With all the recent Google updates, it’s more imperative than ever to publish frequent, original, well-composed content in order to rank well in the search engines and maximize your free traffic from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Having a proactive content strategy is your only effective SEO strategy in this day and age!

Our agency has a team of quality USA-based writers that can power your content strategy very affordably and effectively. Our content rates are as follows:
- Article or blog post – $29.00 per 400 word post
– Product/category description – $15 per 150-200 word
– Online Press Release – $500 for writing + large distribution release
– One-time Website Audit and Re-optimization Suggestions – $500
– e-Newsletter Design – $150 per design
– e-Newsletter Writing – $75 per newsletter

We are currently writing amazing content for several of our clients and we are staffed up to handle more projects. We design the best looking newsletters in the industry (bar none) and can even handle your email marketing strategy entirely. Let us know if you would like to discuss using our content writing services to power your sites, blogs, or newsletters.

Let us know if you have any questions. We look forward to hearing from you!

Picking the right affiliate marketing niches to work on is so important to maximizing your online marketing effectiveness. Different times of year are better for promoting certain types of products and services, and most Advertisers and “offers”  have their seasonality, which means they have a higher demand and click-to-sale ratio during certain times of year. That’s why its important to maintain focused websites or blogs in a variety of niches so you are always in season with one site or another. Since we are still in Q1 of 2012, New Years resolution type products and services are still converting really well. Gifts for Valentine’s Day are doing well right now, but will soon be over so here are some other good Q1 and Q2 affiliate niches you can focus on to maximize the effectiveness and traffic of you websites and blogs:

1. Dating – Online dating is always hot it seems and has been for years. Dating offers convert particularly well in the beginning of the year because people are looking for love after the holidays and New Year. There are so many online dating affiliate programs to choose from it can be difficult to decide which to promote. Make sure which ever ones you go with has an easy conversion process and a nice high payout per lead or sale. Also, if you have traffic you can play one Advertiser against another to get the highest commission rates. All dating Advertisers are hungry for new quality customer acquisitions due to the extremely competitive nature of the industry, so you can promise this and that and get a great commission rate right away, otherwise you can tell them you will go to their competitor for that payout. Dating review sites work well and offer the consumer the choice of what they are most intrigued by. Reviewing or providing info on several dating websites gives you more of a chance to make a commission depending on which website the visitor joins. If you are collecting email address on your website you can send them offers from the various affiliate advertisers and maximize the chances for a conversion.

2. Weight Loss and Dieting – Weight loss and dieting is another huge niche that always seems to be popular and heavily searched for, especially in the beginning of the year because people want to slim down as one of their New Year resolutions. Another relatively new breed of diet offers is the “diet meal delivery service” like Nutri-system. Diet meal delivery programs make it easy and convenient for consumers to eat healthy and lose weight, so they are very popular and gaining in popularity. Targeting locations like “New York diet meal delivery” is an effective way to craft content that will rank organically for location-based searches. Now go out and built a hundred unique city/state pages like that and you will be getting some good traffic. Make sure to feature the banner ads prominently on the page so they get clicked on. You can even try the food yourself so you can more accurately provide information and reviews to your visitors and audience. Sometime the company will give you free samples if you have a decent enough website or blog.

3. Smoking Cessation – Quitting smoking will always be a popular niche because there are millions of Americans (and in other countries) that are wanting to stop smoking. Electronic cigarettes have become very popular in the last couple of years and have proven to be a good performing affiliate niche. Creating an electronic cigarette review site can be effective because it gives the consumer a choice of companies and products. Targeted search, SEO, and Facebook advertising can be effective with these types of products is promoted well with the right commission on the back-end. We represent PremiumeCigarette.com on the Commission Junction network you can affiliate with.

