The Basic of Alexa

Alexa is one of the most underused resources that are freely available to internet marketers.

Alexa can deliver valuable insights into competitor’s site performance. This type of business intelligence is valuable beyond measure.

For example, let’s hypothetically say that you have the idea to start a new forum for internet marketers. You need to prove that there is room in the current market for you. So, using this example, we are going to click here and head over to Alexa and do a little research.

The top internet marketing forum is the Warrior Forum, which can be found right here.

So if we want to break into this market, this is the site we need to beat. Alexa can tell us whether this is possible or not. Here is the basic info on the Warrior Forum given by Alexa:

This tells us that the Warrior Forum is the 155^th most popular website in the world, the 144^th in America, and that is has 25,273 other websites linking to it (giving it authority).

Looking at these stats, we need to drop our idea of a new internet marketing forum right now; we can’t compete with the Warrior Forum. But what else can Alexa tell us?

Search Traffic

Alexa keeps track of search traffic gained via many search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other second tier search engines. It makes all of this data available free to the public.

Take a look at the screenshot below, this is the basic search data for the Warrior Forum:

This screenshot tells us that the Warrior Forum has some incredible reach. It receives around half a percent of all website traffic in the world. This doesn’t sound like much, but it is a huge amount.

We can also check the other tabs across the top that give information on pageviews, bounce rate and visitor behavior. The power of Alexa does not stop here, we can find out more in depth information about how the Warrior Forum performs in search results.

Search Queries

This is another of the free reports available at Alexa that shows us the actual search queries used by people surfing the web, to find the Warrior Forum:

It shows us the top search queries, and the percentage of overall traffic they provided.

Now, imagine that you are setting up a competing website, here you already have a list of top performing keywords that are already dominated by the Warrior Forum, you can instantly strike these off your keyword list.

But there is more information yet to come!

Search Information

We already know the basic statistics about the Warrior Forum, also how much traffic it receives, and what search terms delivered that traffic.  This is all well and good, but it would be nice to know something about the audience that visits the Warrior Forum.

Well, Alexa can provide this as well; just take a look at this screenshot:

Here we have a full breakdown on audience demographics, including the age, gender, education, and browsing location.

Let’s play a little game here, let’s define the average user of the Warrior Forum. The average user is:

• Over 55 years old
• Has not completed a formal education
• Is male
• Has no children (and is possibly single)
• Is browsing from home

This means that the average Warrior Forum user is a male of 55 or more years old, is not particularly well educated, has no children and is probably single (divorced?) and is not currently employed, as they are browsing from home.

Can you picture this person sitting in their living room reading the forum? You can? Well you just witnessed the power of Alexa; it can deliver true insights into the habits of web users and the sites they visit.

And how did this person arrive at the Warrior Forum? And where did they go afterwards? Alexa can tell us this also!

The Click Stream

Alexa also keeps track of all of the sites that referred visitors to the Warrior Forum, and all of the sites they visited afterwards by clicking a link somewhere on the Warrior Forum, and this is called the Click Stream, it looks like this:

We can see that most people arrived from Warrior Plus  and this is not really surprising, this is a helper site that makes certain features of the Warrior Forum easier to navigate. We can also see that many came from Google and Facebook.

When it comes to exit sites, we can see something very interesting here. 1.65% of visitors clicked a PayPal link to leave the forum. These people almost certainly clicked on a “Buy Now” button in the Warrior Special Offers (WSO) section.

As the 155^th most popular site in the world, the Warrior Forum receives millions of visitors a day and 1.65% of those visitors are buying something. This must add up to an awful lot of cash!

Again, something we have learned just by checking our Alexa.

In Conclusion

This article has demonstrated how a little creative thinking can extract incredible business insights about websites, from the amazing depth of information that Alexa makes freely available to the public.

If you have not been using Alexa to judge your competition, and learn about your target audience, you should start right now.

Click here to kick start your online business with your own website from AffiliateX.

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The Power of Link Building

No matter what Google and the other major search engines seem to do to make search listings (SERP) less exploitable, it seems that link building to some extent or another, remains a constant for SEO purposes.

However, it is important to understand that although link building is still a very useful tool for raising SERP, it is far more difficult to achieve good, and more importantly consistent results using link building then it has been previously.

What is Link Building?

Link building is a name given to a specific SEO technique that is designed to raise the authority level of a site, and this it’s Google PageRank, which will in turn, raise its position in SERP.

Wikipedia gives a good explanation of exactly what link building is – you can read it here.

In its most basic form, an SEO practitioner will aim to raise SERP by generating backlinks to the target site, at both the root level and also backlinks to subpages on the same domain.

