photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc

Ok, so school’s almost done. You get to take the next 2 months off.  Yeah, right.  It’s time to find a summer job.  You can take the traditional route get a lifeguard certification and spend the whole summer in the sun, walking on the beach.  Sounds good doesn’t it.

I did that for 3 summers while I was in college.  It was a great party but  by the end of the summer, there wasn’t a place on my body that wasn’t sunburned.  I was in great shape because they made us run around the pond every day to keep fit and I even met some really cute day camp counselors.  The problem was each Friday, the paycheck didn’t go very far, and I was saving most of it for books and tuition.  This barely left me enough to have a good time.

One year, I even bussed tables at night just to bring in an extra bit of cash so I could enjoy the weekend with my friends.  I was so tired that I never got out.  I was sleepwalking through the whole summer.

My Junior year in school, I found the internet and got involved with a place that teaches Affiliate Marketing.  I started doing it just before finals and spent most of the summer getting a site online and learning how to actually make money on the internet.  I was able to sit on my back porch with a nice breeze and really enjoy what I was doing.  I didn’t get much sleep that summer either but it was because this online stuff was so exciting.  I was making more by writing about stuff I liked than I ever made before even with 2 jobs.

The GoPro Hero 3 Camera

You may be wondering what Affiliate Marketing is.  It is promoting products that are related to what you are  writing about.  That year, I had a new GoPro camera.  This thing is bullet proof, waterproof and can go just about anyplace.  I took it all over with me that summer and took some great pics.  Then I shared my experiences with folks on the internet.  Everybody wanted one of these things.

One of the great things that came out of this was that when the summer was over, I didn’t have to stop doing this stuff.  I was the boss.  I just kept doing it when I got back to school.  I was on the Ultimate Frisbee team that year and one practice I even made a chest harness and left the camera on for the whole practice.  I got some great shots.  I had to clean the lens a couple of times and it did get in the way of my shots a couple of times but mostly it was worth it.

The way Affiliate Marketing works is you sign up with an affiliate program.  You choose a product or some related products and make them available to the folks that read your blog.  Then, when someone clicks on the link a cookie is set that tells the affiliate program where the customer came from.  If they buy, you get a percentage of the sale.

If you click on the picture of the GoPro camera, you will see this in action.  You will be taken to Amazon to the GoPro page.  If you buy, I get a commission on that sale.  The nice thing about Amazon is that if someone uses your link to get to them and then buys something else, you get the commission on that other something.  Not all programs do this but Amazon does.

If you are interested in learning more about Affiliate Marketing and how to make money online legitimately, have a look at Wealthy Affiliates.  They will teach you how to set up a site and get it found.  There is even a free Starter Membership so if you are strapped for cash, you can get started on your online education for free.  Make sure you say hi to me when you get there.  My name in there is Labman.

photo credit: candrews via photopin cc

My last job turned into a nightmare.  Not one of the lovely horses that visit you in your dreams.  A crazy place that thought they owned me because they paid me a salary.  I should have read the writing on the wall when I was notified in the interview that the standard work week was 45 hours.  Of course the position was as a salaried “exempt” worker so that meant that the company could require me to work as many hours as necessary to “get the job done”.

Now, I’m not a complainer and I did make an effort to meet their requirements. 45 hour work weeks turned into 50 hours as a rule and often I would work 70-80 hours a week for no additional pay. After two years of this my body just was unable to handle it anymore.  I had to call it quits.

After extensive research I have found that this may be abnormal, but is the norm for the industry that I was in.  The 40 hour work week may be normal for the general working public but when you become a salaried employee all bets are off.  Your boss will expect you to earn your money and they are more than willing to burn out an employee that doesn’t meet their expectations.

There are some enlightened bosses out there.  There is a reason for the 40 hour work week.  Studies have shown that working beyond this threshold does not make for more efficient employees.  In fact performance degrades rapidly beyond this point.  A great article was written about returning to the 40 hour work week by Sara Robinson.  Follow the link if you are curious.