4. Phone Service – another popular thing to do in the New Year is cutting expenses and saving money on your household budget. Doing something like changing your home or virtual office phone service from over-priced national carriers to VOIP-based services can dramatically cut your expenses. There are many VOIP phone service providers, like Phone.com, that can be promoted effectively through affiliate marketing. Phone service affiliate programs typically have a good conversion rate and high payout, so they can be promoted through both free and paid online advertising channels. The more sales you produce, the higher of a commission you can get from the Advertiser because it is a competitive industry and life-time customer value is usually good. Look for other budget cutting services that can be promoted or built a site for. People love saving money and slashing their expenses so this will always be a very popular niche you can craft content for.

5. Trend Watching – another great way to find new, profitable affiliate niches is to watch trends. If you see a product or service all the children in the neighborhood are into, it’s probably a good niche and you should try to find an affiliate Advertiser to partner with. Likewise, anything in the popular culture that seems hot or new and exciting, you can find an Advertiser that sells it and put up a blog review site for it. Since blogs and basic sites basically cost nothing to construct, there is no reason you can’t have many sites launched in various niches with basic original content on them. Google Trends is a great way to monitor and find hot, new trends you can get involved in. If you can find an Advertiser on the major affiliate networks like CJ, Linkshare, Shareasale, and Google Network, you can contact sites and suggest they launch an affiliate program because you are interested in promoting in that niche. Once you have the site going and affiliate ads on it you can set-up Google Alerts on particular keyword phrases to notify you when something hits the web about that niche so you can go write a post on your site immediately. This is a great way to  get free traffic because you will be one of the first with a post about it on the web, so when people go searching for it your page can come up in the organic search results.

These are some well performing affiliate niches that work great in the first part of the year. There are many more of course, but I just wanted to give a few to spark your interest. I definitely think trend spotting is a good method for finding affiliate niches before others that you can put a site or blog up for that niche with 5-10 original articles that can get ranking in the free traffic. But you should be able to update your sites/blogs with fresh content on a weekly basis at least to maintain good rankings (daily is best). I hope you liked this little article, please leave a comment and let me know some other great affiliate niches that work well in the first part of the year. Thanks and have a great day!

Hey Affiliates and Publishers! Here is the latest affiliate program news from our client: TheWatchery.com on the Google Affiliate Network! We have an Affiliate Sales Contest for you starting today and some new banners for you to promote too!

We will be giving away 3 beautiful watches to the contest winners! Here’s how the contest will work:

- The 2 Top Publishers by total sales amount will each win a brand-new watch. Several to choose from!

- 1 Random Publishers that produces at least 1 sale during the contest period will win a brand-new watch. Several to choose from, same value as watches above.

Note: The contest will run from, September 16th, to September 30th, 2011.

Exclusive Deals!! Are you looking for some exclusive watch deals for your site? Let us know and we will make them right up for you. you can promote the lowest prices on the internet for stylish, high-quality watches at truly affordable prices!

Access Your Google Affiliate Network Account Here

I look forward to working closely with you to make TheWatchery.com one of your top performers. If you need anything from me please don’t hesitate to ask. Our affiliate managers have over 10 years of experience with web development, SEO, and affiliate marketing. We look forward to working with you.

Thanks and good luck in the contest!

So you have gotten to the point that you are cranking out several daily blog posts like a beast (or at least weekly, i.e. mini-beast status). Now, how to maximize each fresh content post for the largest exposure is the question! Here are some online places you should “bookmark” and share your post urls to maximize each piece of content:

After post is made in blog or page created on site, take the new post/article url from the address bar and do the following (or use Addthis browser extension):
1. Share on your Facebook Profile and your Fan Page, then ask, “what do you all think about this post?” Or something like that to spark interaction.
2. Share on Twitter same way. Put url through Bit.ly to gain valuable stats/info on the posting. Similar strategy but you have less characters to ask a question, but still attempt to do so or use the post title in the tweet.
3. Digg – submit url to Digg.com. Ask friends to Digg it for you on Facebook and Twitter after you submit.
4. Delicious – submit url to Delicious.com
5. Reddit – submit url to Reddit.com
6. LinkedIn – “Share” on Groups you are joined to. You can join up to 50 Groups on linkedin, you have to check whats there are in our niches…then join those groups so you can share into them (use Addthis browser extension to do this all at once on LinkedIn). Don’t be annoying with it though and be relevant.
7. Google +1 – post to your Google +1
8. Submit to StumbleUpon.com
9. Friendfeed – join and submit to Friendfeed
10. Rewrite the post and title completely and submit to ezinearticles.com, which links to your site in the footer.

