Is it important where you place your affiliate links on your blog? I mean, can’t you just stick up a banner or a sidebar link and watch the sales come in? Now you know better than that!
Where you place your affiliate links on your site can really make a difference on how many clicks you end up getting. And since every click means a potential affiliate sale, where you pace your money making links is a vitally important aspect of internet affiliate marketing.

Research has shown that the most effective affiliate links are text links. That’s right, plain old boring text links. Not those big flashy banner ads that beg for your click, just simple vanilla text ads.

So if you are truly interested in improving your affiliate sales, write some solid articles with one or two text links to your affiliate product embedded into the article. This allows interested readers to see the link as they are reading and click on it. You may not get rich this way, but I do guarantee an increase in the number of affiliate sales you receive.

Of course, your article and your link have to work effectively together to make this happen. A bad article and an unrelated link to an unknown product are not likely to make you any money. If you can’t write a good article, hire somebody to write it for you. You can hire a freelance writer for about three to seven dollars per article. And believe me, it’s always money well spent.

So the next time you are out to choose an affiliate link, try placing a relevant link in a great article that is well optimized for search engines and see how it works out for you. Don’t forget the importance of keyword rich titles to help improve your traffic. It’s simple SEO, but many times over looked.

What’s the deal with all the spammers. For some reason my blog is being bombarded with spam comments and it’s becoming more frustrating by the day. I don’t have much of a problem with black hat marketing, but this is getting to be too much.

There must be hundreds of auto comment scripts floating around the internet and a few are getting pretty good. I have noticed a few comments that have completely bypassed my approval and made it to my blog. It’s simply unbelievable just how good some of these black hat spammers truly are.

I don’t recommend black hat marketing by any means, I’m just not going to hold it against someone who practices such marketing techniques. I hate spam just as much as the next guy, but you have to hand it to some of these guys. Their originality is allowing theme to make a pretty good living online.

Oh well, just my two cents. Now it’s back to some good old fashion white hat marketing. Keyword research, writing articles… you know the drill. Seems like a lot of work, huh!

Good luck and much success.

A website refers to a compilation of Web pages that can be typically accessed through a software package, commonly known as a Web browser (one example is the HTTP on the Internet). These pages, which are essentially documents that are in the HTML or XHTML format (HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language), are accessed from a ‘common root URL’ - or the website’s homepage (as most people know it). From this homepage, the visitor/Internet user can browse or look through the entire website either with the use of the hyperlinks or the URLs of the different web pages.

Viewed on computers and other devices that are capable of connecting with the Internet (such as PDAs and cellular phones), websites can be grouped into numerous types, depending on their use or the services that they offer. Some of them include the following:

·   Archive site - maintains and protects electronic contents that are valuable to the point of extinction.

·   Business site - promotes a business or a service.

·   Commerce or eCommerce site - offers goods for sale.

·   Community site - allows people with related and similar interests to communicate with each other (either through chat or message boards).

·   Database site - searches and displays a particular database’s content.

·   Development site - provides data and sources that are related to software development and web design, among others.

·   Directory site - contains wide-ranging contents that are usually divided into categories and subcategories.

·   Download site - allows users to download electronic contents, such as game demos and software.

·   Game site - provides a ‘playground’ where people meet and play.

·   Information site - contains data or content that have the sole purpose of informing visitors (not for commercial purposes).

·   News site - dispenses or distributes news and commentaries (similar to an information site).

·   Pornography site - shows pornographic videos and images.

·   Search engine site - provides general information and serves as a ‘gateway’ for other sites and resources (can also be a web portal site).

·   Shock site - shows images and other materials that aim to offend viewers.

·   Vanity site - a personal site that is run or maintained by an individual or a small group, the contents of which can be of any information that the site owner wishes to include.

·   Blog site or blogs - registers online readings and posts online diaries or discussion forums.

·   Wiki site - allows users to collaboratively edit the contents.

Yahoo! is perhaps the most famous example of a very large website. The most popular and widely-used website, Yahoo! is a mixture of the different types of sites - it is a directory site and a search engine site, among others.

Because of the enormous (and diverse) amount of information that it contains, the Yahoo! site map is an extremely useful feature in the Yahoo! website.

A site map is a web page that lists the entire pages on a web site. Organized in a hierarchical fashion, site maps or URL lists, can be in textual or visual form (a diagram or an image).

The Yahoo! site map serves as a blueprint for the Yahoo! website. Similar to a book’s Table of Contents, the Yahoo! site map makes it easier for visitors or users to find specific information or pages on the Yahoo! web site without having to browse many pages, because the site map gives an overview or a visual outline of the Yahoo! web site, with each location provided with active links to enable the user to directly move to a specific location.

In addition, the Yahoo! site map allows web developers to put out links from across their sites, making it easier for search engine robots (or engine spiders) to find these pages.

Because the Yahoo! URL list improves the search engine optimization of a site, this feature can be considered a valuable tool for online marketers, whose aim is to stimulate and direct traffic to their web sites.

Note, however, that the Yahoo! URL list can only give you the ‘basics’. Because it is important for web marketers to ‘rank high’ on main search engines, an effective web marketing strategy that promotes your web site is also very much needed. Listed below are some search engine strategies to consider:

1. Write a descriptive page title at the top of your web page that avoids ‘filler’ words like “the” or “and”.

2. Incorporate descriptive keywords on your home page, along with your business name. This is called “keyword prominence”.

3. Include a Description Meta Tag at the top of the web page. This refers to the sentences (1 or 2 lines, with a maximum of around 255 characters) that describe the content of your web page.

These are just some of the many techniques that you can employ to get more users to visit your website. The important thing is to focus on keywords that will brind in the search engine traffic.

Most marketers are in love with Google, but anyone making long term money in affiliate marketing will tell you the true money lies with Yahoo!. It sometimes takes much longer for your site to receive Yahoo! traffic, but I promise that it’s well worth the wait.