But can Google+ help your affiliate marketing business? Can Google+ help you make money online? Well, the jury is still out and today, I want you to listen to a podcast from the guys at Aweber.com who look at the question of what can Google+ do for your business?

This is a follow up report to one they released several months ago and back then, while there were some positives highlighted there were also negatives.

Remember, when something new comes along there will always be detractors but to be honest, the feedback I’ve seen has generally been positive and Google appears to be on the right track here.

Anyways, some of the questions answered in the podcast are:

- How can Google+ help grow your email list?
- What audience type can you expect?
- What content type works best for Google+?
- How can Google+ fit in with your affiliate marketing campaigns?

We made some predictions about Google+ – Google’s new social network – in a podcast a few months ago. What is this new network all about? And how does it compare to Facebook and Twitter for online marketing?

During our first podcast, Google+ was still in a limited beta release. It’s since opened to the public and made some changes to its many features. Now that it’s a new year, we wanted to follow up with our predictions from last year and include some new insights for integrating the social network with your email marketing campaign.

So what’s changed and what does it mean for your online marketing efforts?

How Google+ Has Changed

Google+ has seen some changes since its public release in September 2011. Among the more noticeable changes are:

- Brand pages – profiles designed especially for businesses. And just like personal profiles, brand pages come with Circles that allow you to segment and target your followers easily.

- Hangouts – Google+’s video chat feature – has seen significant improvements too, including screen sharing and the ability to broadcast your hangout to a bigger audience on YouTube.

- Another important change to note for content marketers out there: Posts on Google+ are now included in organic Google search results. In some cases, content from Google+ ranks above actual web sites and articles on the topic you’re searching for…..

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What are your thoughts about Google+? Have you started using it or are you reserving judgment?

It’s all part of the interactive internet we are seeing form before our eyes and one thing is for sure, it is not going to go away. I’d love to hear from you if you are using Google+ and how it is helping your affiliate marketing efforts.

Meanwhile, we talked about blog curation last week and it’s a topic I’ll be covering in more detail over the next few weeks. There is one mentor I’ve had in the past 12 months that knows more about this topic that most of the so called experts out there trying to teach it. His name is Harlan Kilstein. He’s tough and no nonsense and if that’s the type of teacher you want or need, then check out Harlan’s Blog Curation course.

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2. Affiliate Marketing Tips: How To Survive A Google Manual Review

In today’s post, I want you to look a little further and get something in place for next year. This will be in the shape of your own website. The idea here is to build at least two blogs, one for Christmas and one for Halloween. For now, get started with the Christmas blog and get some early rewards for 2011.

To be honest, I prepared for Christmas about three to four months into the year and have a blog right now that is doing several thousand unique visitors a week for some solid buying terms. It wasn’t even monetized until just recently and it’s been a case of planting a crop and simply nurturing and looking after it with daily posts, most of a news nature, and additional posts of a “how to” nature. It’s amazing the loving this blog has been given by the search engines. We’ll be looking at this over our next few posts.

But for now, seasonal affiliate marketing is something that is hot and doable by anyone. In fact, once you have your main properties in place, they can serve you year after year.

Angie Nelson has a blog theworkathomewife.com and recently posted some great tips for holiday affiliate marketing. Instead of producing a long post, I wanted to share her post with you and give some idea of what’s required. And she starts off with advising people to get a blog established as soon as possible.

Halloween shopping has been very good to me as an affiliate marketer. I didn’t have very high hopes in the beginning, but I didn’t have anything to lose. The last month has been one of my best when it comes to commission-based earnings as an affiliate. With more special dates right around the corner, it is a good time to pass along some tips for holiday affiliate marketing.

1. Claim Your Property – If you don’t yet have a blog that fits into the shopping niche, get that done as soon as possible. You need to allow some time to have your site crawled. We are not yet into November, so there is still time. Hop on over to GoDaddy and grab a domain. If you don’t yet have hosting, I recommend HostGator. It’s not a good idea to run over to Blogger for another free site. These sites are notoriously hard to rank out of the box. You are going to need that search traffic.

2. Keywords, Keywords, Keywords – Search traffic is likely going to be your lifeblood when it comes to holiday earnings. It was not my regular readers buying up Halloween costumes, it was the onslaught of search traffic coming my way. Hit up Google Keyword Tool and start digging…..