These are some great ways to maximize your blogging and content production. Why post without sharing and bookmarking? One you get a good process in place it will go quickly. You can use services like AddThis to make bookmarking easier, they have a really nice Google Chrome extension you can download too!

Ok…you’ve just spent the last so many hours writing your latest amazing blog post or new site page, now how are you going to maximize that particular page to get the most exposure possible for your efforts? Gone are the days of just posting and moving on, you have to put each post to work for you to gain the most traffic and maximize your efforts. In this day and age of social media and web 2.0 there are so many great places to syndicate your content that you absolutely have to have a process for what to do with each new posts after you have painstakingly written it! Here are some great ways to syndicate your content after writing it:

1. Facebook – Facebook is the ultimate for sharing your new content with your friends. Many people use Facebook for business, so it’s a great place to share your posts with people in your industry. Not to mention if they Share, Comment, or Like your post, their friends will see it and so on. Just a great way to syndicate, but you have to make it compelling or it won’t get much action. And you have to interact with other people’s stuff or they won’t interact with yours as often (Social Karma). Facebook Fan Pages as well are a great way to exposure your content to your fans and get action on it. You can also send a link to your article as an email update to your Fans, but only on a selective basis, as you don’t want to hammer your fans with Fan Page emails.

2. Twitter – another logical choice for syndication and may even bring more exposure than Facebook depending on your Followers and their likelihood to ‘retweet” your tweet. If you have a really interactive Twitter base it can really bring a lot of exposure and traffic, so make sure to work on building up your followers and creating great relationships with them. Proactively retweet other’s content and they will return the favor on yours!

3. Digg – Digg has been around for a while, but only recently went through some major social improvements that seem to make commenting and Digging by others more likely. Once you submit your post url to Digg you can share that on Facebook and Twitter and ask your friends and followers to Digg it for you. If you can get a decent amount of Diggs it can really boost your traffic to that page of your site. Also you can now connect Digg to Facebook and Twitter to see who you are connected to is already on Digg so you can Follow on Digg. I look forward to them making it more social like Facebook. Submitting each new post to Digg is a must in my opinion because you never know what could get a lot of Diggs.

4,. LinkedIn – LinkedIn has always been the best business development social network, but has recently undergone a ton of updates to make it more like Facebook and they introduced Groups to the mix, which function like forums where you can connect and network with people. I have been running a group for almost 2 years and it’s been a wonderful experience. LinkedIn lets you join up to 50 Groups and you can actually submit your content to each group all at once with a Button like ShareThis or AddThis on your page (Chrome browser also have an extension for Addthis). Submitting each relevant post to your LinkedIn groups can be an extremely powerful way to syndicate your content. Doing this has brought me a lot of new connections and traffic. Posting to your LinkedIn Status is also a good idea to so your connections and see it and interact with it.

5. StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit – These are my 3 favorite “social bookmarking” sites that I submit all of my content to. StumbleUpon is the most like a social network and has recently made some upgrades as well, so you should try to build up your network connections there as well. If your page gets a lot of “stumbles” it can really boost your traffic big time. It’s happened to me a few times and brought in a few thousand visitors. The content usually has to be really informative or compelling in some way though. Delicious and Reddit are just bookmarking sites you can submit your urls to. I think it helps your overall organic rankings but there really isn’t much proof. I do it because those sites rank well and then link to your content so it can’t be a bad idea.

These are some ways to syndicate your content and maximize each post. If you do these on a daily basis you will see your traffic increase over time for sure. Let me know some other great ways to syndicate your content you have had success with. Thanks for reading and have a great day. I look forward to your comments!

