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It’s easy to believe that just because you have decided to become an affiliate marketer, that the money will just roll in. But it’s not your fault. There are countless websites, individuals and even infomercials that make you believe that this is true.The fact is, to become a good affiliate marketer takes dedication and hard work.

There are ideas that have worked with other affiliate marketers however, and three tips that I’m sure you will find useful as you embark on your affiliate marketing career.

Tip #1: Keeping On-Topic. When you promote products as an affiliate marketer, you need to keep all of the products that are related to your website separate from other non-related items. Your site should focus solely on one topic and the products you promote should not veer off into a separate theme all together.

For example, if you have a website based on baby-related items, you don’t want to be promoting health-food related items. Create an entirely different website about health food and place the products you are promoting on that web site instead.

Often, people tend to want to save money on hosting or domain names by lumping all of their affiliate products within the same website. Hosting and domain names are so affordable there is really no reason at all to not create another website just for that purpose.

It’s also important that you provide product reviews so that your site visitors have an understanding of the products they are considering purchasing. It’s even more helpful if you can get real people to give you a testimonial (good or bad) about the product. Ask your site visitors if they’d be willing to provide such testimony for you to publish on your site.

Write articles about the uses of the products you are promoting. These can be additional pages within your website. Not only will it provide valueable information for your visitors but will also create additional and related content for you which the search engines just love.

Tip #2: Offer something free to your visitors. Everyone loves something for free but just because it’s free doesn’t mean it has to be less-than-worthy information. Create something that your visitors can download and make sure that you place the link to download it in a highly visible spot on your website.

In addition, you can also create a page on your website that requires them to enter in their name and email address before they get the free report. This will help you build a very targeted newsletter list that you can contact on a regular basis. Use programs such as Aweber to create a set of messages that automatically go out to your visitors on a regular basis.

Tip #3: Target your traffic. It is very important that those folks viewing your webpages are actually looking for your product.

All the traffic in the world will do you no good if you don’t have what they were looking for in the first place.

Write articles about your subject and submit them to e-zine directories where others can pick them up and use them on their websites. Of course, your website will be listed in the byline as well so you’ll not only get targeted traffic but you’ll also get a link back to your website.

Try to set a schedule for yourself where you’re writing at least 3 articles a week. By continuing to write and keeping a high profile, you can generate as many as 100 targeted visitors to your site a day. Remember that statistics show that only 1 out of every 100 people will be likely to purchase your affiliate product so attempt to get as many targeted visitors to your site as possible.

These tips are not at all difficult to follow and achieve. It all depends upon your commitment to your affiliate business. By
using these tips for several of your websites you can end up making a good source of income for you and your family as well as surviving in this business which not many online marketers tend to do.

I receive many newsletters on a daily basis as I’m sure you probably do too.

Some of them really surprise me though. Not with the new and impressive information that they provide but with the sheer ignorance of what is published!

Today, I received some information about search engine optimization which is of course, right up my alley, so I thought I’d read this particular article. This person had also been “featured” by two very major publications (which in my opinion is either completely false or the publications just didn’t know better - my guess is the latter).

But as I read this article, I was in total and complete shock!

Not only did this person recommend creating doorway pages - which are pages created strictly for the search engines and not for the site visitors, but they also suggested that when you finished with these pages, you submit these pages to the search engines!

Not only is submitting your pages to search engines completely unnecessary, but this person was recommending that you submit your “doorway” pages to them.

What probably upset me the most was that this person was being touted as an “authority” on the subject of search engine optimization.

Never, ever create your website or webpages for a search engine. Always create them for the site visitor. And you don’t have to submit your website to the search engines. All you need to do is find another website who is already listed in Google link to you. Your link will get followed naturally and your site will then get searched and thus indexed.

I had to share a story with you today because I know this is happening to a lot of unwary webmasters all of the time.This is something that happened to one of my clients last week and after consulting with him, I realized that this information really needs to be shared more often than it is.
Now, working in the SEO world, I know that there are quite a few unscrupulous companies out there who try to earn your business by implementing what I call a “confusion” technique.Let me elaborate with my client’s story…

They had registered a domain name a couple of years ago and had created their website on their own. They came to me for some SEO help because they were still not seeing the listing results that they liked.

As I consulted with my client, he had told me that he received a phone call from a company that will remain nameless, promising (in otherwords guaranteeing) that they could get his website in one of the top 10 positions in Google.

He asked them how they did that and they responded that by using Google AdWords you could get in the top positions of Google’s organic results.

My client was a little confused about the terminology - and thankfully he came to me before falling for this typical and widespread ploy on unwary site owners.

I explained to him that first and foremost, Google AdWords were those ads placed on the top and right-hand side of Google’s search engine results page.

If you go ahead and type in anything at all on the Google search page, you’ll see these ads readily populate along the side of the page and oftentimes on the top of the page as well.

These are ads that you pay for. Advertisers, small businesses, large businesses, they all have to pay Google a price to be listed in those positions.

The rest of the results on the page are what are called the “Organic” listings. These are the listings that legitimate SEO firms will do their darndest to get you into. Ideally on the first page and even more ideally within the top 3 positions.

These are the “free” listings. Now, obviously if you pay an SEO firm to optimize your website you don’t consider it a ‘free’ listing - but you don’t pay a price everytime someone clicks on your link like you do with Google AdWords.
In a nutshell, this particular (will remain nameless) firm was hoping that my client didn’t know the difference between being on the first page of Google in an ad or in the natural results - which he didn’t.

Thankfully he asked me first.

Never, ever, ever believe it when someone tells you that they can guarantee you a top spot on a search engine. In a little while I’ll be posting a video on this by Matt Cutts a Google software engineer that touches on this subject.

Please beware of these kinds of scam artists and remember, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.