Click here to visit the original source of this post

Again, the first step is creating a blog which will act as your main base. When searching for a domain name, keep it themed in a broad sense for example, if it was Halloween I would look at something like halloweencostumetidbits.com or something like that. I haven’t even checked to see if that domain is available yet.:)

But the bottom line is, this is a site that might not do much this year but by the time next year comes along it will be “rocking and rolling” with a firm presence in the search engines and ready to make money in affiliate marketing for you.

James Martell is someone who has no peers when it comes to affiliate marketing success and could be described as one of the truly first successful affiliate marketers online. He hasn’t waned over the years in fact is still tops. Just ask affiliate managers from product and merchant facilitators like Commission Junction.

Martell has taught many successful affiliate marketing students over the years and his Affiliate Marketers Super Boot Camp will be about the last serious course you’ll need on how to make money wit Affiliate Marketing.

Click here to get more information on James Martell’s Affiliate Marketer’s Super Boot Camp.

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One of the things we like to do here is present different views from different experts and Steve Shaw at Submit Your Article certainly knows his stuff when it comes to tips on article marketing.

Okay, article marketing is just one part of the affiliate marketing equation and you might think that once you’ve heard a bunch of tips once that’s it; not quite. You see, you should never stop learning and there are still methods that I know I haven’t heard about that others incorporate into their article marketing. So no two articles will be the same unless someone completely copies someone else’ article.

The following article marketing tips from Steve will be completely new to many of you but they are great ways to get your creative juices flowing. The problem most face is coming up with ideas for articles. Staring into a blank computer screen is no fun. You don’t have to. The following tips will get those creative juices going.

Beginning an article is the hardest part. You’re looking at a blank page and wondering how in the world to get started.

Your mind may be drawing a blank, and the longer you sit there the more discouraged you can get.

Here are 5 things that you can do to help get your creative juices flowing:

1 – Use Ezine Articles’ Title Suggestion tool.

Sometimes just seeing a great title is enough to inspire you to write a new article.  It could be you’ve just thought about your topic so much that you’re missing some great topics.

If you haven’t used it yet, I highly recommend using Ezine Articles’ title suggestion tool. This is available for free to anyone who has an account there. The titles are supposed to be written by professional writers and keyword optimized.

You enter a keyword phrase, choose a category, and then the tool will come up with a list of suggested titles. It’s pretty cool–even if the title isn’t perfect for your exact niche, you can tweak it so that it is…..

Click here to visit the original source of this post

So, did you pick up anything new? Have you been having issues with how to come up with article ideas? Do you have some tips to share with others? We’d love to get your feedback so don’t be shy and leave a comment.

Meanwhile, we’ve been talking about the power of James Martell’s Affiliate Marketer’s Boot Camp over the past few weeks and if you haven’t had a chance to hear from James then what are you waiting for. There’s nothing to buy; just an introduction from James Martell to tell you a little about the course and then if you want to take it further.

Click here to check out James Martell’s Affiliate Marketer’s Super Boot Camp.

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3. What Articles Get Most Attention?

We are not going to go into niche selection or keyword selection as they kind of tie in with what I’m about to tell you. And if you are looking for a quickfire method to make money online then you’re on the wrong page. Actually, this is a quickfire method; as quick as I’ve ever seen.

Firstly, you need to make the search engines happy and right now, that mostly means Google. What this means is that your content should be on topic and themed and you should have good on-site SEO. Okay, nothing startling there but too many people don’t do this. For example, one reader sent me a couple of sites to look over and straight away I noticed some glaring issues.

One was bad site lay out and badly formatted content. In fact, his anchor text made no sense as he was talking about one topic and linking to text not related to the content.

Secondly, you need to make your readers happy. When people land on your site after typing a search term into Google to find it and you give them something else then they are going to disappear pretty quickly. Bounce rates are a big issue with Google and if they notice people leaving your site quickly and often, you won’t get any favors from them.

So in a nutshell, make sure your content is on topic, it’s written well enough for the reader to understand and get value from and you don’t go top heavy with your main keyword adding in second and third tier keywords with on topic anchor text.

