Hey all! Hope you had a nice weekend. If you know me you know I’m somewhat of a guerrilla marketer, meaning I work hard at finding and leveraging places to promote online through various sites and platforms. When you engage in this type of promoting you have to do it with a rhyme and a reason and not just haphazardly, otherwise it won’t be nearly as effective and you could come across as obnoxious. In fact, most people that try to promote their company or themselves online in this way don’t do it with the right approach. You have to follow some basic rules that will make it actually work for you and not end up a giant waste of time. No one likes seeing anything too self-promotional, like “This is the most amazing thing ever, check it out or you’re a loser.” Make sure everything you post is original content, which of course takes longer, but in the long-run will actually be effective for you as you promote online. Plug Google Analytics into your site so you can see all the referring sources of traffic you are building up. I wanted to cover as many of the free ways to effective promote your company or website online because I get a lot of people asking me this, so it will be nice to refer them to this page! Let me know what you think.

1. Building Out Your Own Site’s Content – first and foremost you should be building out a large site or blog, over time, filled with only original content on whatever theme or topic the site is about. I recommend using WordPress as your content management platform because it tends to index well with Google and index to more pages than you actually have with categories and tagging in the posts. There are also really nice themes you can use for your site that have great plug-ins already in the design. You should post new pages on a frequent basis (1-10 posts a day) to be effective with your on-site SEO/organic strategy. Your posts should vary in length and your post titles should be intuitive as to how people are searching as much as possibly, i.e. “How to find a flower Shop in Miami, Florida.” Then, your post content should also reflect your post title and other related phrases in the copy, but not too heavily, just mention related phrases as you write you post, otherwise it could be perceived as having to many keyword phrases in the copy, i.e. SEO spam. Every time you post a new piece of content to your site or blog it should be “socially shared” and bookmarked. This means taking the page url and sharing it on your Facebook profile, Twitter account, Fan Page…and submitting it to Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Reddit as a bookmark. You can also join LinkedIn Groups related to your site topic and share in up to 50 groups per article, but it should be related to what the group is about or it won’t be well-received. I have a whole process that takes me about 10 minutes of “syndicating” each new post I write. It works well to build the traffic. Over time, your site will have hundreds if not thousands of index pages in Google that will never go away, so make sure to build up your site into a content juggernaut.

2. Posting on 3rd Party Sites and Platforms - posting good content on 3rd party sites that rank well in Google is a great way to gain multiple rankings for a particular phrase or keyword, or rankings at all if its a competitive phrase. Again, you should post a completely original title and article to which ever site you are posting to. Some of the sites you can gain great search engine rankings by posting to are: article directories like ezinearticles.com, blogs that let you post guest post, and forums that have a blog feature for members. Even forum topics can get you great search rankings for certain topics of interest people are searching for. So you have to seek out these types of sites, related to your niche or topic, so you can post to them and leverage their organic rankings. Another amazing way to post content to other sites is through online press releases (I recommend ereleases.com – Coupon code: EXP75). Even though your release isn’t original every time it posts to a site in the distribution network, some of the sites that host the release rank well so it will bring in traffic and get some rankings. The other nice thing is you can embed some hyperlinks in your content on your top keywords, which can help your site rank better and get more inbound links from quality sites. Online press release are not free but very a cost-effective form of online promoting and work well which is why I’ve mentioned it here. So you have to go out and find sites, blogs, and forums that you can post unique articles and topics on that will link to your site. This is a great way to gain multiple organic rankings under certain phrases you are going after and gain new traffic sources. Obviously, the more you do this the more traffic will result. Make sure to include your website url, phone number, and other pertinent contact information when at all possible to maximize the effect.

3. Forums and Blogs - one of the best ways to get free traffic to your site is by joining online forums (like this one) that allow you to put a signature link in your profile. That way every time you post a new comment or topics on the forum you are showing a link to your website or blog. The more you post to the forum, the more people will see your signature links and possibly click through. These links can also benefit your SEO by creating more inbound links. The key to forum posting is to really get into the community and not post self-promotional content, but really contribute well to the forum. The sheer amount of posting you do will determine how many clicks per month you can get through your signature links. Similarly, you can search for all types of blogs related to what your website is about and leave blog comments on the posts you have something intelligent to say something about (use Google Blog search to find posts related to your site). Don’t just comment to comment without actually contributing to the dialogue otherwise the comment won’t get approved by the blog owner. You can also make friends with the blog owner in this way and your comments will be approved quicker, not to mention make a friend. You may even be able to get them to put a link to your site in their “blog roll” which is great for your site’s SEO, or exchange blog roll links. This is something you have to do on a daily basis and make it part of your routine.

