Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource for you. Your website’s visibility can be improved in Google’s search results with its help. It informs webmasters about how Google is interacting with their website. It’s free to use, just like Google Analytics.

The first thing you’ll need is a Google account. If you use other Google services, you can use the same login. If not, you can sign up for a free.

Once you add your sites (yepp, sites – you can add as many as you want) to the Dashboard, each site have to be verified. If you can’t verify your site, Google won’t be able to get an insight.

You can check how Google crawls and indexes your website, when your site was last crawled and which pages are already indexed by it.

The Overview page shows you how many errors Google noticed. You can check restricted and unreachable URLs and you can see the broken links which lead to 404 error pages. You also can find the referrer sites where these links are. I hope you feel how powerful it is – you can fix any problems that prevent Google from indexing your pages.

If you have broken links that are coming from inbound links, a 301 redirect can be setup on your site to fix the problem as soon as possible. It’s sometimes easier and quicker than trying to contact the referrer site to update the link.

Google displays restricted URLs as errors. Some pages are restricted by the robots.txt file for a reason (e.g. you don’t want your redirected affiliate link to get indexed or you want to prevent duplicate content) and you don’t need to fix them.

The Statistics page is where Google tells you how it sees your site, which top search queries drive traffic to your site, etc. Top search queries are phrases people looked for and Google displayed your site in the results. This is great information about how people are searching and how they’re finding your site. You can see phrases you never think of 

One of my favourite parts is the What Google sees area where you can understand what Google thinks of your site and how it see your content. This is where you can find the reason your site can’t rank well for certain keywords. You can view comprehensive data about your internal and external links to your site.

You can upload an XML sitemap to help Google crawl all of your pages and to learn which pages are the most important to your site. You can specify your preferred domain name. You can choose how you would like to see your domain name in Google’s search results.

Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource to see how Google is interacting with your site. You can learn more about the issues, the linking structure, the keywords people use. If you don’t know why your site doesn’t appear on the first page on Google, this tool might help you detect what is the problem.

Are you using Google Webmaster Tools? Is it useful for you?

First, let’s talk about what USP is. USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition or Unique Selling Point. A USP is a distinct and appealing idea that sets your product or service apart from every other competitor in a positive way.

Using USPs will definitely improve your conversion rates. It will make your offer seductive and more valuable than competitors. A strong USP is a must if you want to give your visitors a compelling reason to purchase from your site.

If you identify what makes a product you’re promoting different from the competitors, then emphasize these advantages in your sales copy and boost your sales. The preposition must be something that the competitors can’t or doesn’t offer – it makes your offer unique.

“Unlike the majority…”

A great way to create a USP is by starting with the word “unlike”.

• “Unlike the majority of weight loss products “YourProduct” will help lose up to 5 pounds of body fat per week.”
• “Unlike other web hosting providers “YourWebHos”” offers 99,999% uptime guarantee that will ensure that your site is available any time.”
• “Unlike other weight loss products “YourProduct” offers 6 month money back guarantee that will ensure that if you aren’t satisfied with the results, you will get your money back.”

Create seductive offer

An irresistible offer is an invitation that is so powerful, so clearly compelling, and so obviously attractive that no one in his/her mind could refuse. Boost your sales and profits by positioning the product or service you offer as the best choice in the market.

Identify the unfulfilled needs and address a hole in the marketplace that your product can really fill. Use USPs in your headline or sub header in your copy writing.
If you don’t know what the promoted products unique selling points are, just ask the affiliate manager or discover those USPs.

Are you using USPs in your copy? Have you ever split tested which one of your USPs convert better?

Last time when I was on my trip in Italy without an Internet connection I couldn’t publish posts on my blog. According to Google Analytics the number of my visitors dropped during these days.

A lot of blogs seem like every author sit behind the screen all day long to publish (4-5 posts) daily. They can post every day whenever they are. These bloggers never go away for vacation or if they do, are posting from the beach, from the shops or from the museums.

