

No related posts.

• facebook and entrecard
• entrecard facebook
• entre facebook

So I figured people might be wondering if there is a way to add your Entrecard widget to your facebook profile. There are 2 angles to this, it might be good and it might be bad for them.

Well, I must say while it sounds very interesting, it’s a whole new concept as Entrecard is an online business card for Blogs and not any other website or profile etc. So basically NO, you cannot put your Entrecard on your facebook profile unless Entrecard develops a Facebook Application where you can put your Entrecard on.

I think the concept can be nice and that website owners can get some good visitors from Facebook profiles, but they would have to change the name to something like EntreBook cause these 2 concepts are totally different.

I like the idea, I think with the amount of people using facebook each day it can harness some great potential. Maybe I should go ahead and develop the same concept as Entrecard but for Facebook…

What do you think? Would you like the concept on Facebook? Or Entrecard on Facebook?

Related posts:

1. Facebook ads suck!
2. Entrecard Sellers Announced!
3. Entrecard Shop is up and running…

I have too much space! So I’m giving it away to 2 lucky people. There are tons of add-ons to this package and you get a lot of extra features like:

• Preinstalled Software
  • Blogs, Bulletin Boards, CMS, Chat, Ecommerce, Galleries, Guest Books, Support applications
• Unlimited template downloads from http://www.templatespace.com
• Access to http://www.submitcentre.com
  Submit, promote and boost your traffic

But the basics are 1000GB bandwidth and 10GB diskspace.

To read more or to enter goto: The Competition Page

If you have any questions just leave as comments here.

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1. Win a Unique blog design – Competition