How to Blend Adsense Ads with Your Website
Adsense is a wonderful opportunity for you to generate additional income for your website. It doesn’t cost you anything is the best part! Adsense is also very simple. You have to complete an application with Google and be accepted to host advertisements for other businesses.
Then you simply add lines of code to the html on the pages of the website where you are willing to have advertisements. With that all in place, how do you blend the Adsense Ads into your website so they don’t stick out like a sore thumb? You don’t want them to distract the consumer from what you are offering on your website.
You may not be aware of it, but you have a lot of say in how the advertisements are placed on your website including the placement, format, color, and style. There are many places on a website to put Adsense Ads.
Some prefer to place it on the top of the page and others like the bottom of the page. Along either side of the text for your website is convenient too. Since we read from left to right, the right side is more common as it will attract attention as the eyes move across the page.
According to Google Adsense, the most effective location is at the top of the page because the entire ad can be seen. Often parts of it are hidden when on the sides unless the mouse is used to scroll over the information.
This can be distracting to the consumer and lose the effectiveness of the advertisement. They also recommend using different colors for the ads to differentiate it from your website materials, but to use colors that compliment each other.
The format can be modified to make it different or the same as your website. Some advertisement hosts like everything to be in the same style and size to give a symmetrical look to the pages. Others like to have their information completely distinct from the advertisements.
Both are effective so it is only a matter of personal preference as to how you want your website to appear. Colors including the background can be changed to make everything work together well. You might have to experience a little to come up with the right design you are happy with.
You want to blend the Adsense ads enough that they look natural appearing on your website rather than appearing to be out of place. If they don’t look natural they can be distracting to the consumer. They also won’t be effective because consumers don’t trust what doesn’t look professional when it comes to the internet.
This could be damaging to your own sales on your website so pay close attention to this issue. It is a good idea to ask some others for feedback on how the information appears to them on your website. You should avoid placing ads to where they appear to be banners.
Adsense offers you some useful tools as well to get everything to blend. The Google Adsense Preview tools allows you to test the layout of your website with the ads in place. This gives you the opportunity to change anything that is ineffective before your consumers view in over the internet. You can also contact their customer support 24/7 for questions or concerns you may have.
Adsense is a great way for your website to generate additional income by offering to host advertisements for other businesses with similar products and services to offer consumers. You are still in control of the layout and design of your website.
What makes the idea of participating in Adsense more appealing is the fact you have the ability to change the color, format, and style of the ads placed on your website.
source: how-to-make-money-online.info
The Five Golden Rules of Email Marketing
By Mark Thompson
If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: “The Money Is in the List.” However, that trite, often-repeated phrase doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s just that “The Money is in a Well-Managed, Well-Maintained, and Properly Nurtured Responsive List” doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?
You can have as big a list as you want, but it if’s not responsive, it’s going to waste a lot of your time. I saw an ad yesterday for someone offering to send emails out to a list of 40,000 subscribers. As part of the sales page, he showed the number of emails that were opened for each mailing.
I was surprised that the figure was around 1,500. Also, the ad claimed that the average income from each mailing was $416. I would seriously expect to earn more than that from a small list of 200-300 loyal subscribers if I sent them an offer.
Maintaining a list of responsive subscribers is not about size; it’s all about how it’s used. (Sound familiar?) To that end, here is a list of five “golden rules” that will help you to build, manage, and maintain a responsive list.
Golden Rule #1: Use Double Opt-in and a Reliable Autoresponder
Always use double opt-ins when building your list. A double opt-in ensures that a person on your list has confirmed that they want to be there. I am sure you have subscribed by this method lots of times. You subscribe to a list, and then you receive another email with a link asking you to click it to confirm you want to subscribe.
This may seem annoying at times, but if you are a list owner, it is vital to ensure that you don’t run afoul of CAN-SPAM or other email marketing laws. It’s difficult for a person to accuse you of spamming them when they’ve indicated that they want you to mail them.
It’s often possible to find free tools that do most things that Internet marketers want. Unfortunately, autoresponders are one area in which this isn’t the case. One of the important metrics by which autoresponder companies differentiate themselves is delivery rates. They monitor these rates, and ensure they remain high, by developing long-term relationships with hosting companies and with companies like AOL and Yahoo. If emails are not being delivered, they find out why and rectify the problem.
If your emails aren’t being delivered, you aren’t going to make any money, and if you use a free autoresponder, you will have very low delivery rates. If you also use the autoresponder that comes with your hosting, you stand the risk of having all of your emails, not just those from your mailing list, flagged as spam and blacklisted. If you are serious about email marketing, get a
professional autoresponder.