When I left my last position, I had a couple of choices.  I could look for a new position in the same field or try to find something that actually makes me happy.  I thought I would look to see what sort of things make people happy.  I know that anytime that kids or pets show up online the views go through the roof.  I have been training dogs on the side for almost 30 year now so I looked into doing this professionally.  I don’t see a way to make a good living doing this but I still maintain my volunteer work with another trainer and help her along. I even took over her website so that she has an internet presence.

About this time, I decided that the internet might yield some income and so began my search for a legitimate way to make a living online.  I looked at a lot of very nice slick presentations.  Each one ended with an offer, some were $39, some $97, even a few that were $997 or 3 payments of ….  You have probably seen many of these.  All hype, usually a hard luck story somewhere in there and now…he’s ready to help you dig your way out of your hole.  But very little substance.  Never did I see a free trial or someone that really seemed to be trustworthy.

Eventually, I joined a group called Wealthy Affiliate and have learned to make a good living online through Affiliate Marketing.  WA taught me the ins and outs of online marketing and how to get a site noticed.   This has had other benefits as well. I have time to get all those little things done that need to have my attention.  I can control my own time and work when I am able.  My hours are my own, late nights are OK now as I can work wherever I am.

I have started my own company that helps local clients to get online with their sites, and cleaned up several sites and helped them to start ranking for their businesses.  Helping people to succeed is now my way of life.  Now, I’m making a living and helping people in the process.  I have never been happier.

The entrepreneurial lifestyle is not for everyone.  It takes time to get your business functioning well.  You need to wear many hats.  You need to be your own sales department, technical lead and bookkeeper. You need to learn to be organized and most of all, you need to stop procrastinating.  It can be rewarding but it isn’t all rosey, you do need to work at it.  The affiliate marketing side of my business keeps me making money day in and day out.  The local side of my business lets me be helpful and make a difference in the world.  Overall I have found a good balance.  I still work long hours but my level of satisfaction with my world has increased 100 fold.

The Wealthy Affiliate training makes it easy to get started on your Internet Journey. I’d like to show you just how easy this all can be.  Are you worried that you don’t have the skills to create a website?  I have helped many folks to get started using the tools at WA.

Your first concern when starting a website and a campaign on the internet is  what will be your focus.  Affiliate Marketers call this a niche (pronounced nitch or neesh).There is a nice tutorial here that can help you decide what niche you would like to work with.  Just click on the picture to be taken to the tutorial within WA.

When you have determined your niche, you can get started with building your website.

When the internet was new, even as recently as 2005, website creation needed you to understand code structure, be knowledgeable about how to lay out your site and still add good content to your site.  With the advent of WordPress and the modern release in 2010, the life of a site designer just became much easier.  You can create the bare bones of your site and get online in a matter of a few minutes.  You still need to write about your niche and add great content to your site but you no longer need a degree in computer science to build an excellent website.

Wealthy Affiliate has created a customized website builder that installs WordPress and several of the most important plugins that work in tandem with WordPress to add functionality to your site.  They call this WordPress Express.  It is absolutely like an express train for WordPress installation.  Click the image below to see it in action.In a matter of a few minutes you have the basics down.  You have a bare bones site up on the internet and have an idea of what you will be working on.  From this point you will be adding content to your site and introducing your readership to your topic of choice.

Inside Wealthy Affiliate you will find a set of 10 courses that can be accessed from the Free Starter Membership (Getting Started Course) that will fill in the blanks for you.  This set of courses will teach you how to start your website, how to make money online and how to add quality content and determining some good themes for your site.

If you found this helpful, please leave a comment below.  If I can answer a question about this or another aspect of Affiliate Marketing please ask below and I will answer it or direct you to a resource that will provide the answer.  Thanks for reading.

How to Recognize Scams

Affiliate marketing is not inherently bad.  Many of the people promoting this marketplace have dubious intentions though.  These scammers are out to clean your bank account of all the funds you can be convinced to part with.  They do this through the use of pop-ups and e-mail capture, upsells and exit discounts.  If you run across any of these method when you are looking for a legitimate company to work with, run away.

