Monday, February 4th, 2008
Most affiliates get sales from the respective affiliate programs they belong to by selling directly to visitors.
But what about the 2nd Tier?
Many affiliates programs allow you to sign up affiliates under you so you can earn commissions from the sales that YOUR affiliates are making. This is commonly referred to as the 2nd tier.
However it is often ignored.
Many of the most successful affiliates have built a huge 2nd tier in their programs where they have hundreds of other people all earning commissions for them.
This means they earn a lot of their commissions from the indirect sales. It also means they do not have to concentrate so much on the direct sales. This frees up more of their time
to work on promoting some of their other affiliate programs.
Think about the power of the 2nd tier.
You do one piece of work - getting an affiliate signed up under you in one of your affiliate programs.
Then each of those affiliates sell the particular product or service separately themselves. Any sales that they make, you make a commission.
The commission you make for the 2nd tier is much less than the direct commission. But if you have hundreds of affiliates under you, these many small amounts dwarf the 1 larger amount.
If they sell this week. You get paid. If they sell next week.
You get paid again. And if they sell next month. You STILL get paid.
You get paid each time they get paid.
Some affiliate programs allow you to earn commissions from your affiliates for many years. So by doing a little work today you can be earning commissions for years to come.
So do not just sell direct to your visitors. Entice your visitors to become affiliates as well.
Show them the benefits of joining an affiliate program. Tell them how much money they could make. Motivate them to sign up as an affiliate under you.
In the long run this strategy will prove to be very successful for you.
Don’t forget the 2nd tier. It may be more valuable than you think.
Tags: affiliate program, affiliate programs, affiliates programs, commissions, direct commission, how much money, indirect sales
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Saturday, December 8th, 2007
Thousands upon thousands of articles are being viewed on the Internet daily but it is very safe to say that only a fraction of it is read from start to finish. This calls for an alarm to those writers who give all their best in writing good article.
The following are elements that should be injected if you want your article to be worth reading:
Good Title - A good title means more readers. This is the most important part of the article if you want it to be attractive to the readers. To choose a title, identify first your purpose why you will write the article. Title would also become the basis of your whole article so you have to be careful of choosing what to use. Write down several suggested titles so that you can give yourself more choices. From this point you can create a good content.
Short introduction - Have you watched a play or movie or listened to a song with introductions you never know when to end? On an article where readers are after the content, introduction should be kept in to a minimum. A good 3-4-sentence-introduction that tells the readers the summary of the article or a prelude of what to expect is enough. In this way, you can keep your readers interested on the whole article.
Content - After the title, you should focus on the content. A good content will keep the reader hooked thus continuity is essential. Asking questions after the paragraph would keep the readers interested on the succeeding content. Make sure you provide a set of this and you are ready to go.
Error free - Articles are written to educate or to inform. As much as possible it should not be subject to criticism from the readers. Although this cannot be avoided, criticism should not focus on the grammar, spelling, and punctuations. A good article should error free. It would not only give the readers ease while reading, it also improves the credibility of the whole article and the message it aims to convey.
Format - In as much as readers would want to get informed, they also would like to get it easily that is why article format is one of the essential elements of a good article. Make sure your article can be read easily by creating several areas for the readers to take short breaks. A lengthy paragraph would not invite readers. Keep it short. The more paragraph breaks the article has, the more inviting it would become. Bullet and numbers are also highly recommended especially if you are writing how-to articles.
Terminologies - Avoid using superfluous words that are hard to understand. Flaunting words are no-no. Keep your terms simple. Your aim is for your article to be read by as many people as possible so you have to use terms that could be understood by all. Target the general reader and the terms will all come easy for you.
Conclusion - Your article is about to end and you don’t have a good way to end it, what should you do? Write a short conclusion that will summarize all the inputs you have inserted on your article. Keep it short and direct to the point.
Editing - After you wrote your articles. Take time to edit and re-edit. This will give you the chance to make revisions or inject some more thoughts to the article.
With these elements laid down, it should be easy for you to write your article that is relevant and readable from start to finish.
Article Source: http://www.simplysearch4it.com/author-articles/6306/1.html
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Saturday, December 8th, 2007
My staff keep reminding me that I am one of the most prolific writers they have ever seen. I have a tendency to write 10 to 15 articles a day and a 300 page training manual in just 2 weeks fully edited ready for publishing which is a little freakish but I enjoy writing and I enjoy sharing my knowledge with people. One of the top ways of doing that on the Internet is to write your articles and submit them to an Article Directory but I have recently seen some very dark issues creeping in with articles submitted to some of the article directories.
