Well its been a little while, but its finally time to get back to our blog monetization plan. I apologize for the delay. The last few weeks have been heavily focused on research and applying the lessons we discussed in parts one, two, and three. In case you are just joining us, let me give you a quick recap.

Part one discussed the importance of proper planning. A big mistake a lot of newbies make is flying by the seat of their pants without knowing how they are going to make money. Sometimes it works out, but more often it doesn't. By having a concrete plan ahead of time, however, it is easier to stay focused, reach for specific goals, and accomplish your objectives.

Part two focused on the importance of growing your readership base. I cannot stress this enough. If you want regular recurring revenue, you need constant and steady traffic growth. Period. Part two shows you how.

Part three explained how to get started with Pay Per Click (PPC) ads. This will be a small start for many new bloggers. By putting the infrastructure in place early though, your profits will increase as your blog grows. Eventually, PPC can be an excellent component of your overall blog revenue stream.

Today I am happy to present part four of my blog monetization strategy, Internet Marketing 101. My goal for this post is to present an introduction to Internet Marketing for anyone out there who is just getting started. If you search the Internet, you will find a ton of information about Internet Marketing. For a beginner it is hard to sift through it all and determine where to start, what is good advice, and what is just another scam. My goal for this post is to provide beginners with all the information they need to get started and take their first step into Internet Marketing. More advanced topics will be covered in posts to come, but you should finish this article with all you need to immediately begin marketing products online. Some of this information may be old news to you veterans out there, so please chime in with any advice you might have. The rest of you be sure to ask any questions in the comments. Sound good? Ok, then lets get started!

Introduction to Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing, also called Affiliate Marketing, is a way to earn money in the form of commission for directing customers to online merchants. To become an Internet Marketer, all you have to do is join an affiliate marketing program directly with the merchant, or more commonly, through an affiliate marketing network. Once you are part of the program, you will be given special links (like the one I just used!) that you can post on your blog, add to your email footer, or use when posting to forums. When someone clicks on the link and visits the merchant's website, the ID embedded in the URL will tell the merchant that you were responsible for delivering that potential customer. If the visitor buys something then you will earn a percentage of the sale price as commission. Sometimes, just delivering the person to the merchant's website is all you need to do to get paid. This is called a lead (a lead might also require the user to sign up, join an email list, or some other no-cost opt in).

The concept sounds simple, but the execution is a little more complicated. Most people who read a blog are not there to shop. So why would they click on the link and go buy something? Luckily, the affiliate marketing programs are sympathetic to this. If someone clicks on your link and visits the merchant site, a tracking cookie is placed on their computer. If that visitor returns to the merchant site within 60 (or 90 or sometimes even 120) days and then buys something, you will still get credit for the sale. Nice, right?

The real skill behind Internet Marketing is HOW and WHERE to place the links so you get as many people as possible to click on them. The strategy for doing that is two fold. First, you want to use the links wherever you can (without annoying your readers). Second, you want to make sure people find the links when they are actually searching for what you are selling. These become the high probably conversions! Think of your affiliate links as little seeds that get planted into the Internet. It will take a little time for them to take root and start to grow. But eventually, the page they are on (if done right), will start to earn PageRank. Once it does, the search engines will deliver potential shoppers to your page. You in turn deliver people who are looking to buy to the merchant. Then the cash starts rolling in! It doesn't happen overnight. But over time, a LOT of money can be made with Internet Marketing.

In the sections that follow, I'll give you step by step instructions on how to run an affiliate marketing campaign. I will discuss joining an affiliate network, creating your affiliate post, and optimizing it for search engines. Realize that I am not a professional at this. What I am presenting below are some tips to get started. Once you take that first step, we can all work together to improve our results!   

Affiliate Networks

There are a ton of affiliate networks out there. Some of the big names are Commission Junction, ShareASale, Pepperjam Network, and now Google is starting to bully their way into affiliate marketing with the Google Affiliate Network. The first step in joining a network is getting approved. You will have to fill out a simple application form that has your contact information, tax ID number (SSN if your are an individual in the U.S.), and your blog information. Unless you blog is totally brand new and has ZERO content, you should have no problem getting approved.

Once you're approved, you can begin browsing the network for "programs" which are basically the types of products you can advertise on your blog. Some networks are better than others when it comes to programs they offer. My advice is to just pick one and try it out. If you don't find many programs that meet your needs, move along to another network. The important thing is to find a lot of products that relate to your blog's niche. Just don't pick a random product to sell that doesn't match your blog. You will lose readers quickly if you start advertising Viagra on your blog about pets!