Hey all..I hope your November is going well! I wanted to put together some useful tips for generating more traffic and affiliate commissions during the busy Holiday shopping season so you can maximize your earnings. Here are some online marketing tips you can use to maximize your efforts:

1. Post about hot gift items – posting about the hottest holiday gift items is a great way to build your site or blog with content people are actually searching for during the Holidays, ex. “10 hottest gift ideas for 2011″ or “What are the top gifts for 2011.” Do your research and depending on your niche there will be a set of hot products that are in-demand this holiday season. Then create pages on your site or blog with good content write-ups about these hot products and use “lists” as well because they tend to be read, such as: Top 11 Tech Gadget Gifts for 2011, 5 Must-have Corporate Gifts Ideas to Impress Your Clients, 8 Innovated Gifts for Your Children. Titles like that can really pull in the traffic. Remember, the more content you post the more search rankings you can garner with each page of your site, so post a lot of pages and fill them with great, keyword-rich content to maximize your SEO benefits.

2. Ask for Special Coupons or Promos – asking your affiliate managers and Advertisers for special deals, coupon promotions, or vanity coupon codes (coupon word matching your site)  for your site is a great way to leverage your site’s branding to market exclusive deals to your traffic, subscribers, fans, and followers. Not all affiliate Advertisers will be able to provide this because they can’t do it for everyone or may not at all due to lack of resources, but you can get lucky with a great promotion sometimes and really kill it. Make sure to get the current month’s deals from the Advertisers you are promoting so the offers in the posts will be compelling and convert higher with your visitors.

3. Ramp-Up Your Social Networking – Make sure you are adding Facebook friends, Facebook fans, and Twitter followers on a constant basis so you have more people to expose your offers, promotions, and pages to. However, don’t crush people with too many offers in a short span or they may get turned off from your suggestions. Don’t recommend something you haven’t tried yourself, however you can make product suggestions and promote really good deals and coupons from merchants you are affiliated with.

4. Post Your Butt Off – Posting tons of original articles to your site or blog (then sharing it all socially)  is the best way to ramp up your traffic in advance of the holidays because by adding frequent posts to your site you can really expand the number of pages you have indexed in Google, Yahoo, ann MSN/Bing which increases the chances your site will rank under various search phrases and bring in more free traffic. Make sure to submit your new posts to Digg, Delicious, and other bookmarking sites to maximize your exposure. Post to 3rd party article directories, link ezinearticles.com, with rewrites of your articles to maximize your organic rankings. I recommend 1-10 posts a day to your site to increase your frequency and page count. Over time, you can build your page count into the thousands of pages which will bring your site more traffic.

5. Ask for Higher Commissions – asking your affiliate Advertisers for greater commissions during the Holidays is a great way to ensure you will maximize your earnings. Some Advertisers may only do this if you have produced a good amount of sales volume in the past, but it never hurts to ask…they can only say no. Most affiliate Advertisers have some room to increase affiliate commissions so you need to ask for a higher payout whenever possible. If they say no or are rude, tell them you will go promote their competitor, which will change their attitude quickly. You can also offer paid placement on your website, blog, newsletter, or social networks. If you have a decent amount of traffic, fans and followers, there are Advertisers that will pay an additional paid placement fee in addition to your affiliate commissions, so that’s a great reason to try to exand what you are doing steadily over time and build the relationship with your Advertisers.

6. Email your list – if you maintain a database of email address, make sure you are messaging your database at least weekly with the newest offers from your affiliate Advertisers. Make sure you are growing your list with email opt-in plug-ins on your site. Take growing your list seriously as it will pay dividends the larger a list it is. You can use services like icontact, constantcontact, or mailchimp to blast your email list. Make the investment in Dreamveaver to edit your HTML, and have a nice HTML newsletter designed which you can use as a template for all your future blasts.

These are a few Affiliate Marketing Tips you can use to maximize your traffic and commissions during the Holiday Season. I hope it was helpful and let me know if there is anything you want to discuss more in-depth. Thanks!

