I can still remember the times when I get my first Clickbank sale… the feeling is so amazing. The idea of making money online by selling e-books and other information product just seems too good to be true for me. However, after months of hard work, learning, and ACTION, I finally managed to get some consistent sales coming in. =)

Below is the stats for one of my Clickbank account:

I am not a guru… I am still learning my ropes in IM. To put my stats here is not to boast about it. I believe anyone who put in effort and possess determination, making money online is definitely possible. The only question is how much you make? And what do you do to make more money online?

When I first get into Internet Marketing (IM), there are so many things for me to try out. It is very common for someone who just started out to feel information overloaded. During that time, I basically read and try out all sort of things… paid survey, paid emails, adsense, affiliate marketing, etc. But I am not getting anywhere…

Until one day when I attended an IM seminar, a speaker shared with us a very good tip that I will never forget. He says that anyone who just started out in IM should just choose one thing to focus on.  This includes using 1 marketing channel to drive traffic before you move on to another. Do not try all marketing channels at one go!

So I made up my mind and focus my effort on Affiliate Marketing, promoting other people products. I choose affiliate marketing because it gives me the best leverage at that time. At that time, I feel that the most important thing to succeed in making money online is to learn how to drive consistent traffic.  So, with affiliate marketing, I do not need to spend my time creating products but just need to focus on mastering traffic generation.

After I decided on affiliate marketing, I start off by focusing on 1 marketing channel to drive traffic which is Article Marketing. Actually I am really glad that I have chose to focus on article marketing. Because it allows me to learn how to write. I believe writing is a very essential skill in IM. When you know how to write, there are lots of things that you can do. Writing articles, creating email content, blogging, creating sales page and squeeze page, etc.

So what do you do to make money online? If you are new to IM and focusing on lots of different things, i urge you to choose one and focus on it. ACTION is very important when it comes to making money online. A lot of people attend seminars, read e-books, participate in forums… but they do not take action. When you don’t take action, you cannot practice what you learn and there will be no result for you.

So do not procrastinate anymore. If you are still pondering whether to start creating your first squeeze page and build your list, just do it! If you are still pondering whether to create your own report for free distribution, just do it! Take action, track your performance and continue to improve your skills. This is the way to increase your earning online

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Search engine optimization is an essential traffic generation strategy that all affiliate marketers must excel in. It brings you targeted traffic, as well as getting all the clicks for free when compared to running an Adwords campaign. Recently, I got into discussion with some of colleagues in the search engine marketing industry, and we came across a very interesting topic that I wish to share it with you. The topic is: When you are doing search engine optimization for your website, do all keywords really matter? Or just a handful of them that do really matter?

From this topic… we drifted towards the concept of the 80/20 rule…

I believe that you have come across the 80/20 rule before. So does it apply to search engine optimization? 80/20 rule does apply to search engine optimization too. In most cases, it is only that few keywords that bring you 80 percent of the traffic from search engines. So how does this affect your search engine optimization campaign?

When it comes to SEO, the quality of the keywords that you optimize is very important. SEO is very different from pay-per-click advertising, where you can target so many keywords within a single campaign. In a SEO campaign, you need to choose your keywords carefully as there are limitation to the number of keywords that can be optimized effectively.

So when you are performing SEO to your website, you can start off with 5 main keywords that are closely related to your business. Try not to choose very general keywords like “cars”. This kind of keyword is nearly impossible to optimize as it is way too competitive. Also, it is not targeted enough to bring quality traffic to your website. When we look at SEO traffic, we want potential buyers who are interested in what you are offering. For the above example, people typing in “cars” may not want to buy cars. So if you are a car distributor, you will not want to optimize this keyword. It is simply not worth your effort and time.

If you have an Adwords account, you can start a campaign and bid for a set of keywords that are related to what you are offering on your website. The reason for doing this is to find out what are the keywords that consumers are typing to find your website. With this information, you can then choose the 5 most important keywords and optimize them to get free clicks from the organic result listings. 

Once you know the 5 keywords that you are going to optimize, you should place them strategically in all the important pages of your site. Keywords must be in the Title, META, Header, and ALT tags of your web pages. You should also write content and place keywords within it.

Offsite optimization such as getting back links is also important if you want to achieve good ranking on search engines. One of the best ways to get back links is to write articles and submit them to popular article directories. Place your site’s URL in the by-line of your article, along with your name and company information. Remember to use keyword-rich anchor text and point your article to the relevant pages of your website.

Effective search engine optimization can really give your business a boost. Remember, only 20 percent of the keywords that you optimize really matters. They are the ones which bring you 80 percent of the traffic. So, choose your keywords carefully!

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To succeed in affiliate marketing and start making money online, it is not a overnight thing. A lot of people think that they can earn quick bucks online. All the fantastic earning shown by gurus are not achieved overnight. Be it internet marketing or affiliate marketing, it is a business. If you want to earn a full time income from affiliate marketing, you need to put in effort in building business systems and strategies.