Selling a Dream or Providing a Product

Much of what these “snake-oil” salesmen are promoting is available online for much less than what they are charging.  In fact, you won’t really know what you are buying until you pay your money.  Then your only option is to try to get a refund.  Many times this is impossible even though there is a stated money back guarantee.  So if you see a slick presentation, perhaps a guru in a nice house or a fast paced sketching presentation think about what they are actually selling.  Is it the dream of riches or is there a product  that you can actually see and use.  Caveat Emptor (let the buyer beware).

I have reviewed a few of these for you and there are many more out there that I will be reviewing in the future.  Just have a look at the review tab in the menu bar.

Legitimate Support and Training

There is a place where affiliate marketing beginners will get all the support and training that you need.  Wealthy Affiliate has a program that is spam and scam free.  The owners insist on it.  There is no self promotion allowed on this site.  Do it and your membership will be terminated.  They even have an amazing tracking program to keep the bad apples from re-entering the system.  What this does is create a learning environment that is very useful for new people and for people that are learning to make a living online.

Check out the full WA review.

What is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is using the web to promote products online.  These products are available from their manufacturers but they may not have a huge market presence.  The manufacturers use affiliate marketers to enhance their online presence.  The affiliate then gets a percentage of the sale.  This is a win-win situation for the manufacturers as they get a strong web presence for a cost that is considerably lower than a full blown marketing campaign.  They also don’t need to pay out up front.  There is only a cost to them when a sale is completed.

Training Available to make Your Life Easy

Wealthy Affiliate teaches you the ropes of marketing on the internet so that you can capture of bit of the wealth that is available from these manufacturers and the affiliate networks that make their products available to affiliates.  Can you make a full time living this way?  Absolutely.  Will it happen overnight?  Probably not.  If you are willing to learn the process and apply yourself to the training, there is every possibility that you will be able to make a good income from this.  It does take time to get your website found and generate the traffic necessary to make sales.

Tools for You to Succeed

Build a website… I don’t know how to do that.  This is one of the questions I hear quite often.  Wealthy Affiliate has tools that will help you to get online in no time.  We can help you find the niche that you can promote and teach you how to learn about it and present it to your readers so that they are ready to buy your product.  This is all there for you when you sign up for the Free Starter Membership.

Have a look, see what you think, if it is for you, learn everything you can for free and see if this is a good match for you.  I think you will find that Wealthy Affiliate meets all of your expectations and is a safe place to learn how to earn online.

The Internet in Market Strategies, Sampling a Crowd

How do you use the internet to increase your marketing dollar return on investment?  Is it possible to put up a website and instantly see an impact into your market?  Does using the internet help or hinder your other marketing efforts?  In today’s environment not using the internet to help promote your product line is tantamount to disaster.

Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy is a comprehensive set of goals that are combined to create a plan of attack for your marketplace.  Through market research and a good product mix your company can produce a set of goals that will enhance the profit potential of your company and deliver a sustainable competitive business.

SWOT Analysis

Any good marketing plan looks at the SWOT analysis to determine if their marketing efforts will be met with any sort of success.  Identifying the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats to your marketing efforts will allow you to get a good feel for the level of competition and effectiveness of a campaign.

Strengths

Identify your strengths, look at what you might do better than your competition.  Then use the online community to verify that these are in fact accurate representations of your product or brand.  Do you have a targeted market?  You can tap into this market online with surveys, give-aways and focused information that can allow you to determine if your strengths are perceived as you think.  It is possible that a sampling of the millions of online consumers will agree with your assessment but it is equally possible that they will not connect with your presentation.  An online sampling of the community can bring a new understanding of what the market is looking for in your specific brand or product line.

