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Affiliate Marketing 101 – Plugins For Your Affiliate Marketing Blog

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://Affiliate-Marketing-Domination.com.
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

As you’re setting up your blog, certain plugins should be added to make your affiliate marketing web site as powerful as possible. Since you only really have full control of your blog plugins on self-hosted blogs, when you start affiliate marketing you want to set up your own WordPress blog on your own hosting account.

Assuming you’ve installed your new blog, it’s time to decide which plugins you’ll want to include to help automate some of your affiliate marketing tasks. No doubt you’d like to start earning affiliate commissions as quickly as possible, so the more you can automate your systems without needing to become too technical the better!

The success of your affiliate marketing blog is dependent on targeted traffic, so the most important plugins are all going to be used to aid in that cause. First, you’ll want to make sure the search engines are aware of every posting you make, so one of the various Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugins is the first to install. These usually control your title, keyword and description tags and sometimes the URL chosen for each post, so be sure to pick one and install it before you make even your first post to your affiliate blog.

Once your audience and the search engines find your affiliate marketing web site, you’ll want them all to be able to find everything you have for them there. For that, use 1 or 2 plugins designed to create sitemaps. The search engines will want to follow an RSS feed while the visitors will want a simple linking structure, so be sure whichever plugins you use create both an HTML sitemap and an XML sitemap. You don’t need to know the differences or the technical aspects – just be sure your affiliate marketing blogs are sporting both.

You can also get both direct traffic and search engine friendly backlinks to each post using plugins. Use one to notify your Twitter followers each time you post, and be sure your visitors see buttons they can use to let their followers know about your post through Web 2.0 sites like Twitter, Google Buzz and FaceBook at the very minimum. Numerous variations exist of plugins that will link to your affiliate marketing web site from the social bookmarking sites as well, so take time to explore a few and choose the one that’s best for your particular strategies.

Those are the basic plugins you’ll want installed for your affiliate marketing blogs, and with the advances in today’s WordPress system they all install with push-button simplicity – if you’re not familiar with how to install them either check the help files at WordPress.org or search for how-to help at directories like Google or YouTube.

As you become more experienced as an affiliate blogger, you’ll want to install plugins for your audio and video files too, to help attract targeted traffic from the podcasting and vlogging worlds as well – these are huge additional lead sources you may be able to tap into using your affiliate marketing blogs as you advance.

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Marketing mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny has been teaching companies new marketing strategies since the 1970′s, having owned and operated his own retail advertising agency before transferring to marketing online full-time since 1996. A recognized expert in how to market a product online or offline and master of these new online marketing strategies, Doug Champigny is the creator of the PowerStart Internet Marketing coaching program and the PowerStart Affiliate Marketing coaching program, and is occasionally available for private 1-on-1 consultations and mentoring as well.

Doug is a regular speaker at many of the live marketing events and conventions around North America – watch for him speaking live onstage in your area soon! In the meantime, for more help getting started as an affiliate, see the Affiliate Marketing 101 lens on Squidoo and the Start Affiliate Marketing info at WetPaint.

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Affiliate Marketing 101 – Search Engine Optimization Tips For Affiliate Marketing Web Sites

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://affiliate-marketing-domination.com.
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

These days, the most intelligent way to build your affiliate marketing web site is with a self-hosted WordPress blog, since much of your design and ongoing maintenance are automated on affiliate marketing blogs. But just as with static web sites, it’s vitally important that you properly manage the search engine optimization (SEO) on your affiliate marketing web site.

First, pay particular attention to the title of each post you make, being sure your target keywords or keyword phrase are prominent in the title itself. This is especially true for affiliate marketing blogs, since the title of the post is usually also used as the URL for that page and you’ll want the search engines finding those keywords both in the title and the URL to give you the best possible shot at high search engine rankings. Remember that Google, Yahoo, Bing and the smaller engines rate pages, not sites, so it’s important that every page be optimized for the keywords that particular page is targeting.

Next, using appropriate plugins be sure you’ve chosen the right tags and description for the page. Again these can affect your affiliate marketing blog’s position on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Further, many engines display your description of the page, so you want it to be enticing to your target market in the hopes of having your prospects click through and visit your blog.