Or… Can they write posts and schedule them for later? Googling my question I found a post on JohnChow.com about WordPress’ timestamp feature.

WordPress timestamp is a great built in tool that can save you a lot of time – also can save your blog’s traffic when you are out for weeks. You can write a bunch of posts in advance and schedule them to be published in the future. You can use it to improve your productivity.

There are days when we are feeling inspired, have a lot of great ideas to post, your writing is really flowing – and there are days when you can come up with nothing. If you are starting your brainstorming session, write your posts and use the timestamp to post them later. You don’t need to worry about periods you have nothing to write about.

How it works?

• Write your post as normally
• Look for the “Publish” section on the right side and click on the “Edit” where it says “Publish immediately”
• Select the date and time you want your post to be published – you can use a date in the past too
• Click on the “OK” button
• If the date is in the future your “Publish” button will become to “Schedule”
• Hit the “Schedule” button – your post will be automatically published at the chosen time

Remember to publish the post. If you’re just saving it, WordPress will leave it as a draft. Once you press the publish button, your post will queue. When the time comes, your post will be automatically published.

How many times do you use this WordPress feature? How many of your posts have been timestamped?

Bounce rate is used in website traffic analysis to represent the percentage of visitors who come to your site and immediately leave without visiting any of the inside pages. Everyone wants this number to be as low as possible because we want our visitors to stay longer on our website.

How do you know what your bounce rate is? The simplest way is register for a free Google Analytics account, list your site and paste some HTML code on your pages. Analytics will you provide free in-depth reports.

Some web analytic software (just like Google Analytics) helps you to find out what bounce rate should be considered as normal. For static websites anything under 40% and for a blog or websites with lots of outbound links from 50% to 60% should be normal.

Is your bounce rate higher than it should be? I’ll show you 5 ways to lower it.

1. Provide good content
   Maybe the most important. Many of us put too much time and energy into the design of the site and not enough into writing effectively. Not giving the surfers what they are looking for is the best way to get them to leave your site immediately. Content is king!
2. Make sure your website loads quickly
   You have seconds to grab your visitors’ attention. It’s really important to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible. Optimize your site – don’t use too many or heavy images or Flash. Choose a reliable host.
3. Make your pages easily available
   Keep your navigation simple, clean, easily readable and user-friendly. Make sure your site is easy to use and well-organized. If your visitors can’t find what they are looking for quickly, they will leave your site. Surfers are impatient. They need information right now.
   Make sure you use the same menu on the whole website and provide an easy way to get back to your home page. This might sound like a no-brainer, but many folks get it wrong.
4. Use internal links
   Give people internal links (links that are pointing to other pages of your website) that will lead them to other pages of your site. Make sure you are linking to other pages that are relevant to the page you are linking from.
   Using good anchor text will help you. Let your anchor texts grab your visitors’ interest and let them dive further into your content. Never use click here – nobody will see it.
5. Take note of traffic sources
   Where is the majority of your traffic coming from? Direct links, search engines, social networking sites? The quality of the traffic will contribute the overall bounce rate being higher or lower. The more targeted your traffic is, the lower your bounce rate. Focus on traffic source that convert better.

Bounce rate is an important measure of your website’s effectiveness. There are also people who believe it plays a role in how search engines rank your site. If it is true it gives you some extra motivation in working on improving it.

If your site has been loosing visitors as fast as they enter, it’s time to make the necessary modifications on your site and then give it a few weeks to see the difference. The difference should be that your visitors will be staying on your website for longer periods of time. Run tests to see if it improves over time.

Are you using Google Analytics? What is your bounce rate? Are you satisfied with it? Do you know how people interacting with your website?

I received a $117 commission today from one of the visitors I sent from a 4 days old website. What is so great about it? Well, that I haven’t set up any PPC campaign. The buyer was coming from Google. Was I lucky?