This has really happened to me…
As a technology geek and yes I will call myself a geek cause that is what I am, I often write articles on technology subjects like how to use excel, how to build webpages, etc. However, when I submitted my articles to five article directories recently I found some really disturbing aspects to the way they do business and present my articles. One of the most disturbing issues was that if you had any domain names or links in either your webpage or in your Author Bio they stripped them out. If you had used keywords in your Hypertext, they removed your links and substituted their own to your competitions website. See, it seems some article directories are now using your work to advertise other people services within your articles.
When I saw this for the first time, I was flabbergasted. Not just because somebody else was using my work and saying that it was their, but more so, they were using my keywords to hijack my back links back to my website to my competitors. I had also found from these five article directories that they had licensed my work to others, so that they could put their names on my articles.
This one issue alone opens up a plethora of issues with Google, MSN, AOL and Yahoo?
The entire search engines above frown on duplicate material on websites and by somebody using your material without permission you could find that anyone of these Search Engines could ban your site. The really scary aspect to this is that you are not responsible for this and it really is a form of identity theft and more copyright infringement.
For all except one of the directories, I was able to overcome this problem by simply going in and deleting the articles to reclaim my work and stop my competitors from stealing my work but one of the directories did not have the capabilities to do this.
So from my experience I have written five mandatory questions you should be asking your directories so that this does not happen to you!
Q1. Do I Own The Rights To My Articles?
This seems pretty straight forward but I have found in the fine print of some article directory sites, it will say that by submitting your article to this directory that you agree that the directory now owns the intellectual property of this article. If you find that, then my recommendation is to run. Most quality directories do require you to give them a non-exclusive license to reprint or reuse or redistribute your article and this is quite acceptable as this is what you want, but you do not at any stage want to lose your rights to your articles, especially if you are not getting paid for it.
Q2. Can I Pre-format My Article with HTML
Some directory articles have rules that prevent you from including HTML in your article. What this means in many cases is that you cannot format the article the way you want. This can be a major problem for you if you have bulleted lists or numbered lists as you can sometimes find these lists are all on one line or not properly formatted.
I have even seen situations where, I have submitted articles to this type of article directory only to find that all my paragraphs are lumped together and the articles look terrible. The bottom line is this, select your article submission directories carefully and make sure you can pre-format the article in HTML. I should note that there are now many Article Submission directories that allow you to enter articles with full html including pictures.
Q3. Are You Going To Sell or Provide My Email Address To A Third Party?
Everyone that I know hates spam. Me in particular, especially since I get around 1,000 spam emails everyday! Be very careful though, some article directories have written into their operating agreements that they can pass your email address onto third-parties. This means, they could sell or supply your email address to anyone. Most article directories that I deal with, have very strict policies on protecting your privacy and your emails but some article directories automatically put your email address up on the article with your name.
This is as big a problem as someone actually selling your email address, as some spammers use tools called mail bots or email bots that look for the html tag mailto and then pickup the email address after that html tag. This is a big problem for all of us, as this means the spammers know they have a valid email address, so ensure when you are choosing an article directory that they do not sell or provide your email address to any third party plus that they do not put your email address on the page your article is on.
If you are not sure, have a look at some of the articles in the article directory as that will give you a pretty good indication as to the way the articles and email addresses will be handled.
Q4. Do You Allow Hyperlinks or Domain Names in your Article Or Author/Bio Line?
The whole reason for you or I writing articles is so that we can get our work published onto the internet and promote our business whether it be through back links or from people reading your article and then deciding to visit your website. If you are not writing articles for this reason, then I hope you are getting paid a lot of money cause if you are not getting links back to your website, then you will not get any traffic.
There are some article directories that do not allow hyperlinks in the main body of the webpage, where as others do allow it on special occasions. Some article directories do not even allow hyperlinks in the Author/Bio Line which as far as I am concerned means you may as well go elsewhere because if you are not getting at least a domain name shown in the Author/Bio Line then how are people going to know where your site is. If you are selecting an Article directory, make sure in their writing rules area that it specifies that even if you can have an active domain link, that you can at least have an inactive domain link or web address link.
A sample of an inactive domain link is shown to the right - http://www.1-on-1.biz
What this means is that the reader of your article at the very least can see your domain and can copy and paste your domain into the address section of the browser. You certainly will not get as many people visiting your website if you are using inactive domain links in the Author Bio area but at least if people really want to see what you have to offer they can get there relatively easily.
Remember one thing, the human race inherently lazy so if you do not make things as easy as possible your sales will never soar.
Q5. Do You Allow Hypertext Links in your Author/Bio Line?
