Introduction

If you build it, they will come. Film: Field of Dreams

Have you ever picked up a book entitled something like "How to Start Your Own Business," only to be given grave warnings about how you must have the "right kind of personality" or you will "surely fail," or how you must have a formal "business plan" or you will "surely fail," or how you must "be an expert" before you even begin, or. . ., you guessed it, you will "surely fail?" Rather than, "How to Start Your Own Business," those books should be called something more like, "What Business do you have Starting a Business Anyway?"

Can you really encourage people to succeed by telling them they are likely to fail? The fact that you will face genuine obstacles and practical considerations in any new business venture, is no reason to mindlessly punch a clock and spend your life slowly disappearing into an unrelentingly gray cubical! Are you really willing to say, "I never failed because I never tried?" Ouch.

Why shouldn't you be the one, who, like the bumblebee, does fly in spite of his "inferior" wings which, experts say, are too small to carry his body weight? It is impossible for him to fly, yet he does.

Was not Amazon.com started in a young man's basement and DOS created in a garage? The only difference between these entrepreneurs and you is -- they started, that's all. It just may be that you will have unbelievable success, even if you don't have an "entrepreneurial personality," "formal business plan," or know what you're doing. Stop testing the water and get into the pool. Guess what? You WILL, yes, I said WILL make mistakes and lots of them. So what? Once you get over the fear of making mistakes, you can get on with the business of gaining experience.

While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.
Henry C. Link

This e-book offers no ominous warnings of impending failure. The truth is, if others have done it, and they have, you can do it too. In fact, a child could do it. Here, you will learn the basics of earning money while sitting at home managing your own affiliate website.

After reading the material, go to http://www.affiliate-marketing.com.au/. This is the best website to help you get started. Here you can set up as many affiliate websites as you like, even if you don't know how to set up a website. The steps are simple and well explained.

Build it, and your customers will come.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1
Working From Home - The Dream

• Creating Your Own Business
• Joining an Affiliate Program

Chapter 2
Why it Works - How Affiliate Marketing has Evolved

• Early Attempts at Internet Marketing
• The Emergence of Affiliate Marketing

Chapter 3
The Affiliate Jungle - How to Choose a Successful Affiliate Program

• First Steps in Starting an Affiliate Web Site
• Quick Checklist for Choosing Affiliate Programs

Chapter 4
Multi-Tier Affiliate Programs - Other People Making You Money

• What is a Multi-Tier System?
• Setting Up a Multi-Tier System
• Management and Software Options to Get you Started
• How to Promote your Affiliate Program 

Chapter 5
Designing a Selling Site - Your website is your #1 Salesman

• Layout Considerations that Effect Marketing
• Hail King Content!
• Do What the Big Boys Do
• Using Content to Pre-Sell Products

Chapter 6
Search Engine Optimization - Getting High Ratings for Your Site

• Search Engines vs. Directories
• What a Search Engine Sees
• Five Steps to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• The Top 10 Tips for a High Page Rank 

Chapter 7
Making Real Money as an Affiliate - Financial Freedom -- Just a Click Away

Conclusion

Chapter 1

Working From Home 
The Dream

J. Paul Getty, Former oil tycoon and once the richest man in America said:

There is only one way to make a great deal of money, and that is in a business of your own.
 

People become entrepreneurs for many reasons:

• More time with their children

• Working in pajamas

• Freedom from insane bosses and/or co-workers

• Relief from gruesome commutes, etc.

Born entrepreneurs know by instinct that J. Paul Getty got it right. You will never get rich on someone else's idea of what your wage should be. You must find your way out of payroll prison and into the world of self-employment where the sky's (World Wide Web) the limit.

Perhaps working for yourself has been a "some day" dream, but now, in light of recent job market declines, it has become a "do now" necessity.

Ted Turner says:

My son is now an "entrepreneur." That's what you're called when you don't have a job.

Whatever has brought you to this place, you are not alone. Today, with the power of the Internet, it's easy to start your own home business.

First, choose the online business model that best fits your style.

The Two Main Models are:

• Create your own business 

• Join an affiliate program

Creating Your Own Business
If you choose to create your own business, start by researching the market for what people need (or feel they need) and determine how you will compete with the quality, prices, and services of existing businesses. When you know what you want to offer, simply choose a name for your company, take care of the legal formalities and set-up a place in your home for a small office. Next, advertise your business and let people know you exist. Keep the quality of your services/products exceptional and consistent, and customers will come, repeat their business and tell their friends about you.

