Well I should be sleeping now or so my body says, but my brain is in “share knowledge” mode. You need to be in the writing mood to blog at your best!

I’d like to go over a very effective marketing technique, forum marketing. I’ll introduce it briefly, but the meat of this post will be in describing my many techniques in choosing the right forum to post in, the tone to “speak” in and a few other little tidbits.

When I speak of forum marketing, I’m talking about the act of getting your link up on forums. That’s vague enough!

You’re going to want your link on forums to get some extra visitors to your website and so that you can add to your backlinks. A backlink is “site A” linking to “site B” where “site B” is yours. You can then say “site A” backlinks to “site B”. Backlinks can help you get listed on search engines and if done effectively can greatly increase your position on them.

Here’s what I do for effective backlinks. I focus on my main keywords for my site. Let’s say “affiliate marketing”. I then Google or Scour (I’ll write about Scour some other time) those keywords, maybe add ” forum” to it, and look at the results. I’ll check out all the forums in the results and find a topic that I feel I can reply to with some helpful information. (This is important! If your post sounds like a sales-pitch it’s as effective as a turtle sprinting!). Try to lead someone to your link, where the link would be helpful to them or relevant to their case/issue.

Add a personal touch to your message. Here’s two examples of someone trying to link their Costume store on a forum that had a topic created by someone who needed a Halloween outfit.

Ex. 1) For some great prices and costumes check out “link to store”.
Ex. 2) I’ve been looking around for a costume too and found a great selection over at “store link here”

If you haven’t figured it out yet, example 2 is much more effective because it has a more personal touch and feels like it’s coming from an equal not from someone who is desperate for a sale.

So follow the above and here’s what you’ll have:

• a link to your site coming from a relevant forum
• the gratitude from the person you helped out or informed in the forum
• credibility in the eyes of the readers
• higher sale or interest potential
• search engine love! They like when a link to your “halloween store” is coming from a “halloween topic”. Even better if it was coming from a Halloween site, but that can’t always be achieved. You must make due with what you can get.

So go out there already and start getting linked up! What!… still reading? Go!

As always if you have any questions please leave a comment. It’s way too quiet in here. Cause a stir!

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Part of affiliate marketing is knowing who your users are. If you own a website or a blog or any content online I bet you’d want to know who’s viewing it, from where, when, with what browser, and on what platform.

There’s an easy and FREE way to getting that information, and that is by using Google Analytics. Google analytics gives you detailed statistics of the users browsing your site and reports that information with graphs, charts, detailed lists and awesome stats. There’s so much you can do with Google Analytics that there are tons of books written to try and expose all its functionality. Once again this is all free. It’s the best free tool around and is a must for any website or blog owner. You can sign up here. It is a free tool, it will never cost you a penny. Use it!

Here’s a few good tips once you start getting used to the tool, 8 Stupid Things Webmasters do to Mess Up Their Analytics.

If you have any questions on signing up or using analytics leave a comment and I’ll help you out.

Hello fellow affiliates!

So I’ve come across a really interesting read in a very suprising format; a free eBook written by Harvey Segal, a big name in the industry. I always thought of those free eBooks and “find the secret to online success for 97$” eBooks as pure SCAMS that offer nothing more than childs play information. I was surprised how well it caught my attention, and as a seasoned affiliate marketer I was also happy to see some good techniques that I’ve used before as well as adding some great ideas to my marketing artillery. And I say this only to point out that not one source has all the marketing strategies. There’s always different, creative ways to market a product or service and keeping an open mind will equip you well when trying to find a solution to reaching your objective.

Here’s a few good points that are covered in the eBook:

• A few methods to generating traffic to your product or service/referral signup (or someone elses)
• Preselling your product or service or referral signup
• Autoresponders and follow up campaigns
• ClickBank and how it can work for you
• Viral marketing
• Creating niche sites
• Resale rights

Check out the full affiliate marketing free eBook.

Alright, this post is for those fairly new to affiliate marketing. I think it’s almost everyone’s dream to work from home, not to serve clients, but to be able to work on their own projects, which in all hopes will create sustainable automatic income with little effort so that they can ENJOY life!

The good news is it is very possible to live this dream. The bad news… well… it won’t happen over night! More good news though, I will be doing my best to inform you and give you all the advice I can give in one helpful site.

So let’s get down to this situation; You want to live your dream, but you’re aware it won’t happen instantly and without effort and you’re prepared and psyched to get started. Your mind is racing with excitement, you may already have a slew of thoughts of what you want to do to make money online. What you want to do and what you DO are two different things. The fact is, there’s so many ways to make money online with affiliate marketing that it can be so daunting of a task to just choose one idea and run with it.

First things first, before I go on to giving you tips on how to choose that right idea that you so hope will bring you success, let me give you a good definition of what affiliate marketing is, as defined by wikipedia:

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of Internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies, and in-house affiliate managers, specialized third party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.

So basically with affiliate marketing YOU are the affiliate, the middle man between the customer and the seller, and as such you will be rewarded for promoting the sellers’ products and services to the end user. I’m saying promoting and not selling specifically because there are cases where you can get paid to promote. Such an example would be getting paid to have links on your website.

Back on track now, where do you start? There are many ways to make money onlne, but for this post I will focus on getting commission from sales as I believe it is one of the easiest ways to begin. Now that that’s settled, what exactly do you want to sell?

You can get commission from selling a slew of products and services. Here are some examples:

• Web Hosting, Web Services such as Online Image Storaging, Financial Reporting Tools, Contact Managers, etc…
• Selling of e-books, screencasts, get rich quick ideas, marketing tips etc… (yes people charge for the basic information I and many others hand out for free on the web)
• And of course the most popular, products. If you can feel and touch it chances are someone is selling it and willing to give you money to get people to buy it. This can range from skates, keys, tea, movie tickets, cd’s, movies to blow up dolls! It’s really that vast!

There’s so much to choose from but here are few pointers in making your decision:

• Choose something that you’ll like to work on; an industry that interests you. Don’t try to sell skates if you hate them!
• Choose something that has a good sized market
• Check the latest trends, what’s selling like hot cakes nowadays?
• Balance! If you love the products you’d like to sell and there’s a huge market for it and it’s still trendy, then heck go for it! Unfortunately that’s not always the case so I would suggest finding a good balance between the last 3 points.
• Get specific! Depending if there’s already alot of competition in what you are selling I would highly suggest you be as specific and niched as possible. For example, there are tons of sports stores out there, but a sports store can be split down to many sports such as Tennis, Hockey, Golf, etc… So why not focus on Tennis Products or Hockey Product, or even more specific such as focusing on selling the best hiking shoes, or hockey skates, etc… Doing this will help narrow your market down and will make marketing in the future a whole lot easier.
• Make sure you can even sell the product and get commissions. You need to make sure at least one affiliate program exists for the product you want to sell. For example if Canadian Stamps is your main interest, there is a pretty good possibility there aren’t any affiliate programs that will give you commission on selling stamps.

Those are the main things to take into consideration.

If you don’t want to sell a product, but would rather make money off of ads on your very own websites, the above tips will still work in making a decision in what industry your site will evolve around.

I may have missed a few points, but please do not hesitate to ask me a question in the comments section below.You may have different dilemmas or ideas that may not directly relate to my examples, but I assure you if it has anything to do with online products and services, even personal services, i can sure give you some sound advice!

Stay tuned for posts about affiliate programs and networks. There are tons to choose from, some better than others. I’ll be going through and reviewing as many as possible in the near future so keep an eye on this site.

Much appreciated!