I saw many of the website owners are complaining about their sites are not indexed on the first week/month. My sites are always listed on the major search engines within 24 hours…

Did you do anything to get indexed? Do you have any backlink that can be followed by search engines? You don’t need any special software. All you need is what you have – a PC/notebook, Internet access and 15 minutes.

Sounds pretty strange, huh?

So, you’ve built your website – uploaded to your server and now are waiting for traffic. You need traffic as soon as possible because your site has a lot of unique and precious content.

Here is what I’m doing to get listed on the SEs on the very first day: I’m using the power of social bookmarking/networking sites.

Social networking sites are one of the best ways to appear in the SEs. These sites are crawled every few minutes by Google and its friends. Whenever you submit your pages you get picked up by them within hours. I (and Google) really like the following ones:

Digg.com
Delicious.com
StumbleUpon.com
BlinkList.com
Propeller.com
ReddIt.com
Fark.com
Furl.com

Using the right keywords during submission can help you getting more targeted visitors. Submit your story/article with as many related tags as you can. Tags are used in these social bookmarking sites to categorize stories.

Don’t forget. The more backlinks you have, the quicker you get indexed by search engines because the bots have more leads to get at your site with. The more links you have, the more interesting your site must be. Because of this search engines allow you to climb higher in the search engine rankings.

Now, it’s easy to get indexed by Google and the others. The next step is to get a higher position in the search results for your keywords…

Do your sites get indexed faster with the help of the sites and technique above? Do you know any other method we should use to speed up the process or anything that can bring visitors from the first day? Let us know.

MoreNiche is one of my favourite affiliate networks. They are one of the largest growing networks and their affiliates are extremly successful.

MoreNiche is the best choice for people who are new to affiliate marketing as they teach you everything you need to know to start making money online right now. Once you signup you’ll find lots of free start up guides, ebooks and tools.

MoreNiche gives its affiliates hundreds of articles you can rewrite. Improve your sites with more content. Unique content! They also give you free website templates and guides how you can set up your website. You can create your own affiliate website with unique content within hours. Google and buyers will love it!

The free guides will also explain ways to attract free targeted traffic to your site from search engines so you can build your own money making systems that work for you while you sleep!

Your website with great content is worth nothing without products that you CAN sell. I mean… Products that really solve the desperate buyers’ problems, give them solution and make them happy. Unlike other affiliate programs, MoreNiche select their merchant based on strict approval guidelines. Their products are amazing! The weight-loss and men-health products are converting like crazy.

Frankly, no other affiliate network gives you this much to help you make money online. And you get paid for every sale – phone orders, returns and even up-sells… I have nothing but good experiences with them. They are dominating the UK marketplace but the products are easy to sell outside the UK.

The MoreNiche Support Team is available everyday for you. You can reach them by phone, via their ticketing system or you can visit their forum. They are really friendly and helpful.

MoreNiche is a great opportunity you shouldn’t miss!

Join MoreNiche and start earning money online with free how-tos, help guides, site templates, articles and huge payouts!

Join MoreNiche network today and receive $45 bonus!

Affiliate marketing is a great way to start making money online. It’s easy to find a profitable niche and affiliate programs that offer products you want to promote. Then you can start an online business with minimal investment. Your startup investment may be registering your domain name and paying for a hosting plan.

I think affiliates must have their own web site designed for a specific niche. You can earn revenue without it but you can (and will) multiply your earnings by having one. I also mentioned before that some of the affiliate networks (most of the CPA networks) required you to have your own website.

Affiliate URL vs. Your Domain

If you only promote your affiliate links, you will lose sales. People need easy to remember and short domains. They would never type in an address like http://www.trackingsite.com/?ref=8555412&pid=10257855&sid=7151521. Affiliate URLs are complicated and almost impossible to remember so people will try the www.trackingsite.com URL. If you’re lucky, cookies will save your commission. Are you lucky enough?

Consider you have your own website with a simple and catchy domain name. People will remember it and they will follow the links from your site. And yepp, it makes you money.