The more backlinks, the higher a sites Google PageRank will climb, and the higher it will be featured in SERP.

Links can come from a variety of sources, including forum posts, blog comments, article submissions and press release publication.

Anywhere that a webmaster can publish something that contains a link (and it cannot be a nofollow link), then they can create a backlink.

In reality things are a little more complicated than this.

Building Quality Links

Major search engines are aware that SEO practitioners use artificially created backlinks to raise SERP, and have taken action to devalue certain types of links.

Google in particular has some pretty harsh guidelines that webmasters need to follow to make sure they are not actually penalised for generating low quality backlinks.  You can read more about these guidelines here.

Links are also covered by part of the Google Webmaster Guidelines that can be found here:

If you read these thoroughly, you will realise that spam forum posts with a backlink embedded in them, and similarly blog comments, are now considered pretty low quality backlinks.

It’s the same with many article directories; these have also been devalued considerably.

Currently, the best way to generate quality backlinks in line with Google’s recommendation is to seek them organically, and encourage others to link to your site, instead of looking for link opportunities.

This is best achieved by using social marketing techniques and publishing quality content.

Building Backlinks Organically

Until just a few short months ago, SEO gurus would literally manufacture backlinks, sometimes using automated software, and pump out thousands of forum posts and blog comments. This is now a pretty much defunct black hat SEO practice.

These day’s it’s all about organic backlinks.

Gaining backlinks organically is actually not so difficult, but it does take longer to build a large number of backlinks.

The process is simple, publish some great content, and then promote it. If the content is useful, the viewers will link to it naturally.

Building backlinks in the old style can now negatively affect your site.Organic is the way to go.

Monitoring Backlinks

There are lots of sites that offer backlink monitoring services. However, the main tool used by SEO experts is simply Google Webmaster tools.

In the traffic section, there is a report that shows current backlinks to the site, it looks like this:

Here we can see how many backlinks are pointing at the site, and the content that has the most links pointing to it.

This is really all that is needed to keep an eye on backlinks.

Many of the paid services that offer to keep track of backlinks to a site are querying Google anyway; they are a waste of cash.

Backlinks for Traffic

One of the major benefits of building backlinks organically is that they will also bring traffic. A spam blog comment won’t even get read, let alone bring traffic from somebody clicking the link.

However, a proper organic backlink created by a reader who liked your content, is sure to bring in traffic in its own right.

You can use Google Analytics to track this traffic, look in the traffic section of the site, under referrals, the report looks like this:

In Conclusion

There are many guides on link building on the web.

Unfortunately, most of these are entirely outdated, and do not take in to account the recent changes in link guidelines by the likes of Google.

If you choose to use black hat link building techniques, your site will invariably suffer at some stage. Keep things organic and grow quality links over time.

Click here to see how AffiliateX can help you grow your online business today.

Make money from Elance

Over the past few years, there has been a veritable outsourcing revolution, as companies both large and small have begun to discover the effectiveness of recruiting ad-hoc talent, as project requirements demand.

The king of all outsourcing sites is Elance, click here to take a look at their site.

In this short article, we offer some advice on how to profit from Elance as a service provider, without competing with low ball competition.

What is Elance?

The concept behind Elance is quite simple.

It is a website that matches project buyers (people requiring jobs done), with service providers (people offering to do the work).

A project buyer posts a bid request, outlining the project requirements, the budget and the deadline, and then providers bid upon this bid request.

The buyer then chooses the provider which fits their needs best.

As a service provider, the key to making profit from Elance is actually wining the bids that you make on projects, at a good rate of pay, and this is sometimes quite difficult for new Elance providers to achieve, so we offer some tips below:

Writing an Effective Profile

Every Elance provider has a profile, that they can fill in with information that project buyers will find relevant.

Regardless of what you put in your Elance profile, there is one part that you must get absolutely correct. Failure to do so will leave you at a serious disadvantage.

The part we are speaking about is the section title “Overview”, as this is the only section of the service description a project buyer sees when they visit your profile. Take a look at this screenshot:

Do you see the “Read More” link? Without clicking that link, a project buyer will not see anything else you have added to your profile.

So it is vitally important that you exploit this valuable short extract.

You need to tell the buyer that you are a serious professional, and include some form of call to action that makes them want to read that “Read More” link.

Build a Solid Reputation

The next big selling point, after your Elance profile, is your service reputation. Every time you complete a project through Elance, the project buyer has a chance to leave a rating and review. These ratings are visible on your Elance profile, like this:

The better your reputation is, the easier it becomes to win work at Elance. Take the example above, showing $141,653 in earnings, with a perfect 5.0 rating across 299 completed projects.