Understand and utilize the current SEO practices when writing your content – most search engines provide plenty of information on how they rank the pages they index. And while it’s important to use your keywords or keyword phrases in your copy for each post, never lose site of the fact that you’re writing your posts for your prospects, not the search engines.

When you’ve gone to the effort to bring targeted traffic to your affiliate marketing web site you want them to be pleasantly surprised at the amount of quality content, ease of navigation and the gentle flow of ideas that leads them merrily along their way to buying the products at the other end of your affiliate links. Your affiliate marketing pay will be negligible or non-existent if you’ve written your posts strictly to rank well in the SERPs and your target audience find it difficult to read or follow.

Finally, make sure you’ve also included your page’s target keywords in the alt tags of any images that accompany the text, in the links to that page from other pages on the blog, and in any description or summary you offer of the page for your index and/or RSS feeds. Get in the habit of doing at least this much SEO for each and every post or page on your affiliate marketing blogs.

Trying to remember and incorporate all of this while still keeping your pages strong for your targeted viewers may seem like quite a trick at first, but with regular practice it can become second nature and can result in a powerful and profitable affiliate marketing web site for you as it builds over time.

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Affiliate marketing mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny has been teaching companies new marketing strategies since the 1970′s, having owned and operated his own retail advertising agency before transferring to marketing online full-time since 1996. A recognized expert in how to market a product online or offline and master of these new online marketing strategies, Doug Champigny is the creator of the PowerStart Marketing coaching program and the Affiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching program, and is occasionally available for private 1-on-1 consultations and mentoring as well.

Doug is a regular speaker at many of the live marketing events and conventions around North America – watch for him speaking live onstage in your area soon! In the meantime, for more help getting started as an affiliate, see the Affiliate Marketing 101 lens on Squidoo and the Start Affiliate Marketing info at WetPaint.

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Affiliate Marketing 101: Now You Have To Work For A Living!

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://affiliate-marketing-domination.com
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Affiliate marketing is rapidly becoming one of the primary and premier ways to start your own home business online, but far too many people start affiliate marketing for the wrong reason – they’ve been led to believe that it’s a great way to make money online with very little effort involved. Boy, are they in for a surprise!

In reality, there are a great and growing number of people who do make a lot of affiliate commissions every month, and affiliate marketing may well be the number one way to make money online today. But those affiliates who are succeeding, especially those making the biggest commissions, are working much harder than the employees of the average corporation.

So where does the confusion stem from? In part from over-zealous marketers all trying to portray their products as easy, as resources that reduce your affiliate workload greatly. And while some products and services are of major help, there’s still a lot of effort required for online success, especially when you first start affiliate marketing and haven’t made a name for yourself yet.

Another major reason is the broad scope covered by the word ‘easy’. If you’ve been slugging cement blocks around a construction site for the last few years, sitting at a computer to work from home might seem really easy. If you’ve been a teacher trying to deal with today’s undisciplined youth, you might find the peace and quiet of working from home very easy.

If your current position has you living out of a suitcase and eating airport food as a regular diet, you might find being at home to work very easy. And if you’ve spent the ten years since they mapped the human genome trying to use that information to cure any major illness, you’ll definitely find the challenges of affiliate marketing easier!

But don’t confuse easy with no effort needed. While affiliate marketing isn’t rocket science but mostly rather a series of simple steps repeated over and over again, you do have to take those steps and keep at them. There are a number of ways to build residual income online, and a number of emerging technologies that put a lot of the steps on autopilot for you, but these benefit the pros who’ve been at this the longest and have already built a name for themselves, a large responsive opt-in list and a virtual empire of online resources – not the person just looking to start affiliate marketing.

But don’t worry – if you get started now and really work at it consistently, persevere through the toughest startup period and stick to the basics that have proven over and over again to be most effective, you too can one day be one of the pros who know how to make money online while using affiliate marketing to fund our dream lifestyle – there’s still plenty of room here at the top online!

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Affiliate marketing mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny has been teaching companies new marketing strategies since the 1970′s, having owned and operated his own retail advertising agency before transferring to marketing online full-time since 1996. A recognized expert in how to market a product online or offline and master of these new online marketing strategies, Doug Champigny is the creator of the PowerStart Marketing coaching program and the Affiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching program, and is occasionally available for private 1-on-1 consultations and mentoring as well.