Affiliate links vs. Redirects

You can save some of your sales with redirection techniques.

What is not looking natural (and our affiliate links are definately not…) is looking suspicious. People don’t like to click on affiliate links and some of them make sure they access the site without using your affiliate link. They will not click on that scary link.

You will get more clicks on your redirected link (www.yoursite.com/youroffer/) than on your affiliate link. I’m sure.

Track your visitors – Increase your conversion rates

If you are serious enough, you want to carefully monitor your visitors. You want to know where they are coming from, how they can find you, what keywords they are using etc.

Having your own website and a free Google Analytics account makes it easy to track your traffic. It will allow you to check which keywords are driving traffic and wich terms are causing your visitors to leave your site. It also helps you adjust your strategies to increase your conversion rates.

Sell more affiliate products

Almost forgot the best… Your site provides you a place where you can promote all of your affiliate products (within one or a few niches). Your visitors can also buy other products once they are on your site. (E.g. You can set up comparison pages and give your customers what they want. They will be more than happy )

If you have your own site, your possibilities are endless and you have complete control over your projects. (E.g. I like to build review pages for different products. This way, I can presell my visitors on a product before I redirect them to the sales page.)

It costs you less than $10 per month and you can host more than one (so called additional or addon) domain per account. Does anyone here earn huge amounts from affiliate programs without having a website?

If you would like to reduce your startup costs, you can host your site free for 3 months. 3 months is enough to receive your first payments;)

After the catchy headline I have to tell you that the free offer is only for 3 months. But it’s free and everyone likes free things.

As I mentioned around a week ago I recommend to get your own website with your own domain. If you promote an affiliate program, one of the things you have to consider is having your own website.

Having your own website makes you look more professional and costs you less than $10 per month. And now here is your chance to get 3 months of Jumpline hosting for free.

Let’s see… What do you get with this free Jumpline offer?

• 10 GB disk space what is more than enough for 10-20 websites! Simply amazing.
• Have you ever wanted sub-domains, just like helpdesk.yourdomain.com? You can host up to 16 sub-domains with one account.
• Do you want to have more than one website? Host unlimited pointed and parked domains! It means you don’t need to buy other web hosting packages – just buy some domains from $0.99 and host them on the same account.
• An average website is around 1MB. With 500 visitors daily (that’s more than enough you to earn $100 per day) you need around 10-15GB of monthly data transfer. Jumpline offers 100 GB monthly data transfer for you!
• I’m sure you want to look professional, so you need your own email accounts, just like yourname@yourdomain.com. You can have up to 100 of these kind of email accounts.
• Do you want to build a blog or forum? Do you need dynamic pages? Jumpline support PHP language with MySQL databases what is a requirement now.
• You can manage your databases from the PhpMyAdmin.
• Couldn’t you set up a WordPress blog or a forum? Just a few clicks and you can use over 30 integrated applications, just like WordPress, phpWiki, phpAds, phpBB etc
• Did you do something wrong and don’t know the reason? With the daily backups you can restore your website as soon as you want.
• Do you have any problem with your account or website? You can contact the support team immediately! They are available 24/7.
• The availability of your webtime is a major concern. Jumpline offers 99.99% server uptime – for a 30 day month it’s less than 5 minutes when your site is unavailable. Please note there is no web hosting provider can have 100% uptime.

It sounds good. But is it really free?

Yepp, you are not required to make a purchase. You have the option to cancel the free offer at anytime and you will not be billed after the free offer expires. You can simply cancel the free offer inside your online Customer Manager.

Your free web hosting account will be set up within a few hours. Jumpline can assist you in transferring your domain name to their nameservers.

You will have access to 24/7 email ticket support. You will also receive toll free phone support Monday-Friday 9am-9pm.

Jumpline.com requires a valid credit card to secure the free hosting offer. However you will not be billed unless you choose to keep the webhosting service after the free offer expires in 3 months. You must cancel the trial before then.

