However, if you believe you should be doing more business, but can’t seem to reach a greater customer base even though you are on Facebook and are employing basic SEO, it may be time to enhance your knowledge of internet marketing strategies. The internet is constantly evolving, and because of this, so is the way that businesses are able to reach their target market. Three great ways to improve your internet marketing efforts to gain the visibility you need to prosper include:

Consistency
Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger are all great platforms to use to reach new audiences. These sites have millions of users which is great when looking for new customers, but they can also provide a challenge for companies wishing to stand out. While a great looking Facebook page and blog can say multitudes about your company, no one will say interested in them if the same information stays on these sites for days or months on end. To maintain relevance and customer interest, online businesses need to post to their blogs and social media site pages at least once a day. Not only will it increase interest, but it will also help raise your business’ website in the search engine results pages.

Multimedia Use
A site should never incorporate only text. Search engines today are programmed to read the code behind videos, and including them on your sites can greatly increase the likelihood that your site will show up on the search engine results pages. Not only can they enhance your visibility via code, but they also afford your site the chance of going viral which can rapidly increase your customer base. Using videos on your site are also a great way to maintain a site visitor’s attention longer which makes them more likely to be converted in to a customer.

Web Metrics
Many online business owners don’t pay attention to who visits their site or which region these customers are coming from, just the number of visitors coming to the site. This can be a big mistake that can cost you an opportunity to close in on a niche market. When pushing your site, always monitor who is visiting your site through web metrics. Web metrics will let you know who is visiting your site the most, allowing you the opportunity to focus in on that demographic and reach them more effectively.

I’m just going to use the topic of dating offers as an example, but the tips I’ll give obviously apply to any niche or offer you pick.

Getting traffic to your offer

You can’t make money without traffic. So, getting people to see your ad, click on your links, submit their info, or even purchase something is the most important part of all of this. Deciding on where you want to get that traffic from is the tough part. There are so many options – Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, Facebook, Twitter, and many more. For this example, we’ll stick with AdWords and AdCenter since they are pretty similar.  Sign up for both of them as you’ll want to diversify and test which platform works better for you. Most affiliate marketers seem to believe that AdCenter converts better, but it takes longer for a campaign to ramp up and receive traffic, where with AdWords you may see impressions and clicks more quickly, but not necessarily any conversions. Test them both and keep working with them.

Within each of the sites, you’ll be able to set up different campaigns. I like to to test different keywords, so if we are dealing with a Dating offer, then I may set up the overall campaign with the offer name. Then within the campaign you can set up your different ad groups. These are the ads that will be displayed and the keywords that they would show for. I set up different ad groups based on different groups of keywords. To get off the dating example for a second, a better one to understand this might be if you were promoting an affiliate link for a discount printer ink website. You could have Ad Groups for each different printer type or manufacturer (Epson, HP, etc) and then have all your keywords relating to that manufacturer or group. This way you can see which keywords are performing the best within different ad groups. I think that explanation makes sense, if not leave a comment and I’ll try to help explain some more!

Once you’ve got your Ads and ad groups set up, set your budget for spending and let it go.

Finding Keywords

Doing keyword research is probably the most time consuming part of this process. There are so many tools out there and different websites you can use. Ian Fernando just posted a video about the Google Wonder Wheel which is an excellent tool to use and gain ideas from. Within Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter there are also keyword research tools which are pretty helpful in giving you ideas. You can just put in your main keyword and it will spit out tons of related terms and even show you the search volume for them. I’ll post more in the future about keyword research as I get more into it. Right now, I don’t really have any set method or system that I use besides the research tools within AdWords and AdCenter.

Testing, Testing, Testing

The biggest part to making this venture successful besides effective keyword research is continually testing every aspect of your ad and campaign. You always want to be changing your keywords (removing some and adding others) to see what works, changing the text or copy of your ad, and also your ad headlines. Another tip is to make as many ads as you can! There’s nothing stopping you from creating hundreds of different ads and seeing what performs the best – this is what some of the big guys do…all day. Just changing a word or two can make a big difference.

Along with testing, you want to keep checking your stats to see what keywords bringing impressions, and more importantly, are getting clicked. Also, be ready to drop some money to see some rewards. I’ve probably spent about $200 to make the $60 that I did. So there is definitely a big learning curve involved, but you could stumble on a great niche or ad that converts great and makes all that money back for you right away!