If your not ready or interested in offering a product or service of your own, there is another way to go. You can sign up with an affiliate program.

Joining an Affiliate Program
Affiliates are representatives associated with bigger companies like Avon, Amway, Tupperware or Herbalife. Thousands are discovering network marketing, also called affiliate marketing, and are making money without ever leaving home.

To get started, use the Internet to research a list of affiliate programs (we list some later in this e-book) and carefully consider the quality of what they offer. Sign up for the programs that offer products or services you've used and can endorse to others. This will result in satisfied customers who return to your site as well as recommend your site to friends. As an affiliate you will be paid a fee/commission when you send visitors to merchants' sites to fill their surveys, buy their products, request free samples, etc.

Your friends and relatives may say that home businesses are mere "pipe dreams," but don't be discouraged. You'll never know until you try. At least try the affiliate programs as the investment is negligible.

Chapter 2

Why it Works
How Affiliate Marketing has Evolved

Free enterprise means that the more enterprising you are, the freer you are. Mark Victor Hansen

One successful entrepreneur tells a story about the single incident that forever changed his way of thinking about making money. One day in his youth, while at work cutting down trees, he noticed the foreman talking to a man with a handful of red ribbons. This man then proceeded to tie his red ribbons around choice trees. Upon finishing, he walked away in his nice suit, having never broken a sweat.

The future entrepreneur asked the foreman, “Who was that guy?”

The foreman answered, “That’s the salesman!”

“The moral of this story …” says the entrepreneur with a winsome smile, “…it’s better to be the man with the red ribbons.”

Perhaps it is, perhaps not, but this much is true: some of us chop trees and some of us tie ribbons. The fact is we need each other. There will always be those that make widgets and those who sell them. The sellers don’t know how to make them and the makers don’t know how to sell them. So, sellers and makers historically enjoy a symbiotic, “win/win” relationship.
 

Early Attempts at Internet Marketing

The question over the past decade has been how to apply this truth to the Internet. The first attempts at Internet marketing were based on the traditional advertising concept of selling space/time - as in the magazine, billboard, TV and radio models. Hence, Internet banners and pop-ups were born, and merchants paid high prices for space/time on choice websites. This resulted in a bubble effect which soon deflated, leaving Internet marketing confusion and mistrust in its wake.

Jakob Nielsen, often referred to as “Sun’s web design guru” says, “Well, banner ads don't work. … I think the basic point about the web is that it is not an advertising medium. The web is not a selling medium, it is a buying medium. It is user controlled, so the user controls, the user experiences. My hand is on the mouse. I decide where I want to go. If I don't like it here, I will go a lot of other places instead.”

If it is not an “advertising medium” how can we use it to sell? People hate banners, spam, and pop ups. They even buy software to stop it. It seems hopeless.

However, while we were barely watching, the Internet was growing into its own. It refused to be forced into the marketing model we chose for it. Like a rebel child with a spirit of its own, it developed, with little help from marketers, into what it was born to be – a community - something billboards, magazine spreads and radio spots cannot be.

The Emergence of Affiliate Marketing

The adolescent Internet grew through its lanky, awkward, failed marketing stages and developed a life force of its own. It became a community – and it’s a community that wants to talk! Chats, blogs, forums and informational content sites grew in prominence until the era of the Internet became known as the “Information Age.”

How do you sell on the Internet? Easy, talk! The Internet is a talking community, full of friends, advice and experts. The time/space model doesn’t work here, the word-of-mouth principle (also called viral marketing) does. As gossip spreads exponentially through progressive multiplication, so does a personal recommendation on the Internet. Far from being a marketing failure, this baby has grown into a marketing powerhouse. Even banners and pop-ups are more acceptable when perceived as a “tip” from a friend (offering a personal recommendation for further information about a popular subject).

“Each one reach one” is the adage at the heart of the affiliate model. Ironically, the Internet is not separating people as its early naysayers warned. Rather, it is spawning dynamic communities and, as marketers know, communities are inherently targeted groups.

The affiliate model works because the widget maker (who is generally not a community maker) enjoys the benefit of the powerful word-of-mouth, personal recommendation of a successful community maker/ widget seller/ “affiliate.”