The bottom line is, it revolves around user experience and Google has been saying this for years. Yet many people still won’t do it being tempted by the lure of making quick money which they usually don’t, and then losing their blogs from the search index.

That’s all I wanted to get across today because the above has never been more relevant than it is now. Make the search engines happy and give your visitors what they want with value-added content.

You know, you can get this right from learning from the best. Affiliate marketing is not rocket science; you can and should be making money from it. James Martell will put you on the right track with his Affiliate Marketer’s Boot Camp. You’ll learn how to get the above right and making sure Google and your readers get what they want by responding with great rankings and income.

Click here to learn more about James Martell’s Affiliate Marketer’s Boot Camp.

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Affiliate marketing tips come in all shapes and sizes and some you ignore while others are gold. Link shorteners are not something we see discussed a lot but did you know that there are many link shorteners that are blacklisted by spam filters and can actually harm your affiliate marketing campaigns?

While link shorteners are a great way to lessen the length of ugly long affiliate links, there are spam filters that will trigger when specific shorteners are encountered and there is a very good reason for this. Here is what Justin Premick wrote at Aweber:

Link shorteners are handy for trimming down long URLs.

But in addition to offering that convenience, they perform one other function: they mask where a link actually goes.

This makes them appealing to spammers who either:

* Don’t want recipients to see their actual website domains, or
* Don’t want ISPs and other organizations to be able to filter out their spam by blocking emails that have the spammer’s domain in the body of the email.

Of course, some legitimate email marketers may find the idea of shortening links appealing, too. This is particularly true for those who send plain text emails, since in an HTML email you can simply link whatever text or image you want, as you would on a webpage.

The potential problem happens when both a spammer and you use the same link shortener in your emails. If one or more ISPs start blocking emails that include that link shortening domain (to block the spammer), they may inadvertently block your emails, too…..

Ever wondered what are the best link shorteners to use? What if you had a list of the blacklisted link shorteners? Well, Justin has compiled some excellent research and this is one page you want to bookmark. It could mean a huge difference in how much money you make or don’t make with your affiliate marketing campaigns.

Click here to visit the original source of this post

Have you had a chance to check out James Martell’s Affiliate Boot Camp training course. Click here to learn more.

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It’s amazing the amount of training I thought was out there on using tags on websites that this would be one area that wouldn’t need too much covering on this training blog. But it looks like I was wrong. It’s a question that comes across my desk on a regular basis and to be honest, many of you are missing out on the powerful benefits of using tags.

Now it could be you are like I was and kind of resisted wanting to learn about using tags as I felt at the time that it just meant one more thing I had to learn in building my affiliate marketing business. In fact, for some weird reason, it got to the stage where I almost wished I’d never heard about them. What a mistake.

The truth is, they can have a powerful effect on traffic to your sites and even if you are using them, you may not be using them correctly.

Two guys I listen to a lot are Tim and Anthony Buchalka. They are known as the Marketing Assassins and are a couple of Aussies I believe are from my home town in Adelaide, Australia. Not that’s any reason you should be listening to them. They have made a big impact on the lives of many budding affiliate marketers. I recently got an email from them on the subject of correct use of tags and the good news is, they have put together a video on how to use tags correctly.

Here’s part of the email they sent:

Tags are a very powerful concept and if you aren’t  using them; man you should  be! Took me a while before I saw the light!

Even if you are using tags, chances are you could be using them much more effectively. They can have a tremendous effect on traffic generation and  would you believe; not one in 100 sites we come across use them well.

1 in a 100!

Click the video image below and learn how to use tags correctly from a couple of guys who really know.

Affiliate Marketing Tips: How Do You Use Tags Correctly?

Have you had a chance to check out James Martell’s Affiliate Marketing Boot Camp training. If you really want to fast track your ability to earn an income online then you need to be taught by the best affiliate marketer in the business. James Martell has been teaching this stuff almost since affiliate marketing became fashionable online. He was one of the original pioneers. Click here to check out the Affiliate Marketer’s Boot Camp course.

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3. Affiliate Marketing Myths: Crap You Should Avoid Believing About Affiliate Marketing

This is one of the things that infuriates me about many affiliate marketers and that’s the fact they don’t want to be labeled sellers. It’s almost like they are embarrassed to be put in the salesperson category and would rather be known as information marketers. Great, that’s fine with me but don’t ever try to convince me you are not trying to sell something.