As you all know, I’m always looking for ways to make more money and I know you are too – that’s why you are reading this! So anyway, I’ve been playing around with affiliate marketing for a while now but have not had much success. I’ve been able to get a sale here or a sale there but usually for just a few bucks. So last week I decided I wanted to give it a harder shot and started doing some reading on Ian Fernando’s site, Justin Dupree’s site, Zac Johnson’s site, and many others. I’ve basically been looking for any tips, guides, or recommendations to get me started into the crazy world of affiliate marketing and PPC (pay-per-click) marketing. Well, after launching a couple campaigns recently, I had some luck last week!

I made $60.

Yes, you read that right, $60. Now, its not exactly anything to jump and scream about when guys like Jonathan Volk are earning thousands of dollars a day or even people making a few hundred a week. However, it is fun to see the small amount of work that I put into it start to pay off somehow. So, I wanted to go through a few things that I did, the process I went through, and hopefully it will give you some ideas and tips on starting up some of your own campaigns to earn that extra money.

First, you’re going to need to be apart of an affiliate network like Market Leverage. The folks at Market Leverage are great and I highly recommend going with them as they have a good variety of offers in a number of industries/niches. So, start out by signing up with them and then get familiar with the dashboard and looking through the offers. Another great option is Commission Junction which is a very popular network with tons of online stores, sites, and programs.

Next, you’ll need to decide what kind of offers you want to run. Now, you have a bunch of choices. If you have a large email list built up, you may want to run email specific offers or if you know where you can get a large amount of traffic from, email or zip code submit offers may convert better for you. But if you don’t have an email list of thousands of people or large amounts of traffic you could direct to a landing page, there is always the option for advertising your campaign through Facebook, MSN AdCenter and Google AdWords.  These are the three traffic sources I have been using lately, but there are tons of others – pretty much any search engine has an advertising networking you can join.  If you want to just push out some affiliate links and test a bunch of different offers, offers that allow for search traffic will be what you want to go with.

Once you’ve decided on the type of offer you want to run, you have to decide on the actual offers to promote. This is where it gets tricky. Obviously a network is going to have a lot of offers you could run including niches like weight loss, mobile/ring tones, home business ops, dating, and more – so narrowing down what you want to promote is important. However, you easily could just start picking random offers and trying them out. It just depends on what you want to do!

–

In part two of this short series on affiliate marketing, I’ll write more about actually setting up ads with AdWords or AdCenter and testing different things to see what works. Look for that coming shortly.

Affiliate Theme is an innovative new WordPress theme, but with a twist. Affiliate Theme was built exclusively for affiliate marketers and make money online bloggers who build landing pages and review sites for niche products and offers. Some of the top bloggers and Internet marketers are already using it. I  hear those guys are using Affiliate Theme to pull in hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.

Basically, the theme gives you the chance to quickly set up landing pages and niche sites based around different affiliate offers from Market Leverage or any other affiliate marketing company you belong to.

Here are some of the customization offers:

• With a single click you can change the entire layout from 1-column, 2-column, 3-column, 4-column, left-column sidebar or right-column sidebar. That effectively means you can test six different website layouts without needing multiple themes.
• You can control the background colors or images, font typography, homepage title and header graphics.
• You can easily insert tracking code without needing to hack your theme.
• Your blog’s navigation system can easily be changed, as well as the footer elements.
• There are settings for a featured offer on your homepage (like a highlight box) and also individual page offers.
• and a WHOLE lot more…

With the theme comes with 6 different templates and a few different customized headers that you can use. Of course you can customize any portion of it to fit your needs. Check the Affiliate Theme website for full details.

As with any other wordpress theme site, you can sign up for a single use package, a multi-use package, or an unlimited use package.

If you want to start making money through affiliate offers and niche wordpress sites based on different CPA offers, then Affiliate Theme is the way to go. Sign up and give it a shot!

So, what plugins do you use for your site?

I currently have installed:

• Akismet (of course)
• All In One SEO
• DealDotCom
• Gregarious
• OIOPublisher
• Subscribe To Comments
• Text Link Ads
• What Would Seth Godin Do

Share with everyone in the comments what plugins you use on your WordPress site!