Internet Marketing Strategy Blog By Roy Sencio

Trackboost has just launched, and blogging will never be the same again. Trackbacks are actually a hardly used feature by many bloggers, but now the secret is out. While many bloggers focused their efforts on leaving comments on other blogs in order to get a link to their blog or blog post, one not so popular technique was to quote a blog on your own post, particularly a blog that talks about the same thing your talking about. By quoting them, you get a trackback, a link on that blog pointing back to your site; which not only delivers site referral traffic, but also scores some SEO points that help improve search engine rankings for the page on your site being linked to.

The most important benefits I believe Trackboost offers is the convenience of coming up with a post quickly, with much of it not necessarily yours, but borrowed from other sources. You will find an example later in this post. Plus, you earn backlinks… as long as the owner of the blog you are referencing, approves your trackback. However, many of the blogs I have seen that do have trackback links on their page, have their blogs automatically approve trackbacks, by default. This is then a really quick way of getting good quality links on relevant pages.

Here is what other people have to say about Trackboost.

You have probably heard of Jack Humphrey as he is one of the real gurus of Internet marketing. Now, I have just received information about his new software called Utility Poster and the upgraded version called Trackboost. www.slymarketing.com/2008/05/trackboost-and-utility-poster-by-jack-humphrey/

A Blogger’s biggest asset is time, especially if your a Part-time Blogger like myself. To be a successful blogger takes a lot of hard work. But what if I told you there’s two fantastic software packages released today that will do the job for you.
parttimeblogger.com/trackboost-utility-poster-a-bloggers-biggest-asset/

Jack Humphrey has released the beta version of ‘TrackBoost’ software. The software is free for ‘Authority Site Center’ and ‘Social Power Linking’ members. Jack has released a video to reveal some tips and tricks of using the software.
www.internetwondersezine.com/internet-marketing-news/jack-humphrey-releases-trackboost-software-free-for-asc-and-spl-members/trackback

So as you may have noticed, Trackboost is on fire. It just launched a few hours ago, you may want to check out the site at www.trackboost.com.

Fake PageRank? Yes indeed, PageRank can be faked and in fact there are a lot of shady personalities out on the internet offering these dubious deals to unsuspecting webmasters offering them a link on a page that has a jacked up PageRank for a fee.

To begin with, we do not encourage buying of links, in fact search engines are against it either because it totally skews results, and well, render their algorithms ineffective in presenting relevant search results.

This morning I received an email from unknown sender, and this is how it went.

Dear Sir/Madam,

If you are looking for an instant valid PageRank 6 link for your website today, we offer you; http://www.{theirscamsite}.com and http://www.{theirscamsite}.com.

The offer is limited to 100 links and the price for a whole year is as low as $19.

This offer, has priority to our former customers who receive this e-mail, and will not be offered to public until May. 15th, 2008.

Best Regards
Leo
10Directory Network

Yearly PageRank 6 Links Hosted on Unique IP Ranges @
http://www.{theirscamsite}.com
http://www{theirscamsite}.com
http://www.{theirscamsite}.com

The sender’s email address is 10Directory Network <admin@10directory.com>.

Sorry, I cannot include the actual domains on the post because search engines might interpret this as me linking to a site of questionable character and might have serious consequences.

Now, for those of you who are not familiar with that PageRank is, it is a quantitative measure used by Google to gauge quality of a webpage based on the number of links pointing to that specific page. Now if a specific page has a PageRank of 6, you can expect to see a ton of really good backlinks pointing to that page. Just to find out if the offer was legit, I did some checking to verify backlinks. To do that you simply have to go to Google and type link:theURL or in this case link:http://www.webtoolsite.com, then you will be presented with a list of backlinks. But Google isn’t exactly a trustworthy source of backlink counts since for some reasons they do not show or reveal all backlinks that point to a page, so you can go to Yahoo and do that same search using the same words entered. The result will show you just how many backlinks are pointing to the site.

In this case… the results for both Google and Yahoo, one had 4 links and the other had a big 0! A big fage PageRank Scam! But there is another way of checking, and you will find that below, keep reading. When I checked on those 4 links that other site had, each of those links didn’t have any links to them as well.

So how are people pulling this off?

I’ll present you with two explanations, the first one is from forum post.

“The fraudster buys a domain name and sets up a website Directory. But, before they make the directory available for public view, they steal the PageRank of an innocent website. They do this by redirecting their directory’s domain name to the innocent website that has a high Pagerank. By doing a redirect to, for example, a website that has a PR8, Google thinks (rightly so) that the Directory’s domain name has a PR8. Once Google has assigned the backlinks and the PR to the redirected Directory domain, the Directory domain owner ‘turns on’ the Directory–and it appears to have a PageRank of 8.”