Now, if a project buyer views this profile, alongside one with a much lower rating, and negligible earnings, which one does he naturally choose if price is not a consideration? The former of course.

Your Elance reputation will over time, become your major asset.

Bid Sensibly

Many new Elance providers make two basic mistakes:

a)     They bid on far too many projects, instead of taking the time needed to choose only projects they have a good chance of winning.

b)    They bid on price, thinking the only way to compete is to come in at a lower price than the competition.

Both of these are losing strategies, and should be avoided.

With regards to choosing the right projects to bid upon, the first thing to do is discard any project requests that do not contain a proper project brief.

For example, you will see single sentence project requests saying something like “I want 10 articles.” It is simply best to avoid these kinds of projects, as the client has obviously no idea of how to work professionally, and they could be more trouble than they are worth.

Instead, look for bid requests with a clear definition of what is expected as a deliverable, a good example of this is shown below:

When it comes to price, don’t compete with the cheapest, come up with the rate you NEED to do the job, and stick to it.

Don’t compete on price, ever; you will regret it down the line if you do, when you try to raise your pricing.

Offer Value

As mentioned above, competing on price is not a good idea. Realistically, most professional project buyers are not interested solely in price, they are looking for value.

Value can be seen as something like this: value = price+quality+ service.

By this we mean that value is the sum of the price of the deliverable, the quality of the deliverable, and the level of service the project buyer receives.

If you provide a high quality deliverable, combined with an exceptional customer experience, then price becomes less important to many project buyers.

In Conclusion

Many people complain that there is no good paying work to be had on Elance, others complain that there are too many low bidding providers.

If you stick to the tips offered above, you will not be affected by either of these problems.

Don’t compete with the bottom feeders; see yourself as a hardworking, valuable professional instead.

Why not enhance your presence on Elance with your own website offering your services? Click here to find out how AffiliateX can help you.

How to Make Money in the Physical Products Niche

As a new internet marketer, you have probably decided to go down the digital products route, selling ebooks and other downloadable items, probably using one of the large affiliate product sites such as Clickbank.

This is a tried and tested method for making money online, but there are other options.

Most notably, the whole niche of physical product sales, where an actual tangible item is sold, and then physically shipped to the customer.

Below we take a top level view of physical product sales.

Product Choice

When it comes down to choosing a product, or range of products to sell in the physical products niche, there is one major decision you will need to make first. Are you going to sell consumable items, or non-consumable items?

Each has benefits that can be explained like this:

Consumable items – This covers things like printer ink, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and anything else that will be purchased, used up and then purchased again repeatedly.

The great thing about consumable items is that in theory, a customer will come back to your site to purchase time and time again.

However, consumable items are usually low ticket price items, with a fairly slim profit margin.

Non-consumable items – This covers everything else, such as electronic goods, clothing, DVD videos and so forth.

The great thing about non-consumable goods is that they are usually fairly high priced items, and they give a good profit margin.

Affiliate Sales or Own Products?

Once you have decided whether you are going to sell consumable or non-consumable products, the next decision you will need to make is whether you are going to sell your own products, or try to make affiliate sales for another company.

Again, both options have advantages.

Selling your own products (or even dropshipping) will usually give more profit per sale. As a downside, you will need to set up some form of e-commerce site as your online store front.

Selling affiliate products will pay less per sale, but removes the overhead of setting up a complicated e-commerce website.

Selling Your Own Products

If you intend to sell your own products, then you have two basic options.

The first of these is to set up a traditional e-commerce site. Customers will place and order through this site and you collect the cash, and send the goods out to them.

This means you will need to do three things:

a) maintain stock of items,

b) set up an e-commerce site, and

c) have some form of delivery system in place.

If you lack the skills to set up your own self-hosted e-commerce site, there are other options, including companies that will host your e-commerce site for you.

The best of these is possibly Shopify, click here to take a look at their site.

Shopify can produce some really good looking e-commerce sites, here is an example:

The second option is using a dropshipping company to handle stock and deliveries. You will still need your own e-commerce site, but you will not have to keep stock of any items, and you will not need to arrange for order deliveries. Instead, a dropshipping company handles everything.

One of the top dropshipping companies is Dropshippers, click here to visit their site.

Dropshippers has an amazing number of products in its catalogue, covering many niches, and it also helps customers set up their e-commerce site.