Hi all! Today I wanted to discuss some easy ways you can increase how effective you are as an affiliate marketer. As some of you may know I’m primarily into free methods for traffic generation, so nothing here costs money…usually just your time and effort. Let me know if you have any feedback on these ways to make your affiliate marketing efforts more productive.

1. Writing Articles, Posts, Content – Probably the best way to increase your affiliate earnings is to produce a lot of content on the topic or niche your are promoting. Writing frequent articles or blog posts can really ramp your traffic because the search engines like Google really value frequent, original content posting. Another great reason is the more physical pages you have on your site, the more “indexed” pages you will gain in the search results thereby increasing your overall traffic. It’s also a good idea to post unique version of those articles on sites like ezinearticles.com which can rank well in Google and add an inbound link to your site, which helps your site rank better. Over time, these are very effective ways to increase your free traffic and hence your affiliate earnings.

2. Social Bookmarking – Once you have posted articles or blog posts, you can then “bookmark” your posts to the top social bookmarking sites. This is important because it allows you to syndicate your content more broadly and get it shared and bookmarked by others. Please refer to my social bookmarking article for more detailed instructions on social book marketing techniques.

3. Social Networking – I’m sure you are already on Facebook and Twitter, so you need to leverage these sites to get your content shared, liked, commented on, and retweeted. By sharing your article pages and blog posts on Facebook and Twitter you can increase their syndication and possibly even make that content go viral if it’s compelling enough. Make sure to spend a great deal of time liking, sharing, commenting, and retweeting other people’s content so they will be more likely to share yours to others. Otherwise they won’t or just a little and that won’t get it done. When people share, like, comment on Facebook, their friends see that and it gets more traffic. Some of the top social networking sites you should be joined to are: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and FourSquare.

4. Forum Posting – a great free way to increase your traffic is to join relevant online forums to your site’s niche and set-up your forum signature with links to your sites. Most forums allow a few links in your forum signature which people see and could click, not to mention it helps build up inbound links to your website which is good for your organic rankings. Being an active forum member can be great because you can build links quickly and easily if you comment a lot and start a lot of topics on the forum. Make sure to add valuable comments and topics or you will be banned. To find forums search “your niche forums” like pet forums and then join a bunch, set-up your signature in your Control Panel and start getting active!

5. Blog Commenting – Every niche has a ton of related blogs that you can post comments on to build your inbound links and traffic. Frequent blog commenting can really ramp your links and traffic because you are continually being pulled back to the blog by other’s comments and reminded to reply back by email. So you are always a click away from adding another comment. You can use Google Blog Search to find high ranking blogs that you can post comments to and link to your site. Make sure to leave really good comments or they won’t be posted to the site by the blog owner.

6. Build Your List – You should always be building a list of email address on your sites that can be messaged later with specials and promotions from your Affiliate Advertisers. There are many free plug-ins to handle the subscribing process, there are even pop-overs that launch when your site loads to prompt the visitor to join your list for valuable updates. There are some great WordPress blog plugins you can use to facilitate this here.

7. Learn to Type Faster – Typing speed can’t be under-valued in Affiliate Marketing because the faster you type the more content you can produce. Work on your typing speed by practicing typing articles and going as fast as possible on the keyboard. Also reading a lot can improve your ability to write easier and you will be better and busting out content and articles.

8. Learn from Others – a great way to make yourself a more effective Affiliate Marketer is to look at what other successful affiliates and bloggers are doing and emulate them. You can always find affiliate sites ranking in Google for various search phrases is you just run some search and see who is ranking. You can usually spot affiliate sites because they have affiliate banners on them, although not all sites run affiliate banners. Make sure to check out real affiliates and not those guys that claim to be able to teach you how they got rich with affiliate marketing because more of them are full of crap. So be careful of that.

These are a few suggestions to make you a more effective Affiliate Marketer. I hope you can employ these techniques to increase your website traffic and thereby increase your affiliate earnings. Please let me know if you have any questions at all. Thanks and have a great day. Now go out and build out the web with content!