Doug is a regular speaker at many of the live marketing events and conventions around North America – watch for him speaking live onstage in your area soon! In the meantime, for more help getting started as an affiliate, see the Affiliate Marketing 101 lens on Squidoo and the Start Affiliate Marketing info at WetPaint.

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Every day professional affiliate marketers and super-affiliates receive dozens, often hundreds, of e-mails touting this or that as the ‘most powerful affiliate marketing resource ever created’. While many, even most of these tools and resources may be truly beneficial to you in your online quest, none is even remotely close to your most valuable and powerful affiliate marketing resource – your own brain!

This isn’t about your mental capacity to handle the day-to-day operations of your online business; let’s assume that’s not an issue since you’re obviously able to read and comprehend this article, ok? Most routine affiliate marketing tasks are fairly simple, merely requiring repetition on a regular basis.

But the creative abilities of your brain can make you a super-star online if you manage to harness your creative abilities and focus them on your various efforts. Think for a moment about the e-mails you received today… How many had an imaginative and clever subject line that got you to open the e-mail and read it?

How many of those e-mails were sufficiently imaginative to get you to take action, to click through on the link to read on? And the pages those links took you to – how many had a sufficiently creative headline that intrigued you, involved you and go you to read the entire page. And if you read the entire page, did it inspire you to take their desired action? Did you join the mailing list or purchase the product? If it was a blog post, did it get you sufficiently motivated that you left a comment, bookmarked the site or picked up it’s RSS feed?

Right there you’ll recognize the recipe for success in affiliate marketing – and see the value in being creative instead of one more ‘me-too’ copycat marketer. Successful affiliates think outside the box – super-affiliates don’t acknowledge that the box even exists. While they’re quick to note what’s working and what isn’t in their own efforts and affiliate marketing in general, they simply absorb it, alter their parameters to incorporate the new materials and go on creating their own unique affiliate strategies.

So before you buy another tool, pay for another resource, join another site or even send out another affiliate marketing offer, do a self-diagnostic examination to be sure you’re already using your number one affiliate marketing tool to it’s fullest, and best, capacity!

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A recognized expert in how to market a product online or offline and master of these new affiliate marketing strategies, Doug Champigny is the creator of the Affiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching program and offers private 1-on-1 consultations and mentoring as well. Doug provides more information on starting your own affiliate marketing business at the Start Affiliate Marketing site. Marketing mentor Doug Champigny is a regular speaker at many of the live marketing events and conventions around North America – watch for him speaking live onstage in your area soon!

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Affiliate Marketing 101: Super-Affiliate Success Comes From Affiliate Marketing Systems, Not Tricks

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://affiliate-marketing-domination.com
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Affiliate marketing is a business like any other in many ways, and so it attracts the same wide variety of people that other industries do – possibly even more so, since affiliate marketing enjoys a world-wide audience. So like every category of business since the dawn of our race, some might stretch the truth a little further than others, to be polite about it…

Look through your inbox if you’re already into affiliate marketing or even just starting to check it out as a possible business venture. How many of the subject lines are for products and resources being hailed as the next ultimate solution? How many affiliate marketers and online merchants are trying to make you think their recommendation is an ‘easy button’ – a solution to all your online problems, some set-and-forget trick that will bring you a massive affiliate income with no effort on your part? They may not say it in so many words, but you recognize the intent to position it that way, don’t you?

You’ll never see that from a super-affiliate. They recognize that they want – and need – to do business with you long term if they want to maintain their standard of living, so they avoid setting you up for obvious disappointment in what they promote. Instead they’ll tell you what the tool or resource does, how it can help you, and leave it up to you whether it’s right for your business or not. After all, with tens or hundreds of thousands of marketers on their e-zine list, they know any given tool is only right for a percentage of their readers at any given time.

So don’t be one of the affiliate marketing newbies who hops from product to product hoping to find that ‘magic button’ – for all the hype from some quarters, there is no ‘trick’ to affiliate marketing success. It comes from learning the promotional systems that work currently in your chosen niche and using those to promote only top-quality, useful products that you truly believe can help your readers. Systems like building your e-zine list with targeted prospects at all times, maintaining regular contact with your readers, providing a good ratio of content to sales pitches, etc.