Golden Rule #2: Be Relevant
A few months ago during a mentoring session, one of the new people who had joined the group asked me if I knew why he
wasn’t getting any sales from a list of 1,500 subscribers he had built up over the past three months. The first clue to the problem came when I asked him where I could sign up to the list, he said, “Oh go to any of my sites and you’ll see the form.” The problem was immediately obvious.
He had sites on baseball, prostate cancer, skin care, classical French cooking, and a dozen other niche sites. He was sending all the subscribers the same emails. To top it off, he was then trying to sell them high-ticket Internet marketing products. Your lists must be sent relevant information. If you have a list of subscribers who signed up for your weight loss
tips, then ensure you send them emails that relate to weight loss. Sending to a list anything other than what those subscribers
expect to receive will just lead to your losing subscribers.
Golden Rule #3: Nurture Your List
Once you build your list, you need to look after it and get the list members to relate to you. The big mistake most marketers make is that they immediately start sending out offers and trying to sell things. It has been estimated that it takes about 10 emails before the recipient trusts and relates to you.
Start off by sending out relevant tips and advice. For instance, it can often help to point them to free resources. Try to avoid
blatantly selling in any of your early emails; instead, focus on letting them get to know you. Share anecdotes and information
about your life and build empathy. Obviously, if you have a list of vegetarians, don’t talk about the BBQ and juicy steak you had last weekend!
Once you have built up a rapport with your list subscribers, then you can begin sending them offers and deals. However, don’t
send offers with every email; continue to give value to the list members. If you find you have a lot of people unsubscribing after
you send an email, you need to send more quality emails and start to build trust again.
Golden Rule #4: Have a Plan before You Start
I am sure that most people have fallen into the trap of thinking that they need to build a list and start building with no thought about how they are going to monetize it. List building and maintenance is timeconsuming, so you need to be sure you have a monetization plan from the start.
Have a look around and see if you can find several products that you could happily recommend to a list before you start building it. If the niche is so small that you are going to struggle to find products to promote or people to join your list, move on to something else.
Try to be unique; don’t promote the same products that everyone else is promoting. If you feel you have to promote a popular product that is being promoted by several marketers, get in there first. Send out prelaunch emails and presell the product. Offer bonuses if you need to. Just try to avoid emailing after everyone else.
Golden Rule #5: Manage Your List
So now you have a profitable list, you’ve built a rapport with your subscribers, and every offer you send out makes you money. Well done, but don’t rest on your laurels. You now have an opportunity to turn your responsive list into a hyper-responsive one by managing your list.
A quality autoresponder company will give you lots of stats about each email you send out. You can use this information to split your list into subgroups — those people who you know are buyers, those who have clicked the links but didn’t buy, those who just read your email, and those who didn’t even open your email.
The ones who don’t open the email could have just missed it, or perhaps they didn’t like the title, so you can try a different title and email them again a few days later. The buyers on your list are like gold dust; you now know what products they like, and that they aren’t afraid to buy a product online.
By managing your list, you can build several sublists and target them with the type of emails to which they respond. This is where the real money is.
By developing your mailing list and not just building it, you can ensure that you have a valuable resource that can earn you several thousand dollars a month. If you take only one thing away from this article, it should be that it’s not just good enough to build a big list; you need to build a responsive list.
About the Author
Mark Thompson spent many years working in an IT consultancy in London. Following a re-evaluation of his goals and lifestyle in 2004, he sold everything he couldn’t fit into the family car and moved to rural Spain, where he now pursues a variety of online ventures. Visit his website http://www.income-academy.com to learn more about the benefits of his low-cost online business coaching.
Tips to Help Drive Amazon Prime Traffic
You still have until October 31, 2008 to earn $12 for each new Amazon Prime Free Trial member referred via the Amazon Associates program (subject to program terms ). Amazon Prime is a popular Amazon.com program that gives its members unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping on millions of eligible items. All new members are offered a free trial, allowing them to experience the convenience of shopping with Amazon Prime benefits for an entire month at no charge.
Read on for tips to help you effectively promote Amazon Prime and earn more referral fees today!
Three Tips for Driving More Amazon Prime Referrals
1. Make Amazon Prime a regular part of your posts by promoting the program in conjunction with products available on Amazon.com. If you’re promoting a product, let your readers know that it’s available with Free Two Day shipping from Amazon Prime.* Include a reference to Amazon Prime with product mentions and you’ll receive a bounty for any signups driven directly through your Amazon Prime links.
Example: “Check out Thomas Friedman’s newly released Hot, Flat and Crowded (available on Amazon.com with Free Two-Day Shipping from Amazon Prime ). Great book…”
2. Write about the Amazon Prime Free Trial offer and about the Amazon Prime program— check out the “What is Amazon Prime?” section below for program highlights. For added relevance, try Amazon Prime yourself and write about your experiences. (An Associate’s personal enrollment in Prime does not qualify for the $12 bounty.)