Weaknesses

Look at your weaknesses.  Examine what your competition is doing online.  Are they connecting with the marketplace?  How are they competing better than you?  Look at how the market is responding to the competition and make a decision as to whether you compete directly with them toe to toe, or are there weaknesses in their strategies that you can capitalize on.  Test the water and see if the online community responds.  This is a cost effective way to determine how the market will respond before you launch a full blown marketing blitz.

Opportunities

As above, analyze the opportunities that you discover in your strengths and weakness testing.  Do the analyses of your test market online meet what you perceive to be the needs of the marketplace?  What opportunities present themselves?  Are there changing trends or market adjustments that might benefit a change in plan?  If your company is fluid and can respond to these opportunities you will benefit by modifying your marketing strategy to focus more effectively on the changing picture that your online sampling has identified.

Threats

What sort of threats may crop up in your marketing efforts?  Does your competition do something better than you?  What can you do to overcome the weaknesses that you identified in the previous sampling?  Is the online marketplace demographically different from your chosen demographic?  These are all questions that need to be answered before you commit funds to a full blown marketing campaign.  By addressing these issues up front while your monetary commitment is small, you can plan an effective response to these problems before you have spent your entire budget on a failed campaign.

The Internet Demographic

The internet does provide a good place to test your demographic.  It can be a godsend to small companies that don’t have a huge marketing budget.  It may be the only avenue that you target.  But keep in mind that there may be significantly different demographics in your online sampling than in your true customer base.

Traffic

Traffic is the other gorilla in the room.  Your sample needs to be of sufficient size to provide you with good intelligence.  A mix of organic traffic that is provided by SEO and SEM and a paid traffic base provided by PPC advertising may be sufficient to provide a good sampling of your demographic.  You need a good mixture of people to get valid results.

Community

There are many skilled Internet Marketers that can help you with your traffic but if you are new to the field you may need to find help.  I have found that connecting with an active community of marketers can be a beneficial move.  There are a few out there that can be useful, some forums are helpful but the best community that I have found is at Wealthy Affiliate.  Many of the membership are new marketers but there are a few that have a wealth of knowledge about how to impact a market and draw out the intelligence from the marketplace.  The community is more than willing to provide the knowledge that you need.  Any question large or small will find someone that has experienced your problem and most likely can provide you with a solution.  Join us, we will help you to succeed.

Google Lies!

What I mean to say is that the Google results that you see are inflated over the actual result.  Here’s an example of what you might see for a Google Search result.

In this example Google indicates that there are 94,100 results for this term.  It think, in fact I know, that this number includes what Google calls the “similar” results.  Similar results are those that include the words in the search term but are not necessarily in the same order or together on the page.

To find the actual exact results, you need to page through the Google result pages until you reach the end of the results.  In the display below you would click on the 10 and continue to click on the last page until you reach the end.

Eventually, with this term you will reach page 27.

This is what Google terms the most relevant results.  Rather than 94,100 results there are 266 results.  If you want to redo the search to include similar results you will find the 94,100 results from the initial search page.

It is apparent that it can be a lot of work to identify the number of competing sites that a specific term has by using the Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).  There are alternative tools that are available for you to use.

The Wealthy Affiliate Keyword tool will give you accurate results and clicking on the “View Result” under the competition tab will do the last page of Google work for you.

As you can see the results are identical to the results from the previous technique.  One click and you are done.  It also provides additional terms that are related to your search.  These are additional keywords that you can include in your content to help your site rank for other similar terms and searches.  Free Starter members are allowed 30 searches per month so if you are on a shoestring and looking for a keyword tool that is accurate and free this is a good option. Premium members at WA get unlimited searches with this tool.

Another tool that is very good is Jaaxy.  This is a Premium tool that has a small monthly fee.This keyword tool has many more features and is well worth the small fee if you are doing lots of keyword research for a new site or have many sites that you are working on or client sites that need a special enhancement.  There is a free 30 search trial that you can use to get the feel of this tool if you are so inclined.

This result shows the same term from above searched in Jaaxy.  The results differ a bit as Jaaxy pulls results from all of the search engines and not just Google.