Dropshippers have a very simple three part sign-up process as well, which makes it easy for newcomers to physical goods sales to get started:

Selling Affiliate Products

The alternative to selling your own physical products (or using a dropshipping company to sell products direct form the manufacturer) is to promote other peoples products and receive an affiliate commission for sales made.

There are dozens of physical goods sites that offer an affiliate scheme, but a good place to start is the world renowned Amazon Associates scheme.

The Amazon Associates affiliates scheme makes every single Amazon product available on a commission per sale basis, and also provides some excellent marketing tools.

This means that you can promote the full range of Amazon products, even Kindle ebooks, and receive up to 10% on each sale, as shown below:

Although Amazon only pays 10% commission, which is less than many other affiliate networks, it does provide an incredible number of marketing tools, and due to the power of the Amazon brand, affiliates sales convert very well indeed.

In Conclusion

Although most people believe that entering into the physical products niche is far more complicated than simply marketing downloadable products, it does have some major benefits.

Most notably, the fact that product churn is very low, with very few charge backs and product returns taking place. If you have the skills to pull it off, a good physical product site can earn great income.

Check out AffiliateX for the current most profitable niches to give you a jump start in your online profits.

How to make money on Click bank

If you are new to affiliate marketing, then chances are you are already considering Clickbank as a source of affiliate products that could make you some cash.

There is nothing wrong with this at all, many internet marketers begin with Clickbank products.

One of the great things about starting off with Clickbank is the sheer depth of information that Clickbank makes available about affiliate products. One of the sales metrics that Clickbank publishes for every product it makes available, is gravity.

This is a very important metric, and we shall take a look why below.

What is Clickbank Gravity?

Clickbank tells us how to choose hot affiliate products, it guides new affiliate marketers throughchoosing an affiliate product:

The problem with this page is that it doesn’t explain gravity very well. Indeed, all that Clickbank tells us about gravity is:

Gravity: Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by promoting the vendor’s products during the past 12 weeks. This is not an actual number of affiliates. For each affiliate an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 is added to the result, depending on when his/her last transaction occurred. More recent transactions are given a higher value.

This simply tells is that gravity is a numerical representation of how many affiliates have sold the vendors products within the last 12 week period.

However, gravity is a much more complicated algorithm, and Clickbank doesn’t give many clues about just how it calculates it.

Gravity is one of the metrics that internet marketers can sort on when searching for Clickbank products to promote, like this:

How does Clickbank Calculate Gravity?

Gravity is recalculated daily by Clickbank. In its basic form, gravity is the total of the combined scores of the affiliates that have managed to sell any of the vendor’s products in the last 12 week period.

However, this doesn’t really explain things very well, so let’s take a closer look:

So, starting with an affiliates score, it is worked out like this:

If the affiliates sold a copy of the vendor’s product yesterday, they will have a score of 1.

Now, if the affiliate sold the vendors product the day before yesterday, their score is reduced to 0.96.

This calculation is continued across previous days, using ^n calculation, where n is how many days ago the product was sold (since yesterday). So 3 days ago = 3 days ago: 0.96^2 = 0.9216, and 4 days ago = 0.96^3 = 0.884736

Here is an example:

If two separate affiliates have been marketing products from the same vendor, and the first of these affiliates has sold 2 copies of a product yesterday and 6 copies the day before, only yesterday counts, he has a score of 1.

If the second affiliate sold a single product the day before yesterday, his score will be 0.96.

So the vendor’s gravity score will be 1+0.96 = 1.96.

How to Use Gravity Properly

OK the first thing to consider about gravity is that a high score doesn’t necessarily mean a great product. For example, if vendor has a pretty decent gravity of the high 200s, this could be considered a good product.

But if that same vendor’s gravity score was 500 just a week earlier, we can see that the product is actually slipping. So use gravity carefully, check history as well.

Also, a product with too high gravity might not be the best product to market, for example this product below:

Ideally, you want to find a product with a gravity between 20 and 100 to promote.

Why not higher gravity products?

Well simply because they are popular products, there will be stiff competition from other affiliate marketers, and the cost of marketing them will probably outstrip the advantage of having a hot potato of a product to promote.

The AffiliateX website has some pretty useful information about Clickbank gravity, and it is well worth spending a couple of minutes checking over the following blog post by clicking here.

In Conclusion

Clickbank gravity is a very useful metric that can help internet marketers choose the right affiliate products to promote.

However, it is dangerous to choose products only using gravity.

You should consider the viability of the niche the product is within, and well as checking out the current competition for a particular product before you make a decision. Gravity is a good indication of a hot product to sell, but it is only part of the big picture.

Click here to head over to AffiliateX and access the hottest and most current ClickBank products that are converting into sales right now.

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