3. Post Amazon Prime banners on pages where you promote items that can be purchased on Amazon.com.
*Not all products are eligible for Amazon Prime shipping benefits, so please confirm that the product is eligible by looking for Free Two-Day Shipping messaging on the product’s detail page on Amazon.com.
What is Amazon Prime?
Amazon Prime is a popular Amazon.com program that gives its members unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping on millions of eligible items. All new members are offered a free trial, allowing them to experience the convenience of shopping with Amazon Prime benefits for an entire month at no charge.
Amazon Prime members enjoy the following benefits:
* Fast Delivery
* Simple Shopping
* Convenient Sharing
* Free Trial
Earnings
Associates can now earn $12 for each eligible customer sent directly from a banner or special link to the Amazon Prime signup page who subsequently enrolls in an Amazon Prime Free Trial (subject to program terms).
How do I Promote Amazon Prime?
There are two ways to promote Amazon Prime as part of this program:
1) Build a link to the Amazon Prime page, using the link below as your template (just replace your Associate ID):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/subs/primeclub/signup/extmain.html?ref=prime_assoc_bt&tag=YourIDHere-20
2) Place an Amazon Prime banner graphic on your website including ones shown here:
Why You Should Promote Residual Affiliate Programs
Are you a webmaster in need of additional income? Or are you planning to set up an online business but you still don’t have any product to sell? If so, affiliate marketing may be the best solution for your problems. With affiliate marketing, you won’t need to worry about the products you have to sell. All you need to have is a website with sufficient contents that are related to the products of a certain online company offering affiliate programs. By becoming a member of the program, or by becoming an affiliate, you can start earning a certain amount of money right away!
Affiliate marketing is some sort of business relationship established between a merchant and his affiliates. In affiliate marketing, an affiliate agrees to direct some traffic to a merchant’s website. If that traffic is converted into some kind of action, like a visitor purchasing a product on the merchant’s website or a visitor becoming a lead for the company, the affiliate who directed the traffic will be compensated. Compensation may take the form of either a percentage sales commission for the sales generated or a fixed fee predetermined upon the application of the affiliate on the merchant’s affiliate program.
Promising a lot of benefits both for the merchants and the affiliates, affiliate marketing has become one of the most popular online marketing methods today. In fact, almost every merchant or retailer site today offers an affiliate program that any one can join into. Most retailers would entice people to become affiliates or members of their program by promising great benefits like large commissions, lifetime commissions, click through incomes and a lot of other benefits. But would all these affiliate programs bring off the same benefits?
Most affiliate programs would pay you, as an affiliate, a one-time commission for every sale or lead you brought to the merchant’s website. Commissions for this kind of affiliate programs are usually large, ranging from 15% to a high of about 60%. Other affiliate programs would pay you a fixed fee for every click through or traffic you send to the merchant’s site. Programs like this often pay a smaller fee for every click through, usually not getting any larger than half a dollar. The good thing about this kind of program, however, is that the visitor won’t have to purchase anything in order for the affiliate to get compensated.
Another type of affiliate program is the residual income affiliate program. Residual affiliate programs usually pay only a small percentage of sales commission for every sale directed by the affiliate to the merchant’s site. This commission often comes only in the range of 10% to 20% sales commission. Because of this, many people ignore residual affiliate program and would rather opt for the high paying one-time commission affiliate program. Are these people making a mistake, or are they making the right decision?
We can’t tell, for sure, if people are making a mistake by choosing a high paying one-time commission affiliate program. But we can definitely say that they are making a large mistake if they ignore residual affiliate programs. Residual affiliate programs would indeed pay at a lower rate, but merchants offering such kind of programs would generally pay you regular and ongoing commissions for a single affiliate initiated sale! That means, for the same effort you made in promoting a particular affiliate program, you get paid only once in a one-time commission program, and a regular and ongoing commission for a residual program!
So, are the benefits of promoting residual affiliate programs clearer to you now? Or are they still vague? If they are still vague, then let’s make them a bit clearer with this example.
Suppose there are two online merchants both offering web hosting services on their sites. The first merchant offers a one-time commission type of affiliate program that pays $80 for every single affiliate initiated sale. The second merchant also offers an affiliate program, but this time a residual affiliate program that pays only $10 for every single affiliate initiated sale. As an affiliate, we may get attracted at once at what the first merchant is offering, as $80 is definitely a lot larger than $10. But by thinking things over before actually getting into them, one may be able to see that the second merchant is offering us more opportunity to earn a larger amount of money.
Supposed you have directed traffic to the merchant and it converted into a sale, you’ll get paid once by the first merchant for the sale you have initiated. But with the second merchant, you’ll get paid monthly for as long as the customer you have referred to the merchant continues to avail of the web hosting service. That means that for the same effort of getting one customer to avail of the merchant’s service, you get paid monthly in residual affiliate programs while you only get paid once in a one-time commission type of affiliate programs.