If you have any questions about these keyword tools, please leave a comment below.

There are two reasons for doing Article Marketing.  First, your content is read by a wider audience.  The article directories have a good following, some of these folks might be interested in what you have to say.  They are also indexed well so people interested in your topic will find it easy to reach your information.

The second reason to market yourself via articles is to piggyback off the good will that the article directories have with the search engines.  With hundreds of new pieces of content added daily to the article directories, Google, Bing and Yahoo (the three largest Search Engines) have lots of ranking love for the article directories.  Your articles will benefit from this beneficial ranking and actually do much better in the Search Engines themselves.  When you link to your website from here, some of the ranking benefits are passed to your site.

Article Marketing has gotten a bad rap recently and Google was instrumental in making this happen.  Last year and several time since the original release, Google has spanked many of the directories in the rankings.  This was well deserved I might add.  It was called the Penguin update.

The Penguin update was created to address the issue that the content being submitted to the article directories was of little or no benefit to the readers.  Some of it was even spun content.  Spun content is a unique way that some writers were trying to get more mileage from their work.  Essentially they used automation to create multiple articles from one original article.  Many times the automation just substituted synonyms for the important words in the articles.  This resulted in articles that were practically unreadable by the normal person and added no real benefit to the internet community.

Google devalued this content as was appropriate.  This caused the article directories to be devalued as well and resulted in a wholesale reevaluation of their content by the article directory owners.  Now that the low value content has been removed, the article directories that were penalized are recovering their previous rankings.  There are more strict rules in place and only quality content is being approved.

What this all means is that to do article marketing in today’s internet community there are no shortcuts.  Write good quality articles that make sense to your readers.  Write original content and never post the same content in more than one place.

When your content is complete, it is time to submit your article to your chosen article directory.  I have found that Street Articles is a wonderful one to use.  This article directory is fairly new to the scene having just been started in 2011.  It has rocketed to the top of the heap by keeping the content of high quality.  You are able to add an image into your article to help with reader impact and the links to your site are done in the content as context links.  Street Articles was created by the owners of Wealthy Affiliate so you know that this directory is well managed and above board.  It helps that the approval process is very fast.  In fact, I had one article approved 4 minutes after submission.  Typical approvals are one day and I have never had one go longer than 2 days even on a holiday weekend.

3 Levels Available

Jaaxy provides 3 levels of membership. Here is a quick reference to show you what features are supported in each level.

Pros vs. Cons

Pros

• Fast Keyword Search Results
• Accurate Search Results from all the search engines not just Google but Bing and Yahoo as well.
• Keyword Quality Index provided to help you determine the value of a keyword.
• Quoted Search Results give you a measure of the competition for a keyword.
• Site Ranking results provided against a keyword.
• Listing of the top 10 Search Engine Result Pages with additional information like the site rank in Alexa, number of page links and number of backlinks.
• Search of popular competitive sites that may have instances of your keyword to allow you to distribute the keyword across your social network.
• Recommended Affiliate programs that are available to promote your product.
• Nice Video training to get you started on Keyword Research and the product features.
• List feature to save keywords that you are interested in keeping for later use.
• Export function to save a list or import it into a spreadsheet .
• Affiliate Program

Cons

• Sort feature only available with Enterprise level.

Intelligent Keyword Results

Jaaxy is a keyword search software that will help you to determine the availability of a keyword term.  You can of course, use any keyword that suits your fancy but wouldn’t it be nice to know what sort of traffic a term is getting?  If you know how many searches are being done on a specific term, you can target your content to use the words that will rank your article more effectively on the search engines.  We are, after all, looking for terms that people are looking for.  Jaaxy provides you with this intelligence.

Let say we wanted to look at how to become a veterinarian assistant.

From these results you can see that 7364 people search for this term each month, there are 194 websites that already are promoting this term.  Combining these results gives an SEO power of 92.  A good value.  This would be a good term to include in a Page on your website.  You can expect if you surround the use of this term with good quality content to rank on the first page of Google quite quickly and see a good return for your work.