Important Tip! - Just because you are about to engage in affiliate market to make money online, don't think you have to sell products related to making money online! You will have a much easier time selling into a niche where people really want to buy stuff. Let's face it - most of the world doesn't want to buy an SEO eBook! Check out my recent post for more on this topic.

I have had a good amount of success using ShareASale on my entertainment blog, Buzz Pirates. I have found a lot of products, from funny t-shirts, to home beer making kits that easily fit in with the theme of that blog. They have over 2,374 programs in over 40 different categories ranging from pets to weddings to sports/fitness to "green" products. Chances are you'll have no problem finding something to sell.

If you really want to get a jump start making money, then sign up for PepperJam Networks. Not only do they also have a great selection of programs, they will also give you $10 just for signing up. That's free money! You'll get a lot more than $10 though. They have an amazing Web 2.0 interface that makes using their service easy and enjoyable. They are also right up there with ShareASale as far as quality programs they offer. Sign Up for Pepperjam Network and Get a $10 Sign On Bonus

My recommendation is to sign up for a number of different networks. This allows you to pick the best programs that each network might have to offer.

The Affiliate Post 

Once you have picked a product to sell, its time to put your marketing hat on and get to work! You will find thousands and thousands of tips online about writing a good landing page, keyword optimization, semantic search recognition, visual aethetics... the list goes on and on. Honestly though, I wouldn't worry about that just yet. I believe the best way to get started with affiliate marketing is to pick a product that you really enjoy, know a lot about, and honestly believe in and then write a LEGITIMATE review about it. Instead of trying to trick the search engines, I have found that you can be more successful simply using them how they were designed! If you write a detailed review, you will be creating plenty of content that the search engines need to find and index your post. Just don't forget to include your affiliate links!

With a little practice, placing affiliate links becomes easier and easier. You will start to develop a sixth sense for where to put an affiliate link. As you write articles for your blog, you will find yourself typing a sentence, only to stop and think to yourself "hmm...I bet I can find a referral link for that!". You will end up stopping mid sentence to jump on your affiliate network to search for products and links. Yeah...it ends up taking longer to write blog posts. But the payoff is worth it.

There has been some debate about whether the affiliate post should be a regular blog post or a separate page. I think this really comes down to personal preference. The important thing is to make sure your users and the search engines can find the post. If you make the affiliate post a regular blog post, it has the potential to get lost deep within your blog. Technically, the search engines should still be able to find it by crawling your site, but chances are you and your readers won't.

In order to keep track of my affiliate posts, I like to have a single "staging page" that I include right on my main menu. It is usually called "Cool Stuff" or "Recommended Products" or something to that effect. That page will have links to all the affiliate reviews I have done on my blog. The nice thing about this approach is that it not only allows my readers to find my posts easily, but it helps me find them too! This is important when it comes to updating the pages to optimize them for the search engines. Which brings us to the next topic...

SEO, SEO, SEO

By writing a product review that contains affiliate links, you have successfully planted your internet marketing seeds. Remember what we said earlier though - the valuable traffic will come later when people who are looking to buy search for the product you have reviewed. In order for them to find your review and click on your affiliate links, it is important that you make sure your page ranks high on search engine result pages (SERPs). By applying the proper SEO techniques, your affiliate seeds can grow into you solid money trees that bring in regular cash months or even years to come!

An entire book can be written on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and this post has gotten long enough (well done if you've made it this far!). So instead of going into a long discussion, here are some general tips and links to information I have found very valuable.

• Continue to get as many backlinks to your blog as possible. Backlinks are a huge factor in calculating your PageRank. The higher your PageRank, the higher you will appear on search results. See my previous post on PageRank.  
• Having the staging page that links to all your affiliate posts is important so you can easily go back and update the page. Updating a page is important so Google constantly reindexes your page. You can update it with better keywords, more links, or other info that will help its PR and chance of being found. Garry Conn wrote a great article about the importance of doing this.
• Be sure to pick good keywords to focus on in your post. Make sure you use the keywords in the post title and in heading tags (H1, H2, etc.). Emphasis your keywords with <strong> and <em> tags. John Cow has a great series on picking good keywords.
• Be sure to choose keywords that get a lot of searches but have little competition. Forest Parks wrote a nice article about using the Micro Niche Finder to accomplish this.
• Monitor your posts over time. With your Google Analytics, see what actual search terms people are currently using to find your page. Use these as a guide for tweaking your post. Remember, its good to always update it!

We will investigate more SEO techniques in future posts. This should be plenty to get you started and well on your way.

Summary

This has been a lot to digest. I commend you for making it this far. For those of you who made it, here is a handy summary checklist of all you need to get started with Affiliate Marketing.