So, are residual affiliate programs worth promoting? Definitely yes, because you virtually get more money from these types of affiliate programs in the long run! And would residual affiliate programs work best for you? Probably not, probably yes. It is not really for me to tell. But with the benefits that residual affiliate marketing can provide, it would really be unwise to ignore such programs.
source: affiliate-blog.info
Why So Many People Fail In Affiliate Marketing
More and More people are lured into affiliate marketing and you might be one of them. Indeed, affiliate marketing is one of the most effective means of generating a full-time income through the Internet. It’s a fair deal between the merchandiser and his affiliates as both benefit from each sale materialized. Like in other kinds of business, a great deal of the profits in affiliate marketing depends on the affiliate’s advertising, promoting and selling strategies. Everyday, as affiliate marketing industry expands, competition heightens as well so an affiliate marketer must be creative enough to employ unique and effective ways to convince potential buyers to purchase or avail of the products and services offered.
Compared to traditional advertising practices, affiliate programs are more effective, risk-free and cost-efficient. But why do many people still fail in affiliate marketing? There are a lot of reasons and a lot of areas in the program to look into. The most critical aspect in the affiliate program is advertising. Many affiliate marketers fail in this aspect because they lack hard work, which is the most important thing in affiliate marketing and in all other kinds of business as well. Although it pays to be lucky, you cannot merely rely on it. Affiliate marketing isn’t as simple as directing customers to the business site. If you want to earn big, of course, you have to invest time and great amount of hard work in promoting the products. As earlier mentioned, the competition is very high and customers nowadays are very wise, too. After all, who doesn’t want to get the best purchase—that is, to pay less and get more in terms of quantity and quality.
Lack of preparation is also a reason why one fails in affiliate marketing, whether he is a merchandiser or an affiliate. Part of the preparation is researching. On the part of the merchant, he has to be highly selective in choosing the right affiliate websites for his affiliate program. In order to be sure he has the best choices, he must have exhausted his means in looking for highly interested affiliates whose sites are sure fit to his products and services. The affiliate site’s visitors must match his targeted customers. On the other hand, the affiliate marketer must likewise research on the good-paying merchandisers before he signs up for an affiliate program. He must ensure that the merchants’ products and services match his interests so he can give his full attention and dedication to the program. He can get valuable information by joining affiliate forums, comparing different affiliate programs and reading articles on affiliate marketing where he can get tips from experienced affiliate marketers on how to choose the best merchants and products with high conversion rate.
The website is a very important tool in the whole affiliate program. As an affiliate marketer, you should plan how your site is going to be, from domain name to the design, the lay-out, the content, and ads. Some users are particular about what they see at first glance and thus when they find your site ugly, they won’t read through the content even if your site has many things to say and offer. On the other hand, there those who want information more than anything else. Affiliate marketers with “rich-content” web sites are usually the ones who prosper in this business because the content improves traffic to the site. Websites with high quality contents—with relevant keywords and more importantly, right information about the product and not empty hyped-up advertisements—allow you to earn big in affiliate marketing even when you’re asleep. If you won’t be able to sustain the interest of your site visitor, you won’t be able to lead him to the merchants’ site. No click-through means no sale and thus, no income on your part.
Selecting a top level domain name is also crucial to the success of the affiliate program. Lots of affiliate sites don’t appear in the search engine results because they are deemed by affiliate managers as personal sites. Major search engines and directories would think of your site as transient ones and thus, they won’t list it in the directory. Before you decide on the domain name, know first what you are going to promote. Many fail because their sites are not appropriately named, so even when they feature the exact products the customer is looking for, the customer might think the site is not relevant and thus, won’t enter the site.
Above all, an affiliate marketer must be willing to learn more. Certainly, there are still a lot of things to learn and so an affiliate marketer must continue to educate himself so he can improve his marketing strategies. Many fail because they don’t grow in the business and they are merely concerned about earning big quickly. If you want long-term and highly satisfactory results, take time to learn the ins and outs of the business. Continue to improve your knowledge especially with the basics in affiliate marketing ranging from advertising to programming, web page development, and search engine optimization techniques. Likewise, study the needs and wants of your site users and how different merchandisers compete with each other.
Keep on trying; don’t get disappointed if your first attempts did not pay off. Thousands are attracted by the possibility of generating skyrocketing incomes through affiliate marketing and so they sign up in any affiliate program without carefully understanding every aspect of the business. When they don’t get instant results, they quit and sign up for another program and repeat the process of just copying links and referring them to others. When you sign up for an affiliate program, don’t expect to get rich in an instant. Work on your advertising strategies and be patient. You’ll never know how much you can get if you don’t persevere.
source: affiliate-blog.info