4. Sharing Buttons – every page of your site or blog should have social sharing buttons like the Facebook Like button, Tweet button, Google +1 button, and the AddThis.com button which allows people to share and bookmark your content easily. Not having these buttons in the article’s layout is completely missing the opportunity for people to share your content with their friends. Facebook recently rolled out the Send button and the Facebook comment box which allows people to comment on your posts and it also posts it to their Facebook Wall. Connecting your sites as much as possible to Facebook IS the thing to do. Make sure to interact with and share your Facebook and Twitter friends’ content so they will return the favor as well.

5. Classified Sites – posting to classified sites is another great way to expand your organic reach by posting to well-ranking sites. Again, original content and titles wins the day, otherwise you are wasting your time posting the same content to multiple places. Some of the ones I like are: eBay classifies, Craigslist, Backpage, and Oodle (here is a longer list). But you should seek out as many free classified sites to post to as you can by checking in the Google search results and seeing what sites ranking organically under popular search (and obscure) search phrases. Over time, if you post to all of them, you will gain traffic from their organic rankings. I like the idea of posting your phone number on these types of ads to increase phone calls if you are a business and want calls.

6. Social Interaction - I’m a big proponent of pro-active social interaction on Facebook and Twitter. I don’t think people spend nearly enough time interacting with their friends and followers content and posts. But if you really ramp up your interactions with your friend’s content, they will return the favor and interact with yours. When you Like, comment, or share a friends post or status update, they will likely return the favor and interact with your postings, which all of their friends will see and get you more traffic. Imagine posting an affiliate coupon code and link to your affiliate site, a friend Likes it, and then their friends could go get that coupon and buy from the merchant, earning you the affiliate commission. That’s what it’s about.

7. Videos - making little videos, with your target keywords in the titles, is a great way to leverage free traffic and search rankings. Google makes a practice of ranking videos in their search results and half the Internet traffic is going to Youtube, so making little vignette videos and submitting them to a few video sites can be a good way to gain additional traffic and business inquiries. You should add your site url and phone number in the video so people can contact you, but it’s another great, free way to get people to your content and then traffic to your site. Check out Fiverr.com to find people that can make you videos for $5 bucks!

8. Maximizing your Traffic - I would be remiss if I didn’t address how to maximize your visitors once their reach your site or blog since you are going to be working so hard to get them there. You can do several things to capitalize on your traffic such as:
- Pop-up window to join your mailing list (it works although it can be annoying if it pops too quickly).
- Adding a sweepstakes or contest to your site with WildFireApp, which will allow you to capture visitors information so you can contact them later, not to mention it shares it to their Facebook Wall when they enter your sweepstakes.
- Having social sharing buttons in the layout, as well as the Facebook Fan page widget so they can Like your Fan Page right from any page of the site.
- Making sure to respond to all blog comments so people will comment again.

These are some ideas to gain more free traffic from the search engines and other Internet platforms to your website. People are still searching more than they are doing anything else when looking to buy products and services, so make sure you are EVERYWHERE. Of course it’s a work in progress and will get bigger and better over time as you flood the Internet with your wonderful, original content, articles, and videos. Now go out and make it happen! Thanks for reading and please leave a comment. Thanks!

Performance marketing or performance-based online marketing is the model by which affiliates, partners, or publishers are paid commissions on desired “actions,” i.e. a sale, a lead, or a phone call being generated from their website. There are several different models on which you can work as an Advertiser or Affiliate. The main model is called the “CPA” model or the Cost Per Acquisition or also known as Cost Per Sale. A large percentage of all affiliate marketing or performance marketing is conducted on a CPA model, that’s why you may hear the term CPA being thrown around a lot out there.

The second most popular model is probably the Cost Per Lead or CPL model, where information is being processed into a form on a website or a landing page and then that action is then paid out to whomever referred the business. Cost Per Click or CPC is another technically “performance based” model where you’re compensating someone on those clicks that they’re driving, but technically it isn’t really performance based in that it’s not commission-oriented. Then there is the Pay-Per-Call model. Ring Revenue is probably leading the forefronts on compensating affiliates and partners when the generate calls to your call center or sales center.

CPA and CPL are the primary performance marketing structures. When you hear about affiliate marketing or performance-based marketing you’ll hear these two models being talked about the most. Electronic tracking is absolutely necessary in order to facilitate all performance-based marketing. You have to be able to track the click-throughs and the sales that result and cookie the browser for a certain period of time, so people are accurately compensated for the traffic they’re referring and the sales that result or leads.