A Hypertext link is one of the most important links on an article page. Essentially what this type of link is, is where a person will see normal text but when they click on the text it will take them to a particular webpage. For example I have included a Hypertext Link below -
How to Profit from a Direct Sales Website
I have written the code for the link below. Note that I have substituted the < > for [ ] brackets simply for this article.
[a href=”http://www.1-on-1.biz/dms.asp”] How to Profit from a Direct Sales Website[/a]
The link is shown in the a href section and the text “How To Profit from a Direct Sales Website” is the Hypertext. The reason it is important for us to structure our links in this way as it tells the search engines that that page is related to those keywords. The more times a search engine finds those keywords and links on different websites, the more points you will accumulate for that page, and the higher the likelihood that search engine will rank you high when people use those key terms. I will say though, that SEO technology is more involved than just that one issue, but it is certainly an important issue that can make the difference to your webpage being at the top of the search engine results or at the bottom.
What I mentioned at the start of the article was that 5 article directories I was submitting articles to were keyword hijacking my articles. Essentially when they were presenting my articles in the directory, all my links in the author bio line that contain the “a href” section were dropped and changed to my competitors simply because my competitors had paid for that service. Ultimately, when a user was to click on my keywords and my Author BIO line they were going to my competitors which I consider a dirty tactic. Keyword hijacking degrades an article directory because eventually the article writers wake up to this issue and simply cease putting articles into the directory and the quality of the directory will die off so all I can say to those article directories that are doing this, I hope that you are making lots of money, because this technique is not going to last.
The bottom line is this, if you are trying to build your sites traffic, then you are better off spending your time submitting articles to those article directories that allow you to use HYPERTEXT in the Author Bio lines. Very few that I know will let your get away with that in the main article and to be honest, it can actually get you banned from the article directory.
To finish off …
Let us be frank here, it takes a lot of work to build successful websites and it takes even a lot more to write high quality articles, so why would you want to short change yourself by submitting your articles to article directories that do not want to work as equal partners, because remember that whilst you are writing quality articles for the article directories, you are helping them build traffic to their website and build their PR ranking with Google. Both you and the article directory are in fact benefiting from your work.
Look the bottom line is this … make sure you check out and tick off each of these questions -
Q1. Do I Own The Rights To My Articles?
Q2. Can I Pre-format My Article with HTML
Q3. Are You Going To Sell or Provide My Email Address To A Third Party?
Q4. Do You Allow Hyperlinks or Domain Names in your Article Or Author/Bio Line?
Q5. Do You Allow Hypertext Links in your Author/Bio Line?
Article Source: http://www.simplysearch4it.com/author-articles/1529/1.html
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Saturday, December 8th, 2007
Anyone who has tried writing a book at some point or other would agree how difficult it can get going on it. Though we have lots of ideas and we discuss them with people, when it comes to write them down on a computer or a typewriter, words do not come easily. The page sits there as if mocking us, daring us to mar it and fill with words. What is it in the process of writing which makes us so blank? Most of the time its nothing but not knowing where to start and finish.
What takes the paradox further are the writers that flood the market in an attempt to teach others how to write a book. However, the fact is that the writer probably has never written a book in true sense on any other topic. The writer would usually tell us how to write books, or give seminars and workshops. They’ll tell us about proper diction and about how to make sure the characters run the story, or how the story runs the characters. They’ll fill our heads with plot lines and character arcs, and never get to the part we need to know the most - how to recognize the story?
The Basic structure of all the stories is common. It would have a beginning, middle and end. All the elements must be in order to make it complete and believable. The nucleus of the book is its plot that you must think about. Other questions are equally important. Who is the lead character? What events start the story? What ends it? If you don’t have the answers to these questions, it’s time you go back to research and know all the answers beforehand.
When you ask well known authors how to write books, they invariably answer the same way: you need to write a lot and you need to read a lot. When you spend your spare time reading the type of books you’d like to write, you learn how to construct a story line. It doesn’t matter what your favorite type of book is, either. Reading Dumas and Voltaire may help with your cultural education, but it won’t help you to write bodice rippers. If you want to write for Harlequin, you need to read their books. If you want to write horror, choose an author who sells quite a bit. Don’t imitate that author’s voice, but pay attention to how he or she uses the language to express thoughts and feelings.
Books are great fun to write. No matter whether they come in paperback, hardbound, leather bound, or in the form of ebook without paper or ink, they form the very basis of a solid educational background. Books are the kind of heirloom that passes not only knowledge but also a sense of the way life was at the time it was written. Listen to your inner voice and make all efforts to write what you have within you. Who knows, maybe you will be the one to pen down the classic that would get passed down from generation to generation.
Article Source: http://www.simplysearch4it.com/author-articles/8736/1.html
Tags: , Article Writing, Writing & Speaking
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