This affiliate hosts a popular community or content site and has gained the confidence of his/her readers. The affiliate’s personal recommendation inspires the readers to check out the widgets on the recommended site. If the affiliate’s reader goes on to buy a widget, the affiliate gets a commission on the sale. Win/win.

So, whether you happen to chop trees or sell them, affiliate programs are one of the most powerful sales tools available for today’s Internet marketing expert. If you make widgets, affiliates are your sales associates who literally go to the ends of the earth to sell your product. If you are a community maker, start adding those “red ribbons,” i.e. affiliate program banners, to your websites. Soon you too will be reaping the self-replicating rewards of viral marketing.

Chapter 3

The Affiliate Jungle
How to choose a successful affiliate program

Preparation is essential. Understand the game you are playing before you play. Unknown Author

An affiliate program has two sides, the merchant side (the party with something to sell) and the affiliate side (the party who has gathered a trusting community such as a hobby website, e-zine or discussion group). In essence, affiliate marketing is recommendation selling. The affiliate recommends the merchant’s product and provides a link to it from his/her popular website. In return, the merchant gives the affiliate a commission for the sale – a win/win situation.

Affiliate programs help affiliates and advertisers work together for profitability. The advertiser provides the affiliates with ads to place on their sites including corresponding tracking codes. Each time a visitor clicks through to an advertiser's site, fills out a form or buys something, the affiliate receives a fee. This fee depends on the action taken by the visitor. Usually it is a fixed amount for visiting the site, filling out a form, or a percentage of the sales.
 

First Steps in Starting an Affiliate Web Site

The costs for starting an affiliate marketing business are negligible compared to starting a traditional brick-and-mortar business. You can do it without a backbreaking bank loan and you may not even need to petition your relatives to bankroll you. You will need only to buy a domain name and get hosting for your site. You may need to hire someone else to design and/or write your website, but you will not need to buy the customary inventory that brick-and-mortar businesses depend on. Instead, you will operate on a commission, or profit-sharing basis. You don’t even need to sell anything on your own website. Your website serves as a pointer to the seller’s ‘buy’ page, and your earnings depend on how many buying visitors you can forward to that page.

One way to get started with affiliate programs is to hire an affiliate network to do the back-end work. There are many to choose from, such as: Commission Junction, Clixgalore, Be Free, LinkShare, etc.

A representative of the affiliate network will install the needed software on your server, and you can start earning money immediately. The best way to evaluate an affiliate program is to sign up as an affiliate and experience firsthand, the services affiliates receive. Then, you may want to sign up as a merchant and see what using affiliates can do for your online business.

The top programs offer medium-to-low commissions, have a strict review policy in which they go over your website before accepting your membership (which basically means that you have to design your website BEFORE you apply), and have a proven track record with verifiable testimonials.

Quick Checklist for Choosing Affiliate Programs

• Look for verifiable testimonials on the affiliate system’s website. You may even want to contact some of those people and see how the program works for them. This is also an excellent way to get inside information on how to optimize your website better to benefit from the program.
   

• Search the Internet for news and reviews about the program.
   

• Understand the commission policy, and especially the part about multi-tiered income.
   

• Ask yourself "Can I really SELL that product?" If you have doubts, drop the idea and look somewhere else.
   

• Research 2-3 multi-tiered affiliate systems before choosing one. Select the one that offers the best chance for income (and not necessarily the one that offers the best rates).

This research will prove invaluable. You will be investing time, money and effort, you shouldn’t settle for anything less than the best.

Chapter 4

Multi-Tier Affiliate Programs
Other People Making You Money

High expectations are the key to everything. Sam Walton

What is a Multi-Tier System?

While having two sides (merchant and affiliate), an affiliate program may also have multiple levels (usually 2, but some as many as 5). A second level occurs when the affiliate recruits a sub-affiliate. In this case, the top affiliate is rewarded for signing up a sub-affiliate by receiving a commission on everything sold by his recruit.

Let’s assume that you sign up with the affiliate program of company X and also get more people to sign up (through you) for that affiliate program. You will get a share of their profits as well! It’s a profit pyramid waiting to be taken advantage of, and with some intelligent referring and a well-made website, you can sit back, relax, and watch, as other people literally make money for you!