Performance based marketing is ideal for Advertisers because it only compensates when desired actions are made by site visitors. Affiliate marketers like the performance based model because the more they produce the higher the commissions per action can go. Performance based marketing has grow to huge levels and is still growing as more individual and companies decide to work on this model.

Picking the right affiliate niches to work on is important to maximizing your online marketing effectiveness as an affiliate marketer. Different times of year are better for promoting certain types of products and services, and most Advertisers have their “seasonality” which means they have a higher click-to-sale ration during certain times of year, as well as a higher amount of demand and searches going on. 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 2011, New Years resolution type products and services are still converting well. Here are some 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 have an easy conversion process and a nice high payout per lead or sale. You can also play one Advertiser against another to get the highest commission rates. All dating Advertisers are hungry for new 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.

2. Weight Loss and Dieting – Weight loss and dieting is another 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. Our company manages a really great performing Advertiser in this space called BistroMD.com (in CJ.com). Diet meal delivery programs make it easy 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 pages like that!

3. Smoking Cessation – Quitting smoking will always be a popular niche because there are millions of Americans (and other countries) that are wanting to stop smoking. Electronic cigarettes have become popular in the last couple of years and have proven to be a good performing affiliate nice. 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.

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 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.

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, find an Advertiser that sells it and put up a blog review site for it. Since blogs and basic sites basically cost nothing, 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.

These are some good performing affiliate niches that work well 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. 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 there! I hope your day is going well. Our affiliate management client eReleases.com has a new February/Valentine’s Day coupon code available for their affiliate marketers to promote at $75 off. This is a great incentive to purchase and can be promoted through websites, blogs, social networking, and other traffic generating mediums.

Online press releases are a great way to promote your company because they have several benefits like: building inbound links from big sites, expansive distribution to media outlets, and inquiries to your company for partnerships. eReleases is exclusively on the Commission Junction affiliate network. They are a leader in the press release business and has created an amazing distribution network that I personally use for my own business.

Here is the CJ.com Coupon Code Link ID: 10861995

New CJ.com Affiliate/Publishers can join here.

Current CJ.com Affiliate/Publishers can apply to the program here.

We look forward to working with you on the eReleases.com affiliate program! Thanks and have a great day!

About Annie’s Costumes:

AnniesCostumes.com, and the ExtremeHalloween network of sites, is a well-establish company of over 10 years, with a great converting e-commerce portal featuring a large product selection and great pricing. Their products include: costumes, wigs, make-up, and numerous accessories for every possible event or holiday. In addition, Annies offers costumes in niches like: babies, children, teens, adults and even pets. They offer an extremely wide variety of costumes to ensure that regardless of what your visitors are looking for they will find it and at a great price too!

In addition to offering an amazing Halloween costume product line, Annie’s offers costumes and accessories for every possible occasion including: Christmas, Valentines Day, Mardi Gras, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, and Purim. They even offer costumes of famous historical figures, in the event children need to give a well-prepared presentation on the figure for school or an event. There are so many popular niches you can promote from Annie’s Costumes, you will never run out of ideas!

About the Affiliate Program:

Annie’s performs extremely well in the months leading up to Halloween (July-October), but there are numerous reasons why this offer converts all year round. Obviously, leading up to Halloween the costumes niche booms, as search traffic goes through the roof. So you have to be heavily promoting costumes 3-4 months prior to Halloween to take full advantage. Also, right after Halloween, many visitors will flock back to the Internet to save money on their next year’s costume at a discount. They also look for Santa suits and Thanksgiving costumes and other seasonal costumes for November-December. Consumers also like dressing up for New Years, so that can be promoted or blogged about as well on your sites. Annie’s will normally have sales going on, so check on the current promotions and coupon codes. Posting coupons is a great way to increase conversion rates of your visitors.

Since Annie’s offers much more than just Halloween costumes, this program will work leading up to any holiday if you promote it to the right audience in the right way. You can build pages on your site dedicated to promoting Halloween itself or each seasonal event that may require costumes. Theater troupes are always looking for costumes and makeup all year long for shows they are doing, so the theater niche can be targeted as well with pages, articles, and social postings.

Payout Structure:

The program pays a sliding scale between 10% and 15% based on monthly sales.

Keyword Research:

You Can Use the Google Keyword Tool Here

We have done quite a bit of keyword research for you relating to costumes, wigs, and makeup. However feel free to conduct your own keyword research to discover hidden gems and obscure phrases you can get a page ranked for. When building your site or blog or adding pages to current sites, it is best to be rational about what types of keywords you can compete with in the organic search results and through paid search. For Annie’s Costumes, you may not want to target something as popular as “Halloween Costumes” with paid search, but you surely want to target that phrase on your site for organics, and every phrase related to it. If you launch a niche costumes site you will target Halloween costumes and every other popular phrase related to it by adding articles and posts about different types of costumes.