This special offer only works if you click the link below on this site and do not block the referrer.

Sign up for the free Jumpline account!

They honestly do not charge your credit card when you sign up with it.

Grab a cheap domain name and host it for free!

Have you found the right domain name? Think you are ready to buy this domain?

There are hundreds of registrars available and most of them offer domains for less than $10. But you can’t choose…

As an affiliate you may need full DNS management, URL/domain forwarding and masking.

This post is just a quick overview of some of the best registrars that I have worked with over the past few years.

1and1 Internet

This is a large web hosting company that also provides one of the cheapest domain name registrations. For .com, .org, .net, .biz domains you are charged $6.99. They also offer .info domains for $0.99.

Do you need privacy? The above fees include private domain registration, which means that your particulars are hidden from public view. You get full DNS management, domain forwarding and masking. Both credit card and PayPal payments are accepted by this registrar.

Do not buy hosting from this company, there are better and cheaper solutions. But if you are looking a cheap domain registrar, you can try them!

Dotster.com

Dotster provides cheap prices and easy-to-use web interface to manage your domain settings. They are a Top 10 ranked ICANN accredited domain registrar.

You get email forwarding, URL forwarding, full DNS management, domain locking, web hosting, email boxes. The prices are from $3.99. Both credit card and PayPal payments are accepted here.

Moniker.com

This domain name registrar allows domain name registrations for plenty of TLDs, including .com, .net, .info, .mobi, .biz, .us, .co.uk, etc. The full list is too long to store in my database… Prices for domain names differ, depending on the choosen extension.

They charge $7.97 for .com, $6.29 for .net these days.

Their interface allows you to manage your DNS settings, URL forwarding and everything else you may need. Both credit card and PayPal payments are accepted by them.

GoDaddy.com

This is an extremely popular registrar. They offer .com domain names for $9.99 (plus 20 cents ICANN fee).

They have an easy-to-use web interface to manage your domains. Both credit card and PayPal payments are accepted.

I also like their auctions where you can buy ’second hand’ domains for as low as $5 (but you have to pay for the renewal). I bought some great, old domains here with backlinks and PR2 pageranks…

Almost forgot to mention… Don’t buy hosting from GoDaddy I’ve found GoDaddy to be a great domain registrar, as long as you host somewhere else.

Your web hosting provider

Yes, it’s another great way to regsiter a domain. Some of the hosting companies offer free domain registrations with annual plans.

Once you’ve decided, you should not hesitate to click on that purchase button. I’ve lost more than 5 domain names by hesitating.

Stay one step ahead of your competitors!

If you are planning to promote an affiliate program, one of the things you have to consider is having your own website.

Why do you need it?

Having your own domain makes you look professional, build trust and a big plus that the advertising networks / affiliate networks take you more seriously. Some of the networks out there won’t accept your application unless you have your own domain name.

I’ve seen some people who started with a free domain / web hosting, build some quality backlinks, good Alexa and PR rank. But once they move their own domain, they have to start everything over.

So it’s really important to start with your own domain!

But what domain name should you have?

Finding a good domain name is hard these days but not impossible. First of all you need a Top Level Domain (TLD), even better if you can go with a .com TLD. If you target a certain country, you can buy a Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD). E.g. if you are targeting the UK, you should buy a .uk (.co.uk) domain.

The simple one-word domain names are sold or held by domain brokers. You have to be creative. Combine simple (key)words in a unique fashion. Create a list of basic words that describe your niche or the product(s) you promote then add a positive word that will make your name stand out.

Pick a short domain name that is easy to remember. It has to be short enough to type. Having the right keywords in your domain name would give you better chances to getting targeted visitors.

Once you come up with some great domain name, check their availability.

Where can you buy a cheap domain name?

There are some great domain name registrars you can choose from. You can buy domains for as low as $0.99.

The next step is finding the right web hosting for your website, at a good company, and of course at a reasonable price.