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?

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?

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;)

I’ve just received an email from Sedo saying “Payment took place!”. I like these emails especially this one – I’ve sold a domain for $800.

I registered this domain on 1and1.com for $3.99 about 5 months ago. It’s a hyphenated 12 characters long .com domain. I wanted to use it for an affiliate program (oh, what a surprise!) but I never made any sales from this site.

So I decided to list the domain for sale on Sedo marketplace with a $60 asking price. I usually list my domains for $60-$100 and sell them for $60-$200.

Some weeks ago I received a $60 offer for my domain and of course I took the name to auction. An auction period runs for seven days. On the seventh day I received an email saying: “We are pleased to inform you that the auction of your-domain.com has ended with a closing sale price of 800 USD.”

Err… Not again! Another non paying buyer… (Well sometimes it happens on Sedo – I just had a transaction cancelled due to non payment from the buyer.)

On 5th May I received another mail saying they had received the escrow payment. Yeppp, the buyer paid the amount and fortunately it was a very smooth transaction. I have received the amount today:

Quick tip: You can add your bank details to your Sedo account if you want to avoid Paypal fees for receiving the money.

As I mentioned before only 1-5% of all affiliate marketers are succeed in internet business. The others fail.

What are the most often repeated mistakes you should avoid? I want to show you some very basic mistakes I made myself and many ‘marketers’ are still making.

1. Signing up for every affiliate program – Most of the affiliate networks are free to join and offers thousands of merchants. Affiliates who participate in too many programs will not have enough time and money for promote all of them. Instead of focus on one vendor or niche they are trying to make huge money by offering hundreds of products. They bite off more than they can chew…
2. Promoting unrelated programs – I wouldn’t recommend a software on a jewlery site. But sometimes marketers do. If your visitors are not interesting in what you are promoting, you will never see them again.
3. Poor website – There is a lot out there… I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Poor design, hard to read sites, worthless and duplicated contents, ‘useful’ widgets (weather etc).
4. Banners only – Some of the ‘marketers’ thinks that a banner is enough to sell those products. They found some great banners in the affiliate resources area so they put some of them here and some there. Now they ‘do the hard work’ and waiting for the results. But what we really need is unique content, CTA (call to action) graphics and targeted traffic.
5. Abandoned affiliate sites – Would you ever buy something from an affiliate who can’t remember when s/he saw his/her site last time? Updates are really important. There is always something happening in your niche. You should talk about it.
6. Hard selling – Don’t sell, recommend. People are not stupid, they know when you want to sell something. Build a website, get targeted visitors and just talk about a product that makes your/our life easier.
7. Pay Per Click traffic – Setting up a successful PPC campaign is really hard. Newbies should stay away from PPC (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter). Organic traffic is the most important way to get visitors to your website.

Of course this is not a whole list of mistakes but avoiding the above mentioned mistakes can help you making your first commissions.