Setting Up a Multi-Tier System

Obviously, through the principle of progressive multiplication, if affiliates are selling, and recruiting sub-affiliates to sell, sales will multiply exponentially. This is good, but it can be somewhat like a brick-and-mortar store suddenly having too small a parking lot or too few registers to handle the traffic. Remember, an army of affiliates wants, and deserves, their cut of the pie. For the merchant, this can spell a management nightmare.

Amazon.com developed the most famous affiliate program. To run their program, they developed automated traffic-tracking tools, which they patented. However, most companies stick to what they do best (their product) and outsource the management of their affiliate programs. Online affiliate tracking experts host the software needed to keep track of affiliates and required payments. 

Here are some Management and Software Options to get you Started:

·                                 AffiliateShop
                             Interneka
                             Commission Junction
                             QuickPayPro
                             Leadhound
                             My Affiliate Program
                             AssocTRACK
                                    Your Own Affiliate Program
                             Synergyx
                             Be Free
                             LinkShare Corporation
                             AffiliateZone.com
                             AffiliateTrends
                             AffiliateGuerrilla
                             CyberAffiliates (Australian)

·    Of course, these are just a few of the many programs available. Note: If you choose a “do it yourself” software solution, you may need to hire a programmer to install it for you.

How to Promote your Affiliate Program 

1.      Finding affiliates to invite into your program:

a.  Look for sites with content complimentary to your product or service

b.  Look for sites that rank well for the most logical keywords related to the site

c.  Look for sites that already link to you. In altavista.com enter, site:your-domain-name.com, to find the sites that link to you.

2.      Treat your affiliates well:

a.  What will you pay for? A click through to your site? A purchase? A download?

b.  Will you pay a set amount or a percentage?  

c.  Will you reward the affiliate if the shopper buys any item on your site or only the advertised item?

d.  Will you reward the affiliate one time only or every time that buyer returns and buys again?

These considerations are important because they are directly tied to the morale of your affiliates. If the offer isn’t good enough, they simply won’t represent you or, if they do, they won’t work very hard at marketing your product. Good affiliates are in demand in today’s Internet marketing arena. Merchants are competing for the best. You can use http://www.refer-it.com/ to compare your offers to the offers of similar companies.

3.  Multiply your efforts by offering a multi-level program:
Affiliates recruit more affiliates. They do the work for you.

Some Affiliate Programs that Offer Multi-Tier Options 

·                                 Make Your Site Sell
                             WebSponsors
                             Secrets to Marketing your Business  
                             Declan Dunn's latest exciting book
                             One & Only
                             AWeber
                             iPowerWeb
                             USAPrescription.com
                             PillStore.com 
                             Groundbreak.com
                             MyAffiliateProgram
                             CafePress

     One of the best ways to familiarize yourself with multi-tier affiliate marketing is to participate as an affiliate for a while. After learning the affiliate side, try a level down and recruit a sub-affiliate. Next, examine the online and software solutions. Also, try asking the Webmaster of a site with a successful affiliate program what management system they are using. After doing your homework, launch your multi-tier affiliate program and discover the real power of the Internet.

Chapter 5:

Designing a Selling Site
Your website is your #1 Salesman

Do What the Big Boys Do

Many newcomers to the ‘get rich on the internet’ train believe that to successfully make money from affiliate marketing, all one needs to do is throw together a quick sales page, highlighting the features of the affiliate’s product (or products) and sit back and watch the commissions ring up. That doesn’t work.

If you want to know what does work, follow the examples of leading affiliate marketing gurus (and their websites). Build content-rich websites, with a general focus toward the genre of the product you’re aiming to sell. If you have several affiliate programs, keep those with similar themes together, e.g., web development and internet marketing e-books can be sold together. Focus on building trust -- the key ingredient to all sales. When you provide your visitors with a truckload of free and more important, valuable information, they will think of you as an expert in your field, and regular additions to your article database will keep them returning. Content-rich websites also ensure high ranking in search engines.
 

Using Content to Pre-Sell Products

The key here is not to sell the product (that’s someone else’s job), but to pre-sell it. Once your visitors trust your opinions, and you've developed a steady stream of traffic, you can direct them to the product of your choice. Compared with sales-only websites with a browser to buyer conversion rate of less than 1%, content-rich websites generate a conversion rate of anywhere from 5% to 15%. With higher traffic, and better conversion rates, the greatest profitability comes from content-rich websites.