Hey everyone! Great news…Inkgrabber is running an affiliate sales contest that you can win an Apple iPad or $50 Gift Card.

The Inkgrabber.com Holiday Sales Contest will run from November 7th – December 25th, 2010. Anyone can win a prize that produces at least 1 sale. The more sales you produce, the more chance you have to win the iPad!

1st Prize: Apple iPad – One winner selected from the list of Producing Publishers during the contest period. The more sales you make, the more entries you get into the drawing. Anyone that produces a sale has a chance to win the iPad!

2nd Prize: $50 Visa Gift Cards – 7 Most Improved or Best New Publishers - the most improved publishers and new publishers will win a $50 Gift Card.

Disclaimer: Not everyone producing a sale will win a prize.

We hope you participate and win in the Inkgrabber affiliate sales contest. Click here to join the Inkgrabber affiliate program on Commission Junction.

What should I use to build my niche site? (Free vs. Paid)
WordPress.com, Synthasite.com, Blogger.com – These can be great for launching quick sites/blogs. Add affiliate banners to monetize.

Paid requires paid hosting, domain name purchase, site builder tool access

Content, Content, Content – the search engines love unique, original content. Become a proficient writer, one that types with blazing speed and is mildly creative. Or hire writers to provide the content on a per piece basis. Articles/blog posts range from $10-25 per 400 word piece from outsourced writers. Write about things people are interested in and would return to your site read.

Syndicate your content – Submit RSS feed to: www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55
Broadcast your content – Submit post to Ping.fm for mass syndication. This updates your “status” on all your social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). This increases replies, comments, and responses for your network.

Be creative and timely with your content – write about things that will compel people to read your article and not abandon. Make sure to have Newsletter Sign-up, Follow Us on Twitter, other on-page functions that can increase “stickiness.” This will also help your site rank better.

Optimize for SEO – You content shouldn’t be overly keyword rich, but natural and comprehensive. Make sure your titles are well constructed and anticipate how are people are performing searches, as these become your Title Meta-tags.

Article Directories – Becoming an author at EzineArticles.com can get you rankings and some good inbound links and traffic. This can help you get multiple rankings for the same topics.
Choosing Topics: What niches should I go into?
See what other affiliates are doing. Run some searches on topics or products you are interested in. See who comes up in the search results. Study what other people are doing on their sites to give you ideas of what you should do.

Join affiliate programs – Join tons of programs on CJ, Linkshare, and Shareasale. See who accepts you. CJ programs can be sorted by EPC or best performing offers. Then go to Google and search for those merchants and see who ranks organically. There should be many portals and niche affiliate sites ranking.
Best Tools to Use for Niche Site Building:
Experience Advertising Tools – WordPress custom Blog builder, Product site builder, Store builder.
PopShops.com – Great for reviewing products and building mini stores. Some cost but cheap.
Datafeedfile.com – Good for building niche stores with the Merchant’s product feed.
Golden Can – This is great for adding a store to your existing site with just some code.
Google Keyword Suggestion Tool – Tap affiliate managers for best keywords and products.

Preselling is defined as utilizing copy-writing and graphics on your website to effectively prepare the visitor leaving your website to receive the subsequent Advertiser or Merchant with a want or need. Good preselling is vital to mentally preparing the visitor to visit the merchants website. If your copy is convincing and conveys the purpose of the products or services, the visitor is more likely to then make a purchase or fill out a form for more information. For example, visitor A finds my “Flowers for All Occasions” page in Google. I have beautiful graphics of floral arrangements and glowing recommendation of 1800 flowers. “1800Flowers is the best flower source on the Internet, they have an excellent selection of floral arrangements at great prices.” As an affiliate, the more merchants and products you review online, the more potential traffic you can generate from the search engines. It’s usually a good practice to focus on niches, such as Valentine’s Day Gifts and review various types of gifts including flowers, chocolates and jewelry. WordPress is an excellent tool for using presell reviews of products. Let me know if you would like to discuss preselling with me.