• Join an affiliate network
• Choose a product you know a lot about that fits well with your blog niche
• Write an honest detailed review about it
• Post it so its easy to find on your blog
• Research valuable keywords for the post
• Regularly update the post to optimize it for keywords and high SERPs ranking

The important thing is to constantly review and adjust. Not everything will work right away. When it doesn't work, do something different. When something starts to work, do more of it. Stick with it and over time each one of your affiliate posts can become a strong revenue stream for your blog.

If you have any additional tips, comments or questions, please leave a comment. I hope you enjoyed this post and thanks for reading!

Good luck!

Jeff

It is very easy to confuse the difference between tags and categories when labeling your posts. Some people prefer one over the other, not really understanding the difference between the two. The article offers a few helpful suggestions on how you can utilize both tags and categories simultaneously in order to assist the friendly neighborhood search engine robots. 

What are tags? 

If you're familiar with social media / bookmarking sites like Technorati, Digg, or StumbleUpon then chances are you are familiar with tags. Tags give you a way to label your posts with a number of descriptive keywords. Think of tags as descriptive labels, where categories are just general topics. A single post should generally (but doesn't have to) fall into one category, but have a number of tags. For example, say you publish a post about Halo 3 for your XBox 360. You might choose "Video Games" as the category, but have "halo, xbox, FPS tips, cheats" as your tags. 

What is the benefit of tags? 

You should make an effort to keep your categories clean and organized. Don't use multiple category names for the same topic (ie - television and tv). Your categories should be your primary form of navigation among topics, so it is important that they make sense. Tags, on the other hand, can be all over the place. Think of them as another way people can search for your article and find other relevant information throughout your site. When naming your tags, try think about what a person will use as keyword if they were searching for it in a search engine. After reading an interesting article on your site, instead of browsing through an entire category or searching your site for more relevant topics, your reader can just click on the tag links. Boom! They've got their search terms already lined up for them. For this reason, it good to include your tag links at the end of your post. 

Tip #1: If you used WordPress, any theme developed prior to version 2.3 may not include tags names in the layout of each post, even though you entered them when writing the post. This can easily be fixed by using the Theme Editor and adding the following code to the single.php file wherever you want the tags to appear. 

<?php the_tags( 'Tags: ', ', ', ''); ?>

On some sites you will see a tag cloud that shows the popular tags used on all prior posts. The more popular tags have larger text while rarely used tags will have very small text. This is becoming a popular way to navigate tags as well. Whether you use a tag cloud or categories for navigation is a matter of personal preference. However, there really isn't a need to show both. Personally, I prefer my categories to be used for navigation and the tags to be used as a form of searching. 

Is SEO Really Dead?

There has been a lot of talk lately about SEO becoming unnecessary. It is true that search engines are becoming more sophisticated and no longer rely on meta keywords entirely for determining content topics. That doesn't mean that you should give up optimization techniques entirely though. Do you still eat chicken soup when you're sick? I do. In case it still helps, I have chosen to add my post tags as meta-tags in the post's html header. WordPress does not do this by default, but you can use this plugin if you want it to. This technique will help you tell the search engine what YOU think its keywords should be. Just make sure the keywords really match your content. Search engines are smart enough to penalize you for keywords that don't match.

Tip #2: Update your tag on old posts. Once you have looked through your traffic stats and see what search words people have used to find particular posts, go back and update the tags to include keywords you may have forgotten. It could help to improve the relevancy score for your post.

Other than adding your tags as keyword meta-tags in your html code, there is no official standard for finding tags in a post. I wish there was. Think about how much easier it would be to use a social bookmark service if the author provides the tags for you. How many times have you read an blog post and wanted to Stumble it but couldn't decide what tags to use? Hopefully one day, these services will be able to parse out the tags in the actual post and automate much more of the bookmarking process. In the meantime, including tags in your post will at least give your readers an idea of what tags you'd want them to use.

Using tags may not have an immediate impact on your blog. However, if it is something that could make life easier for your readers, why wouldn't you do it? Eventually, you may find more sophisticated uses of tags that will make you wish you were using them all along. 

Today is a day of celebration here at BuzzMyBlog.com. It appears that Google has updated their Page Rankings and they have been very kind to BuzzMyBlog.com. My blog has jumped from a PageRank of 0 to a PageRank of 4! This is a huge jump and I expect a lot of good things to come from it.

What Is Page Rank 

For those who are not familiar, let me take a second and describe exactly what Page Rank really is. The Google PageRank™ is actually a trademarked term describing the search algorithm that was developed by Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were enrolled at Stanford University. It is the heart of the Google algorithm that decides the order in which web sites are listed for a given search term.