Chapter 6

Search Engine Optimization
Getting High Ratings for Your Site

Search Engines vs. Directories

There are two major types of search utilities on the internet. One is the human-compiled directories, such as the Open Directory Project, or the Yahoo directory, and the other is the "crawler" or "spider" type search engines. For the human-edited directory, you need to write a short description of your site and pick a category before submitting it. However, there is no telling when, or if, it will be approved and listed. The process usually takes three to four weeks.

If you want to speed up the process, you can pay to be listed - a one-time fee of $299 (USD) at Yahoo for noncommercial sites or a yearly $299 (USD) fee for commercial sites. This fee does not guarantee that your site will be accepted, just that it will be reviewed faster. Review your budget carefully; these directories are a major source of high quality traffic.

Once your site is listed in a directory, the crawlers will pick it up and index it. The crawlers automatically visit a web page when they find a link to it, and update automatically. If you don't want to wait until the crawlers do their job to find you, you can submit your site directly to them - to Google and Yahoo first (their crawlers are different from their directories), and then to Lycos, HotBot, AltaVista, Excite, Ask Jeeves, and so on. The process is rather simple. In most cases, just submit your URL. You don't need to register with all of them -- they will eventually find you. There are several tools that will submit your URL to the major search engines free of charge, such as those at SubmitCorner (http://www.submitcorner.com/Tools/Submit/) and SubmitPlus (http://www.submitplus.com/freeprograms.php?b=top10).

Cheating or spamming a search engine with too many submissions is not a good idea, and may get your site banned - the crawlers are smarter than you may think, and they grow smarter every day.

What a Search Engine Sees

If you have a web site, and you want people to find it, you should spend some time analyzing how to improve your standing in the search engines. A search engine usually displays the top 10 to 20 results on the first page, and this is where you want to be -- on the first page!

The search engines use an algorithm to calculate how relevant a page is for the respective search words. The formula differs from one engine to the next, and is kept secret to prevent webmasters from cheating. However, we do know some things about these algorithms. Their most important analysis tool is the location and the frequency of the keywords on the respective page.

The key words, or the combinations of key words, should to be placed in the TITLE tag, in the first lines of the text, and anywhere else on the page, reinforcing them. Search engines cannot read pictures, but some of them read the ALT tag, so keywords can be placed there. They also have problems with indexs and dynamic content (such as pages generated using a database), but they can read the META description and keywords tags. However, many web builders tried to cheat the search engines, resulting in META tags becoming less important to the ranking. A search engine can also read the COMMENT tags, which are invisible to the user. The URL is also important, so try using the keyword there, if possible, but avoid the “?” symbol - it sometimes blocks the crawlers.

Other parts of the algorithm are more difficult to control. For instance, they will take into account the number of links pointing to your site, and the quality of those links. Are the linking sites also popular, and do they belong to the same categories of interest as your own? If your site is new, you may try to use a link exchange service, or contact other webmasters and offer link exchanges. To find relevant sites to exchange links with, make a search using your best keywords, then contact the top 20 sites displayed.

You can pay to drive traffic to your site, by using a specialized SEO (search engine optimization) company or a pay-per-click service. All major search engines, including Google and Yahoo, offer sponsored links, which are displayed next to the results of the regular search. You have to pay a small fee every time somebody clicks your link.
 

Five Steps to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Some say SEO is an art, while others call it a science. More likely, it’s nothing more than commonsense and expected psychological behavior.

Here is a 15-minute guide to search engine optimization:

1) Site Content Optimization

The first step is to optimize your content. Work on developing a list of keywords that are relevant to the service or product that your website provides. For example, if you provide digital camera reviews, here's a sample of what the first 5 keywords could be:

'digital camera reviews'

‘digital cameras’

‘digital photography’

‘digital camera news’

‘digital camera help’

Ideally this should be done before you begin writing your website content. Once you've built your keyword list, focus on keeping your page topic-specific (don't lump digital camera news and reviews). Incorporate the keyword into the URL when possible, e.g. (http://mydigitalcamerareviews.com/camera-reviews.htm)

For each page, maintain one or two top keywords and make sure that you place them throughout the page text. Optimal density is around 5%, but that is sometimes hard to achieve, so anything around 2% will do.