You can basically promote any product Annie’s sells, so you may want to research how popular certain products many be and the phrases related to them. Use your intuition and whatever is popular with kids they probably have a costume for. Here are some ideas to get your additional keyword research started: What are some hot characters recently? If children are bugging their parents to get them a costume of the hottest character for Halloween, people will be searching for it. Some examples include Sponge Bob Halloween Costume and Dora the Explorer Halloween Costume. These may, or may not be hot characters at the moment, but when you get creative you can easily build a list of very highly targeted keywords based on the current popular characters and include them in your keyword list and as pages on your site. You can build pages on your site specifically targeting these characters and develop good content to include on the page. This is good for SEO and building search engine rankings for your site. You should seek to build as many targeted pages of content on your site for as many individual niches as possible. Ideas for pages of descriptive content or reviews you can add to your site include: product categories, seasonal events, and actual products. In addition to targeting the Halloween Costume niche, try targeting the holidays that most people wouldn’t think to promote costumes for (such as St. Patrick’s Day or Easter.) Again, the more creative you get with your keyword thought process, the more effective keywords you will generate. Contact us for a list of pre-research popular phrases.

Ideas for Article Topics:

Writing articles is probably the best way to build long-term, sustained web traffic which can be built over time. Articles can be used on you own site to generate traffic and also can be submitted to article directories. However, I usually recommend posting each unique article to one site. Writing a few articles on the same topic you want to target and spreading them around is a good strategy. Make sure to vary the titles and content for each. Leveraging original content on your own sites and through article directories should be a major part of your SEO strategy, as the search engines love original content and lots of it. Once you have done your keyword research and know what you want to write about you can now brainstorm some quality article titles to use. Simply ensure that your keyword is being mentioned in your article title, and again in your article. Don’t mention your targeted keyword phrase more than a couple of times in your page content, but mention related phrases in the copy.
Here are some sample article title ideas:

The 5 Hottest Costumes for this Halloween Season
5 Reasons (Sponge bob, Dora the Explorer, etc.) Halloween Costumes Are In Demand
3 Tips to Selecting a Comfortable, and Attractive Mardi Gras costume.
10 Way to Save Money when Have a Halloween Party
Where to Find the Best Deals on Theater Makeup

Again, use your creativity to your benefit. If you are targeting keywords that people are searching for, but no one else is marketing to, you will be able to more easily generate traffic for those terms and therefore affiliate sales. If you bid in the paid search for more obscure products or phrases or can get an ROI on a low bid amount. Everything should be tested on a low spend to see what converts though paid search for you.

Best Ways to Promote Annie’s Costumes: Annie’s can be promoted in a number of ways including: SEO, paid search, Facebook Ads, Social Media/Networking, and in your opted-in email newsletter.

SEO – building sites and blogs promoting costumes, holidays, and popular characters will attract the kind of visitors that buy Annie’s products. Focus on producing as much original content as possible to attract the search engines and achieve higher rankings in the organic search results.
Paid Search – Pay-per-click can be effect to promote Annie’s especially in the the months leading up to Halloween. Make sure to have all your promotions related to Halloween in high-gear at this time. Develop as much content as possible to attract more visitors.

Facebook Ads – Facebook Ads can work with Annie’s because you can really target demographically and with keywords. Be careful how much you spend and make sure to track everything properly and measure your ROI.

Social Media – You should absolutely be using Twitter and Facebook to promote your you affiliate stuff in general. If you are passionate about the niche I recommend creating an entity on Twitter and a Facebook Fan page for your costume site promotions. Then add the Follow on Twitter and join our Fan Page icons to your sites/blogs promoting Annies. This will increase the number of the potential people you can interact with and promote to later on.

Newsletters – Building your newsletter list on your site should always be a major priority. Once you have some newsletter subscribers you can send them nice newsletters with affiliate ads in them. Make sure to follow Can Spam 2003 rules and regulations by allowing them to unsubscribe from your list and being non-deceptive with the message itself.

Word Of Mouth – Word of mouth marketing is one of the best ways to spread the word about your site or blog. Tell everyone to visit your site, which is why you should probably have a domain name of your own to promote to others.

These are but a few strategies to promote Annie’s Costumes. Please contact us for more strategies or to work one-on-one with an affiliate manager. Thanks and have a great day!