How’s your business doing? If it’s struggling then maybe it’s because the attitude of not being a seller is coming out and manifesting itself in your website. Where’s that banner?….oh oh, what’s it doing below the fold. Why isn’t it in the face of the visitor when they first land on your site? Came across a good piece on Zac Johnson’s blog about 3 affiliate marketing myths you need to be aware about. It’s a good education and one that will make you think about this online business we call affiliate marketing.

“Affiliate marketing” is a term that means different things to different people.  For many publishers, forum owners, and entrepreneurs, affiliate marketing has served as a primary source of their monthly income.

Others aren’t quite sure what it entails or whether it’s applicable to their site.  Those that do understand the mechanics but opt not to participate often do so because of misconceptions about affiliate marketing.

As a result, a large group of site owners assume that ad options like Google AdSense and/or banner sales are the only ways to monetize their site.  In reality, this is simply untrue.

“Modern Day” Affiliate Marketing
In its simplest terms, affiliate marketing is outsourced marketing.  Companies have a product to market and “affiliates” are other websites that help them sell their product by promoting their product and delivering customers to them.

The concept intuitively makes sense.  To illustrate, let’s consider a hypothetical scenario: a merchant recently created a new type of orange widget he’s hoping to sell.  One day he walks into a store packed to the brim with people talking about all things orange widget related.  He’d likely want to approach the store owner and ask how he might be able to offer his orange widgets to the group.

In a nutshell, that’s affiliate marketing.  As a “store owner” (e.g. site owner / web publisher / potential affiliate) you operate a site that attracts an audience with a specific set of interests (in the scenario above it’s orange widgets).  As a result, you are in an ideal position to connect your audience with the advertisers that are most relevant to them.  And those advertisers are very interested in reaching your audience. It’s a win-win-win scenario: the advertiser gets a sale, the affiliate gets a commission and the audience learns about something relevant…..

Click here to visit the original source of this post

So what do you think? Do you agree with the author’s thoughts. Are you selling on your affiliate marketing site? How about affiliate marketing programs…did you realize there were more to choose from than just from the major affiliate networks. Affiliate marketing is an exciting business and when it’s making you money, there’s no better feeling. Please share your comments with us as they are always appreciated.

Speaking of learning to make money with affiliate marketing; did you get a chance to check out James Martell’s Affiliate Marketing Boot Camp training. James Martell changed my life seven years ago with his affiliate Marketer’s Handbook and I’m sure he can do the same with yours if you’ll allow him to train you. Click here to check out the Affiliate Boot Camp training.

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Affiliate marketing is tough enough without having to deal with distractions and  while there are some great courses out there to show you how to deal with them and boost productivity, the truth is, you don’t need to spend a thousand bucks to find out. You don’t even need to spend a hundred bucks. A lot of the best stuff on this topic is available for free.

I’ve mentioned Mark Ling on this site in the past as someone I truly respect as an online marketer and he’s posted a great article on his blog titled “Boosting Your Productivity With Remember The Milk.” The amazing thing is, this information is free and it’s readily available. This is a “crash course” in getting things done.

Before explaining how Remember the Milk works, I’ll give you the cliff notes guide to ‘Getting things done’ methodology.

Everything that is going on in your life is running around in your brain in ‘open loops’ that you may not be consciously aware of. These open loops cause you to do things slower, similar to how a computer runs slower if you have too many applications open at the same time.

So the first step is to identify all the things that you have ‘to do’ in your life and write it down as an actionable task.

David Allen recommends putting them in an ‘inbox’ with each task on a separate sheet of paper.

Then when you start each day, you work your way through your inbox of tasks and either ‘do it’, ‘delegate it’, ‘defer it’ or delete it.

Particularly urgent or priority tasks can automatically be put at the top of the pile, however be careful not to spend too much time categorizing your tasks as the idea is to just work through them quickly either doing them, delegating, deferring or deleting them.

If you find yourself becoming distracted by a new idea, or a new task that suddenly crops up, simply write down that new idea in an ‘ideas folder’ and go back to check through those ideas on a monthly or weekly basis, so that they don’t distract you in the here and now. New tasks should just get written down and added to your inbox.