2) Delivering Quality Content

Your visitors (and you'll have thousands of visitors daily if you're patient and apply proper SEO techniques) are looking for quality information. At the first sign that your website cannot deliver, they are bound to click away to another website. Search engines and directories place your website according to relevancy. Thus, keeping with our earlier example, your website must have a vast variety of digital camera reviews, and you should keep it regularly updated with the latest information. After all, what's the point of having a website that provides cutting-edge information if you're not going to work on it?

Note: If you already have a website, don’t think of adding all of those 20 articles you wrote (or had written by a freelance writer) at one time. Search engines also keep track of how regularly your website is updated. Instead, take care to update your website one step at a time. Once the search engine spiders realize that your website is turning out quality content regularly, they will reindex your website on a more regular basis (and then you can step up those content additions).

Good content will go a long way toward boosting your relevancy with search engines, and articles are an excellent base to start the next SEO technique.

3) Link Building

Once you've created your website following the first two steps, you'll need to develop a link network. Google's PageRank algorithm depends on the number of inbound links to your website, as well as other factors. However, its value in determining your position has diminished slightly. Nevertheless, in combination with highly specific content, PR can still be a valuable factor.

If you don’t fully understand PageRank, don’t worry. Just concentrate on getting scores of websites linking to yours. The more relevant they are to your niche, the better it is for your rankings. Their PageRank also affects your PageRank, thus having an impact on search engine results for your website. Link building is considered the most important step by SEO experts because it has the double effect of boosting your search engine placement (by increasing relevancy and PageRank), and also increasing traffic from related websites.

4) Submission to Directories

There are several good tools available on the Internet that let you submit your website to leading search engines for free (or a very nominal fee). This saves you the hassle of manual submission, but shouldn't be a cause for celebration. First, it takes quite a while before search engine spiders visit your website. Even after a search engine indexes your website, it might take a bit longer before doing a deep crawl of your website (thus going through all your niche-specific content). So, it can take a while to get results.

Secondly, these tools don’t submit to the leading Internet directories. And even if they do, the process is automated, and since directories manually index all websites, they're quick to weed out automated submissions. Instead, submitting to major directories like Yahoo! and MSN (and Inktomi, if you can afford paid inclusion) should be done manually. While it may not sound like much, a reasonable placement within your niche in a popular directory like Yahoo! can pay off with great results.

On the downside, directories can take anywhere from a week to a few months to list your website. To avoid the wait, write a compelling site description/submission proposal.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The most important point to remember about search engine optimization is patience. You cannot attain top ten rankings for your keywords in just a month, or even 4-6 months. SEO takes time: time invested in extensive link building, gradual content building, directory listings and most importantly, building regular traffic. Your early traffic will probably depend more on advertising and word-of-mouth, than search engines.

Consider the following strategy, especially if you're at the start of your SEO campaign and can afford to spend some cash:

5) Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)

PPC advertising consists of signing up with a service such as Google AdWords or Overture. Your link is displayed as a sponsored listing when a visitor searches using your key words, and you pay for every visitor sent you. This might be a good strategy for large businesses. However, Internet startups on a tight budget should carefully weigh cost versus benefit before selecting any PPC service.

Links to Affiliate Programs Offered by SEO Web Sites:

http://www.seo-tech.com/seo-affiliate-program.html - SEO Tech offers a 10% commission on every sale generated through your reference.

http://www.affiliateguide.com/search-ppc.html - a comprehensive listing of SEO, PPC, and Search programs.

In review, let's put it all together...

The Top 10 Tips for a High Page Rank 

1. Focus on developing primary (1-3) keywords for your website, and for each page you add. Consider your keywords carefully. Ask yourself what your target audience might search for. You might want to check your competition's keywords. You may use different keywords on different pages of your site, but try to focus each page on only one or two keyword phrases.
    

2. Place keywords in the TITLE tag (mandatory for a decent ranking), keyword META tag, description META tag, COMMENT tags, and ALT tags. Also place keywords in the first paragraph of body text and in headings. Distribute your keyphrases at a 5% frequency of the written text. A greater frequency might be considered  "keyword spam" (by search engines). It can also be annoying for the reader.
    