PageRank™ works by looking at the web in a democratic nature. When one web page links to another, Google considers it a "vote" of relevance for the page that is being linked to. The more sites that link to a specific page, the more "votes" it has thus the more relevant it is deemed by Google. Not all votes are created equally, however. Votes are "weighted" so that votes from more relevant websites are more important than votes from less relevant websites. Every few months, Google rolls up their sleeves and digs through their enormous databases to assign a number between 0 and 10 to all web pages they have indexed. Pages with a value of 0 are considered to be less important, while pages with a value of 10 are considered the most important. This number becomes the page's PageRank™. When someone queries Google with a search term, the results are returned in order of importance as determined by a top secret algorithm closely guarded by Google. No one knows the exact algorithm, but SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts make a career of trying to figure it out. The one thing that is known is that PageRank is a VERY important component of the algorithm.

Its not a very easy thing to explain. I hope I have done it justice. If you want more information, you can check out Google's explanation. Wikipedia has a good explanation of it as well.

What Does PageRank Do For Me

Ok, so here it is, April 30th, and your blog has been given a new PageRank from Google. What exactly does this mean for you? The answer is....lots and lots of good things!

• Higher Ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) - When someone searches Google using keywords related to your website, your site will be returned higher in the list when you have a higher PageRank. For example, last week BuzzMyBlog.com was ranked unbearably low for the search terms "buzz blog". Since my PageRank has changed from 0 to 4, however, my ranking has gone from 100 something to 12! (seriously...I am giddy over this!). The value of this is obvious. The higher the search order, the more people find your blog, the more traffic you get, the more readers follow you, etc. etc.
• Your Links Become More Valuable - Not only does a higher page rank help my blog out, but it also helps out every blog that I link to. Now that my blog has a higher page rank, links from my blog carry more weight and help to increase the PageRank of any page that I link to. All of the sudden, my Weekly Buzz feature where I review up and coming blogs just got a lot more valuable. When I review a blog and link to it, Google sees that as a much more important vote of importance than it used to.
• You Are More Attractive to Advertisers - Higher search order and more weight for your links can only lead to one thing...more money. Advertisers realize the importance of a higher PageRank and they are often willing to pay more money to advertise on websites that have them. They know that a higher rank will lead to more traffic and higher probability of a web surfer seeing their ad. If you use a service like PayPerPost, that pays you money to blog about certain topics, then you will find more lucrative opportunities with a higher PageRank.

I am sure there are many more advantages to having a higher PageRank. If you know of any more, leave them in a comment.

How Do I Improve My Page Rank

Having a higher PageRank sounds good, doesn't it? So how do you go about getting one? This is a topic that can run you in circles trying to figure out. There are SEO experts out there that claim that they can improve your PageRank over night. If someone is trying to sell this to you, don't believe them. They are just trying to get your money. Yes there are things that can be done to make your site more "Google friendly", but PageRanks are only assigned by Google every few months. Nothing will change overnight.

SEO experts claim to have a few tricks up their sleeves that will help give you a higher PageRank. I would be careful going down this road as well. If Google catches on that you are trying to cheat the system, they have been known to slap sites with pretty hard penalties. Google can reward sites by increasing PageRank, but they can also reprimand sites by lowering it. It is not uncommon at all for blogs to have their PageRank lowered for excessive linking, hidden text, paid links, or anything else that threatens the authenticity of the algorithm.

I am not an SEO Expert by far. But I can say that there is, without a doubt, one sure fire way to raise your PageRank - and that is TIME. Be patient and just focus on your blog. All the time you spend worrying about your PageRank and Search Engine Optimization, you could be spending improving your blog and writing quality content. In the long run, this is really the best way to get a high ranking from Google. Think about it...that is what the algorithm was designed to do - to give a ranking to relevant websites. What better way to get a high ranking than to make it MORE RELEVANT! Don't try to cheat the system. You'll just end up being penalized by Google. Instead, focus on writing strong content and give people a reason to link to your blog. You will be rewarded because you deserve to be, and you will find yourself getting more traffic and interested readers. In the long run, this is what we all want, isn't it?

Giving people a reason to link to my blog is what has helped raise my PageRank. I did not pay for links, and I did not try any tricks or cheats to appear more relevant. Instead, I focused on a writing content that helps other bloggers. My Weekly Buzz feature rewards my readers with a free review and prizes that help promote their blog. By doing this, I have given people a reason to link to my blog because they really want to. The Google algorithms operate on my blog as the were designed to be used. This is the best way to raise your PageRank.

I hope you have found this study to the Google PageRank informative. If you have anything to add, please leave it in a comment. If you have not yet signed up for my Weekly Buzz, you might want to do it now. With my new PageRank, the weekly reviews just became a lot more valuable!

Jeff