SEO

I’ve been doing online affiliate marketing since 2002 and have noticed a worrying trend for affiliate marketers: Google doesn’t seem to like us as much as they used to.

Whether your affiliate business gets its traffic from pay per click, search engine optimisation, email marketing or social media, I’m sure you’ve found it’s getting a lot tougher than it used to. Google is cracking down on many affiliates both through SEO and PPC. People on social media are increasingly likely to report you as spam if you even hint at trying to sell them something and email delivery rates are pretty poor.

At the risk of causing you to set fire to my website (digitally, of course), may I suggest that you take your skills and begin to move beyond affiliate marketing? Build an actual, sustainable business that you have control over.

Yes I know it’s a little scary. Maybe you “don’t want to be bothered with all that customer support stuff”, maybe you still crave the “set and forget” business model. Maybe you just don’t think you’re any good. Hey, we’ve all been there.

It’s time to take some of those eggs out of your one basket and spread them out a little.

There are still fortunes being made in affiliate marketing, no doubt about that. But if the food being on your table is reliant on your affiliate income, that’s just not smart. I know a lot of people who do just that. They think that diversifying means getting traffic from another source.

It’s not.

If you’ve had some success with affiliate marketing, you already have a killer skill set. You are already at an advanced (maybe even expert) level at getting traffic to a website.

Use that.

Some ideas of extra business models you could add to your current affiliate model:

Offer your traffic getting skills to some local businesses for a fee. I’m sure they’d LOVE some of the visitors to their website that you could get them with little effort!
Create and sell your own products. Don’t create internet marketing products unless you’re truly elite (in which case why are you reading this? hehe). Build a product that competes with your current best selling affiliate program – you already know the market like the back of your hand and probably have all the funnels in place. The product can be one you write, or go to Odesk and get an ebook ghost written. Flesh it out with your own knowledge, understanding and research and make something you’d be proud to sell.
Write a blog. You’d be amazed at the benefits that can come from blogging, whether that’s

Full article at A Lot More Than Affiliate Marketing

For some inexplicable reason, “blogging” seems to be a taboo word to a lot of business owners. I’ll often suggest it as part of an ongoing business building strategy and the business owner will jump like I just zapped him or her with 1,000 volts of electricity!

People say things like:

“But I’m a businessman, not a writer”.
“Everyone knows you can’t make money running a blog”.
“Only hippies blog”.
“I don’t have time for that nonsense”.

It baffles me how people can still think this way. But I guess a lot of business people are still to get on “this internet thing”, so I shouldn’t be too surprised.

Let me put it to you this way:
If you’re not running a blog as part of your overall online business strategy, you should probably close your business now and get a job.
Bold statement? Yep

Care to prove me wrong? Didn’t think so

To paraphrase Blaise Pascal’s Wager:

If I’m wrong and it doesn’t make a difference to your business long term, what have you got to lose? A few hours that you would have spent watching TV or on Facebook.
If I’m right, what do you have to gain? Prosperity in a grand new world.
Come to your own conclusion.

As I’ve said before, both social and search marketing are transforming into a single entity. The pinnacle of that combined entity is blogging. It builds your home base, provides ample content to build your authority on Facebook and Twitter and generally builds the “I’ve Seen You Out There” factor.

Blogging, no matter your business, should be the focal point of all your marketing. It’s one of the easiest and best ways of distinguishing yourself from your competition and building your market dominance.

You might say “but I don’t have anything to write”. Yes you do. You’re an expert in your field aren’t you? Or at least pretty damn good at what you do? If you aren’t, you better get good at it or again, go get a job.

The way the world is going, the people who are really good at what they do will be successful, while everyone else will work for them.

My sister had really bad warts that no skin specialists could cure her of. After years of painful treatments she finally went to a great doctor who was

Read more about this at Blog Or Even Into Receivership

This is something that I can’t believe I haven’t heard other people talk about yet, but it’s so simple and easy to implement!

When you’re surfing the net, catching up on the news, reading your favourite blogs, etc – if they have a comment section, take an extra 2 minutes and comment on what you just read, linking back to your site.

So many people finish reading the blog post and just move on that it baffles me!

Leaving a comment does three things:

You get a link back to your site.
You build your network.
You make the writer feel more motivated to write.

It doesn’t get better than that.
You Get A Link Back To Your Site
If you’re like most people, you are already spending time and money building links to your site. Commenting on blogs in this way is an excellent way to give a bit of a boost with natural looking links. Of course the reason they look natural is because they are natural.

Sometimes we get so lost in checking for a high PageRank and dofollow that we lose sight of normality. Don’t worry if the blog post is a PageRank zero or whether the link to your site would be nofollowed. Don’t worry about putting keywords in the Name

Full article at SEO 101: Quickly Receive Links In Your Site