3. To ensure maximum exposure, manually submit to popular directories (such as Yahoo, Google, Wowdirectory, and the smaller, targeted ones, which may be available in your line of business). When the crawlers find you, your ranking will improve considerably. Also, consider paid advertisement options (such as PPC), but remember that sponsor listings are 1/5th as effective as regular search engine results (making it useful early on, but redundant once you’ve spent some time in developing traffic).
    

4. Create a site map. This allows the crawlers to index all the pages of your site. It might prove helpful for the human visitors as well.
    

5. Regularly add quality content to your website. Good content is vital. You may convince people to check out your site once, but, if you have nothing new to offer, it's very unlikely you will achieve a high ranking.
   

6. Consider giving something away for free - and, if you do, use the word "free" as one of your keywords. It is one of the most popular search terms, as long as it is associated with something else.
    

7. Get other people to link to your site. This is vital for the Google PageRank, which determines how important a web page is by calculating how many other sites link to it, how important those sites are, and how relevant for the respective subject. Low-intensity, long-term do-it-yourself link building will not only save you money, but will produce the same results most SEO experts claim to deliver.
   
   If you can, spend some time learning how this system works, either directly from Google: http://www.google.com/technology/, or from one of the million pages written on this subject.
    

8. Promoting your site is a lot like advertising for any other product, so plan your budget and spend it wisely. There are many options available: hire a company to be in charge of the entire process, use a traffic exchange service, use a pay-per-click service, etc.
    

9. Obtaining a good ranking is a lengthy process that may take up to 6 months. It's highly unlikely that you'll get the number one spot and hold it for months on end. The competition is fierce. Instead, focus on a place in the top 20, or simply on doing better than your direct competition.
    

10. Do not try to cheat the system; it will eventually turn against you. If you understand how the search engines work, you can make them work to your advantage without cheating. Also, search engine ranking methods change often, so keep up with the latest news.

Chapter 7

Making Real Money as an Affiliate
Financial Freedom -- Just a Click Away

Signing up with a well established, third-party affiliate program is the quickest way to get started making money while you sleep. Two such programs stand out from the crowd: Commission Junction (CJ) and ClixGalore (CG).

This is how they work:

• Acting as a third party, the affiliate program (AP) lists merchants seeking affiliates to represent their products.
   

• The affiliates, in turn, choose the products (ideally in their niche), they wish to represent by placing advertisements or links on their web-sites.
   

• These links are tracked by the AP, which manages all transactions (transaction = customer clicks on advertisement to go to advertiser’s website) and handles record-keeping for both advertisers and affiliates.
   

• The affiliate earns a fee or commission on every transaction.

With so many advertisers and affiliates, it’s easy to get lost in the details, and wonder if you can make a profit earning only $0.01 per click. Since the AP usually takes its commission from the affiliates’ share, you can expect those earnings to drop by 10% (leaving you with a sad, $0.009 per click). But let's do the math.

Suppose you’ve spent over a year building and promoting your website and you are averaging around 5000 unique visitors per day (that’s easier than you think). Let’s say around 10 percent of your visitors, or 500, click on the advertiser’s link. Now if you do the math, that’s 500 x 0.009 x 30, around $135 for one month. Not bad for just one ad.

Be encouraged! You will make money if you do the following:

• Work on your website traffic. Ensure that you have a large number of unique visitors daily.
   

• Learn to place advertisements in prominent locations: the main page, a relevant article, your newsletter, etc.
   

• Mix and match your programs. If one program can earn you $135 per month, 5 such programs could potentially earn you $675, and if you have more than one website…you can guess the rest.
   

• Do background research on the advertisers. It’s important for your website’s image that you link to other websites that offer content at least as good and helpful as your own. You don’t want your customers to be disappointed by your recommendations, and thus lose faith in you.

If you follow proven SEO practices while building your website, within a year you should have a sizeable number of trusting readers who follow your recommendations.
If you consistently point them to reliable products, they will return to your counsel (via your website) again and again.

Then you truly will be making money while you sleep.

Conclusion

Do you feel you have learned enough to get started ...or least to get excited about affiliate marketing? At http://www.affiliate-marketing.com.au/ you can start your affiliate website business today. If you already have some experience, you will appreciate the resources this site has to offer. Even if you're a total "newbie," this site makes it easy, step by step, for you to take full advantage of the snowballing profits possible through affiliate marketing.

You can do it!