You’ll find this very satisfying, it’s somewhat liberating to have everything that you need to do in your life all organized into actionable tasks that you can get rid of.

It gives you great confidence in the fact that nothing gets lost and you always know what you have left to do, evening ‘remembering the milk’…..

Click here to visit the original source of this post

Have you got yourself in a rut because of the work load you have? Do you easily get distracted by offers from other marketers that land in your email inbox? Do you think the information in this article can help you boost your online marketing productivity?

Please leave your comments as they are always appreciated. Getting the most important things done first is the way I’ve always operated. Not only that, the toughest of the most important tasks will be handled first. There’s method in that madness when you write for a living and utilize the fresh time in the morning to “knock out” your main and important tasks.

Don’t forget to check out James Martell’s Affiliate Marketing Boot Camp. You can get all the information you need by clicking here. This is one course that can get you to working full time online making a great living.

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The trick is listening to people that have already blazed a path to success in affiliate marketing and then learning from them. Does that sound familiar? It’s something we often promote here at TheAffiliatesCenterBlog.com and until you can grasp how important this is, you’ll continue to struggle. It’s one of the reasons we recommend programs such as James Martell’s Affiliate Boot Camp which is one of the best to learn affiliate marketing from.

Today, I came across an excellent podcast from Pat Flynn at smartpassiveincome.com talking about their own experiences with affiliate marketing and some of the best affiliate marketing strategies we’ve seen. Here’s what’s covered in their podcast session:

• The first experiences that both Chris and I had with affiliate marketing.
• How to find the perfect products to sell as an affiliate on your site.
• Our thoughts on promoting a product that you haven’t used yourself yet.
• How to get products for free from companies to review and promote on your site.
• Rules for long-term success with affiliate marketing – especially if you have an existing audience or following.
• The best tips for affiliate marketing if you have a product-based niche site.
• Detailed information about one of Chris’s niche sites that he recently sold for a lot of money.
• The mindset that you need to really crush it with affiliate marketing.
• The most important factor that determines your success with niche site affiliate marketing.
• Why and when you should become a “sales rep” for a specific product.
• Interesting and unique places to add affiliate links to increase sales and conversions.
• Specific types of posts that work best for affiliate marketing.
• Websites that we built that totally failed, and why.
• How podcasts, videos and webinars can be the best way to promote products as an affiliate.
• Where the affiliate links on your blog or website should really be.

One of the problems with learning how to make money in affiliate marketing is that there are too many pretenders out there. For example, would you take advice from a stock broker making $50K a year on how to create a multi million dollar stock portfolio. No, and neither would I. Click here to here the podcast from a couple of guys making thousands a month with affiliate marketing.

Enjoy!

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But you need to model yourself on something that is already working and by learning from those who have been successful over and over again you will give yourself a great chance to succeed, not for the short term but the long term.

In a moment I want you to watch a short video titled “21 Success Secrets of Self Made Millionaires” from one of my all time favorite motivators, Brian Tracy. He needs little introduction to most and has had a big impact on my success online.

But let’s touch on one the success secrets to becoming a millionaire. Modeling successful people. Why re-invent the wheel. One of the first success moments I had was when I threw all the crap that I had bought promising me instant riches and started following affiliate marketers who were successful and teaching their success methods.

I was fortunate to latch onto those who are still “killing it” today. Guys such as James Martell, who was one of the real pioneers of affiliate marketing. I made up my mind to follow his teachings no matter what and to my surprise, success came quickly.

Martell wasn’t a fly by night affiliate marketer. When things changed, he adapted and taught his students to adapt. And to nobody’s surprise he’s still at the top of the tree in affiliate marketing, profiting from it and teaching it. You can check out his excellent training program, Affiliate Marketing Bootcamp.

At the time I discovered James Martell, I had also started listening to Brian Tracy. The combination of cause and effect was almost immediate. By finding the right vehicle and then applying what I learned through taking action, success was never far away.

Isn’t that a simple formula…finding the right vehicle but taking action on what you learn. Forget the get rich quick hype, I beg you. Get your mindset working in the right direction and that long term affiliate income can follow like clockwork.

Check out Brian Tracy’s short video below and start taking action today.

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