Next is this page… and I quote;
“This seller builds up the backlinks and PR of his own site www.scam-domain-buyers-easily.org and then 301 redirects to the www.keywordwidget.com domain name. At the next update(s) that domain is then showing as having all the backlinks and the PR7. Then after the purchase the seller switches the 301 to redirect to his next selling site www.keywordwidgets2.com which bumps up the backlinks and PR of THAT site which he then lists for sale.”

DETECTING A FAKE PAGERANK
Detecting a fake PR is fairly simple. If you think that a site is showing a fake PR, then simply take a look at its cache version on Google. Make sure you check both instances, with and without the www prefix. One may be redirected, while the other not!

* Check cache by going to google and typing in info:yourdomain.com

* Check cache by going to google and typing in info:www.yourdomain.com

So before you go off entertaining any such emails, although to begin with buying PageRank is something that you should not be doing, verify these domains/sites.

Do not get Fake PageRank scammed!

Keeping your product’s affiliates motivated is the biggest challenge you face while running your own affiliate program. While many people may sign up for your affiliate program, a good number of these will not aggressively promote your product, no matter what you do to motivate them.

There are those however, who sign up and follow through, with a goal of becoming successful. These are the affiliates that require your attention, and you must work to keep them motivated.

Provide Affiliate Marketing Tools
In order to help your affiliates sell your product effectively, you should have ready, all the necessary tools to successfully promote your program. Provide them with banners, ads, sales letters, ebooks they can re-brand with their affiliate links, and articles that they can re-brand as well. If your affiliates are an army of sales people willing to go to battle with other products and win customers, you need to give them the right bullets and ammo to go to war with.

Provide Information and Training
Give them information they need that ensures their success, teach them how to really market online. These materials that enhance your affiliates selling skills can be in the form of ebooks, audio or even video tutorials. Several product owners spend much for support videos and training videos that affiliates can access. If you do not want to spend for these videos, you can simply do it yourself by giving them step by step guides using screen video capture software like Camtasia.

Communicate
Always be in constant contact with your affiliates. Send them newsletters that suggest new ways to promote the product. Provide them with marketing related content that they can use. Update them on new marketing tools, creatives, and new promotions such as sale prices and bonuses.

Incentives
Once in a while, come up with contests, giving the affiliate who makes the most sales in a given period of time a worthwhile prize. The more valuable the prize, the harder the affiliates will work at promoting your product. In fact many product owners simply just give out cash like this affiliate program for a new product, where the owner is giving $1,000 on top of commissions earned. That is for a product called One Minute Sites.

Send personal notes to those affiliates who are giving you the highest sales; recognize these people in your newsletter. When high sales are being made, it means the affiliate really knows what they are doing, and they may have tips or ideas to offer to other affiliates.

Likewise, when you have an affiliate who is obviously trying, but not making many sales, contact them personally to give them tips and advice. Help your affiliate be successful, for their success is actually your success too.

You have a product. You want to start an affiliate program for your product to reach more people. You have two choices, either run it on your own and get Affiliate Marketing Software or enroll your product in a program like ClickBank, Commission Junction, etc. In this post we will talk about choosing affiliate marketing software for your product’s affiliate program.

There are several choices when it comes to affiliate management software. It is important that you use software to monitor affiliate sales and commissions. This just cannot be done manually.

All you need to do is set up your affiliate program using web based software. Then, you write the affiliate terms and conditions, as well as the affiliate agreement, and get that posted on the site.

When writing the terms and the conditions, you specify what the commission structure will be for your program, including whether it is a two-tiered or multi-tiered program, and what the commission payout will be for each tier. After this, the next step is to list your program with the various affiliate directories online.

There are many different software brands that can be used to manage your affiliate program. Affiliate Wiz is good software, and so is All Affiliate Pro. There is also web based services that can be used, to run an affiliate program, such as 1ShoppingCart. Again, there are many to choose from, and using a network to manage your program is usually the easiest and fastest way to get an affiliate program up and running.

The important thing is that the network or software used should provide each affiliate, automated sign up, and assign them an affiliate link. The software or service should then track clicks and sales, and record commissions earned by affiliates, based on the information you put into the system at the very beginning.

Ideally, affiliates should have the ability to log into a website to view their affiliate statistics, to retrieve creatives such as banners and ads, and to change their own contact information as needed. You will find that the more automated the affiliate program system you use is the more smoothly the program will run.

Be prudent in selecting software or services for your affiliate program. Some services and software are very high priced, while others are very low priced – but not all affiliate program management services and/or software are created equal, and some are better than others. Read customer reviews and try to contact people who are using the software or service personally for a recommendation before buying one.