Knowing the ways to drive traffic is just the tip of the iceberg, especially if you are into affiliate marketing. Let say that you intend to promote a product in the weight loss industry. There are thousands of other affiliate marketers promoting the same product as you, so how to make yourself be at the top of the pile?

That is why systems and strategies are very important if you want to differentiate yourself from other affiliate marketers. You need to think of ways to outsmart your competitors. There are also things that you need to build such as your own lists, squeeze pages, blog, etc. With all these, you need to have a strategy too. For example, what is your first step to market this particular product? Is it starting a blog or a squeeze page? Or is it using adwords or squidoo to test out the product first? All these questions need to be carefully considered before you can come out with an ideal strategy.

2 years ago, when i first attended an internet marketing seminar, i was fascinated with all the earnings shown by the gurus. And like many others, I start to dream, but unrealistic dreams they are… I dream of marketing a few products and waking up the next morning, seeing all those sale invoices in my email accounts. But to my dissapointment, zero sale!

From then on, I know that this is not easy. Due diligence and hard work need to be put in. So i immernse myself into education about internet marketing, reading resources that are helpful to me… and continue to test and implement. So I hope by sharing the 4 reasons below with you, you will not make the same mistakes as I did last time…

Now let me share with you the 4 reasons why online affiliate marketers fail:

1. Treating it as a part-time hobby. If you treat affiliate marketing as a part-time hobby, you will get a hobby income. If your goal is to achieve full time income every month so that you can quit your job, then you should spend majority of your time in it.
2. Not building a list. Lists are your assets which can help you to retire early. By just sending traffic directly to the a merchant’s site without first capturing emails through your squeeze page, you are just wasting opportunity. Unless you are testing a particular product, if not you should always build a list around a niche that you are promoting.
3. Stop learning. The only people who stop learning are in the cemeteries. If you want to continue to excel in affiliate marketing, you must continue to pick up new ideas from people who are more experienced than you. By learning from them (either through books, videos, audio, consultation, etc), you will be able to cut down on your own research time and try out new ideas to make you more money.
4. Information overload. This is one of the major problems faced by most affiliate marketers. There are just too many different ways to drive traffic and make money… sometimes it just make you confused about where to start. My advice to you is to focus on one way to drive traffic. Master it before you move on to other methods. I know there is temptation to try out everything, but restrain yourself from it.

Affiliate marketing is a proven business model that can allow you to make a full time income online, provided you are ready to sacrifice your time and effort into it. Most importantly is that you need to take action. Keep on testing and implementing new ideas and initiative to see the results. Learn from mistakes and continue to move forward.

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Affiliate marketing is not as simple as placing ads or links on your website and driving traffic to your merchant’s website and collect profits with every sale materialized. If you think that to achieve big affiliate check you can virtually do nothing and wait for someone to click on your affiliate link, you are in for a tough ride.

Affiliate marketing is another form of marketing, which means that you’ll still need to market your merchant’s products in order for you to earn commissions. If you want to continue to grow bigger affiliate checks, you cannot sit and wait. You MUST do something. You must think of better ways and strategies to promote a product. You must also think of ways to entice more people to click on your affiliate links and drive traffic to the sales page of the product that you are promoting.

Let us discuss a few tips which can help you to grow your affiliate income:

1. Host your own website. To differentiate you from other affiliate marketers, you need to have your own landing pages. Your landing pages can either be in the form of a blog or an information website. Get a domain name that is related to the affiliate product that you are promoting. It is advisable to include the keyword that relates best to the affiliate product in your domain name, so that it will help you in getting high organic rankings in search engines in the near future.

2. Become an expert in the affiliate product that you are promoting. It is advisable for you to try out the product that you intend to promote first. By doing so, you will be able to give first-hand experience information on the product to your site visitors. You can even write reviews and articles about the product as people will tend to search for review first before purchasing any product on the Internet. In your review, be sure to be unbiased. Give good and bad points about it, and your readers will be more confident in buying through you.

3. Prepare your own affiliate promotion materials. Many merchants make life easier for many marketers as they provide marketing materials for them. This is a good start for you if you are new to affiliate marketing. Once you get a hand on it, you should write your own ads. By doing so, you will differentiate yourself from other marketers, and stand a higher chance to get noticed.

4. Drive more traffic. One of the reasons of you not getting a bigger affiliate check might be that you are not driving enough traffic. Participate in forums and chat rooms that are related to the product that you are promoting. Post comments on other people blogs and get more targeted traffic back to your landing pages.

5. Build your own list. Once you find that you are doing reasonably well on a particular product, you should build a list around that particular niche. Give useful information to your subscribers and do not always promote products in your newsletter. Rather, find a way to insert your affiliate ads and links on some portions of the letter. Over time, you will be able to build a substantial amount of hungry subscribers to buy from you in the future, provided they trust you.

These are some guidelines that you can follow to grow your affiliate checks. However, if you find that there are other methods that work very well for you, continue to do them. My objective here is to assist you to drive more traffic, entice more people to click on your ads, and convert them to sales. If you are able to fulfill these, you will not fail in affiliate marketing. 

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