Starting as you go through your inbox today, identify which marketers are hyping you and which are pointing you to helpful resources, not designed to be an easy button but just to help in some part of what you’re doing online in your affiliate marketing. Unsubscribe from the former and give that extra time and attention to the latter – and learn how to build successful affiliate marketing systems of your own!

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Marketing mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny has been teaching companies new marketing strategies since the 1970’s, having owned and operated his own retail advertising agency before transferring to marketing online full-time since 1996. A recognized expert in how to market a product online or offline and master of these new marketing strategies, Doug Champigny is the creator of the PowerStart Marketing coaching program at http://www.PowerStart2010.com and the Affiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching program at http://www.affiliate-marketing-powerstart.info and is occasionally available for private 1-on-1 consultations and mentoring as well. Doug is a regular speaker at many of the live marketing events and conventions around North America – watch for him speaking live onstage in your area soon!

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Affiliate Marketing 101: Too Many Voices In Your Head To Succeed In Affiliate Marketing?

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://affiliate-marketing-domination.com.
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Affiliate marketing takes a clear mind, a clear agenda and a clear focus on the tasks at hand. So if you’re not making it as an affiliate marketer, it may just be that you have too many voices in your head. This doesn’t refer to schizophrenic tendencies, nor even to your conscience or ‘that little voice’ one often hears referred to.

For the most part, the voices in your head that lead to failure in affiliate marketing can be organized into three groups – the naysayers who don’t believe anyone can make money online, concerned friends and family members who know nothing of affiliate marketing but must offer their advice anyway, and the other affiliates and marketing mentors you’ve chosen to follow. Let’s take a look at all three groups with an eye to seeing how they’re leading you away from affiliate marketing success.

The first group, the naysayers, know little or nothing about affiliate marketing, though they’ll probably claim to be experts on the subject. They’ll tell you how they, or someone they know, did everything right for the longest time and made nothing, thus leaving them knowing that online marketing is all a sham. Attend any live internet marketing event and that viewpoint will quickly be dashed for you – in fact you’ll be amazed by how many successful affiliates there are online. What this group is really saying is that they, or their friends, weren’t capable of succeeding online. Avoid these people like the plague – they’re a drain on your energy and mindset.

The second group, your family and friends, probably DO have your best interests at heart. But unless they have a good understanding of online business, their decisions and advice will be based on their own experiences offline, which won’t be relevant just as often as it will be. You can’t avoid your loved ones – and shouldn’t – but you need to either ask them not to advise you on affiliate marketing or learn to let in ‘go in one ear and out the other’ as the popular saying goes.

The toughest collection of voices to deal with are the other affiliates and affiliate marketing mentors you’ve chosen to follow. Assuming you’ve chosen well, each is living proof that you can succeed at affiliate marketing, but each will be giving you different advice, often advice that contradicts what others are saying. Is someone right and someone wrong? Not necessarily…

The problem is there are many roads to the top, paths that you can follow to become a successful affiliate marketer. But you have to choose one path and walk it til you succeed – you can’t expect to take a bit of one system, a trifle of another and bits of a third and make it work for you. While you might get lucky that way, it’s far more prudent to follow a proven path til you reach a certain level before trying to modify it extensively. Wait til your own expertise is up to the task or you could be sabotaging your affiliate efforts without knowing it.

The solution here is to follow the advice on ONE mentor or advisor, the one that seems to you to be the closest in style and training methods to your own style and learning methods. Some people learn best by being shown, others by doing it themselves. Some people are Type A personalities and tend to be gung-ho in business, others prefer a more laid back style. Look for an affiliate marketing mentor that matches your style and follow their advice til you reach success in affiliate marketing. Then and only then can you let the rest of the voices have their say – because by then you’ll be an expert and in a position to judge for yourself who can and can’t help you increase your success online!

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Marketing mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny has been teaching companies new marketing strategies since the 1970′s, having owned and operated his own retail advertising agency before transferring to marketing online full-time since 1996. A recognized expert in how to market a product online or offline and master of these new marketing strategies, Doug Champigny is the creator of the PowerStart Marketing coaching program at http://www.PowerStart2010.com and the Affiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching program at http://www.affiliate-marketing-powerstart.info and is occasionally available for private 1-on-1 consultations and mentoring as well. Doug is a regular speaker at many of the live marketing events and conventions around North America – watch for him speaking live onstage in your area soon!

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