One of the most difficult things to do online is list building. In fact testament to how difficult it is, and how any business can potentially benefit greatly from their own mailing list, is the fact that there are today several list building and lead generation solutions. Many of these list building solutions are monthly membership sites that cost hundreds of dollars.

It is without a doubt, that you would greatly benefit from having your own list. The problem is, many people do not know how to build a list and maintain it. Bryan Winters of InfoGoRound and AudioGoRound fame has just launched a solution to list building woes with One Minute Sites.

Affiliate Marketing is the most successful and most popular business model on the internet today. This is the easiest way to make money online, and without the need of having your own product to sell, your own website and even your own advertising or promotional tools.

To get into affiliate marketing, all you have to do is sign up to a product’s affiliate program, then send visitors to that sales page of that product using your own unique affiliate URL, that you receive upon successfully signing up to the program. If any of those visitors buy the product, you get credited for the sale and receive a commission. No more hassle of creating your own product, developing promotional tools, or having a bug free affiliate program software that monitors sales and routinely pays your affiliates.

However, while being an affiliate may be very profitable especially if you are able to drive a lot of targeted “ready to buy” visitors to a product sales page, it is actually the product owner who enjoys greater rewards. Think about it, aside from you, how many other affiliates out there could also be driving traffic to that product?

It does take a little more work though, but let us see if the benefits of having your own product and starting an affiliate marketing program for it are worth the extra effort.

Most successful affiliates, after realizing the profitability of certain products in the niche that they sell in, usually develop their own product, and then start their own affiliate program, where other people sell the product for them, for a commission.

Getting an affiliate program set up for your product is easier than you may realize, and in some cases, there is no cost involved in setting up such a program, if you know where to look and what to do.

Benefit 1 - Reach
An affiliate program for your product allows you to reach people in your market, that you may not have reached any other way. You actually leverage on the established networks of your affiliates, and this can be very profitable especially if your affiliates have huge mailing lists with thousands of subscribers that they send promotional emails to regularly.

While it may seem expensive, as you will have to spend some money to set up your affiliate program, plus you need to pay your affiliates on time, you will find that you profit more by having an affiliate program; and the profit lies in the volume of sales you are able to get by being able to get your product across to more people through your product’s affiliates.

Benefit 2 - Branding and Product Reputation
Have you ever come across some product reviews on the internet, which more often than not, have a link on the review that directs a visitors to the sales page of the product being reviewed?

This is one of many strategies used in affiliate marketing. Create a product review, which of course should be unbiased and objective, then send your interested readers to the product through your affiliate link. While there is a chance that the negative aspects of your product might come out in the review, it does not always actually turn potential buyers off. It actually even helps them make an informed decision, and they appreciate both good and bad comments about the product.

People who are reading the review still tend to click the link to the product to find out more information, and if they eventually decide to make a purchase, the author of the review whose affiliate link sent a visitor to the product sales page. gets the credit for the sale.

Imagine the kind of reputation your product is able to gain from all the exposure it is getting, people writing reviews about, people blogging about it, people talking about what they perceive to be the good and the bad of it. At the end of the day, it simply helps establish your product in your market.

Benefit 3 - Establishes Your Authority As Expert In Your Market
This is basically similar to the second benefit, about establishing reputation, but this time YOURS, as product owner, and not the product.

If you belong to any internet marketers mailing list, I am sure you have received countless emails about them talking about this guy, who they are pals with, and is a really great guy, a results kinda guy, a successful guy, who just happens to be launching a new product.

How often did you get excited about knowing more about the product, or even wanting to know more about the person behind the product, if only to know more of his reputation as part of your wanting to know whether his product could be any good or not?

Benefit 4 - Traffic
With the countless promotional methods your affiliates are using to sell your product, your traffic is going to swell, or flood, depending on how many affiliates are promoting your product, how many people are on their mailing lists, how much traffic their own websites or blogs are getting, etc.

Expect a ton of traffic, if you have a ton of affiliates; this will also translate into search ranking gains for your product’s site.

Conclusion
At the end of the day, running your own affiliate program can be quite draining, but then is that not a worthy effort to have an army of salesmen selling your product?

While affiliate programs are virtually automated, some effort is required on your part not only to start the program, but also to keep it running smoothly so both you and your affiliates continue to profit. Keep your affiliates motivated all the time, provide occasional incentives, provide great support like pre-written reviews, auto responder messages, banners, links and other affiliate tools; and pay affiliate commissions on time.

Keep all that in mind, and you could be on your way to being the next affiliate marketing tycoon.

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