The next term how to become a veterinarian doesn’t fare quite as well, There are only 231  searches per month. and 498 sites are competing for the term.  As you can see the KQI indicator for this term is yellow indicating that this probably isn’t a great term to use on your site.  The 61 Score for the SEO power is lower than the first term and also indicates that this is not a great term to try to rank in Google.

You can see with the third result that people are searching for another term “become veterinary assistant”.  This is a term that people are inputing into the search engines.  It even has good search results and a high SEO value.  You can see that it only has 29 competing sites.  This is because the term isn’t correct English.  Including it in your content would not provide a good grammatical structure and is probably something that would make your writing feel wrong.  So, use the grammatically correct terms, search until you find one that makes sense in your writing.  You do need to use your brain a bit when looking at the results.  If it feels wrong, do a refined search for a better term.

No Inflated Search Values

Jaaxy provides a way around the Google numbers that are inflated to include all of the similar results.  Similar results in Google are terms that include all of the words in the search term somewhere in their content.  This means that if you are searching for a term such as “Best Keyword Search Results”, Google will return values for Best, Keyword, Search and Results in their results.  Jaaxy will only return the results for the exact term that is searched.

I have looked at this topic in depth in another post.  Have a look and see if you agree that Google Lies.

Related Keywords

When you are setting up a page, it would be nice to know what keywords are similar to the one that you are searching.  A search in Jaaxy will provide a list of related keywords that may be something that you can use in your online content.  Each related keyword can be searched to determine if it will provide you with another set of terms worth including in your content.

Competition and Quality Index

Not only does the Jaaxy search software provide you with accurate search volumes for monthly searches but will estimate the number of hits that you will receive when your term reaches the first page of the Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP). It also will provide a Quoted Search Result (QSR) that tells you the number of pages that are competing directly for your keyword term.  Using the QSR and the traffic volume, a Keyword Quality index (KQI) term is generated and a Red,Green, Yellow indicator is displayed to give you a quick visual indicator showing you if a keyword is worthwhile using for ranking purposes.

SERPs and Page Rank Intelligence

On other tabs in the Jaaxy tool there are links to a display of the top 10 Result Pages in Google.  This will help you to identify if a term has tough competition or if the other pages that are ranked for this term will be easy to beat.  Many of the competing pages do not use the actual keyword.  This will make it easy to outrank the competing sites for your chosen term.  Additionally, there is a ranking tool that looks at your site URL and the keyword that you have included in your content and tells you where your site will rank in the Search Engines for that term.  Would you like to know where you are in the rankings?  Most of us would.  This tools gives you an accurate result of where you are.  This can help you to make an intelligent decision as to how to backlink a particular term to move up in the rankings.

Additional Features

There are several other features that must be seen to appreciate.  There is a competition tool that shows you where in the social networks your term appears.  When you are trying to rank for a certain term this intelligence can be invaluable.

If you are looking for what is hot in the Search Engines, there is a tool that will help you to brainstorm for things that are currently getting a good search volume in each of the Search Engines.  This alone may provide you with a high converting topic worth looking into.

There is also a listing of affiliate programs that are related to your search term.  This will provide a way to monetize your efforts.

Enterprise: Keyword Search on Steroids

The recently released Enterprise version of Jaaxy is just what the doctor ordered.The Pro version can be a bit annoying when it comes to the QSR.  You need to click on each result to get the Quality Score.  Enterprise grabs all of the results and displays them for you.  It also searches for available domains and displays these for you.  If you are looking for Exact Match Keywords to start a new campaign, this is a feature that has high value.

The sort feature in Enterprise is also highly useful, getting the highest result for the keyword search values is nice but where this really shines is sorting on the SEO power. Two quick clicks and you have the best keywords from the resulting search to target with your article or post.  This is invaluable for getting a page or post to rank quickly.

If you want results rapidly with high value but don’t want to spend your life researching keywords, Jaaxy Enterprise is the way to go.

 Have a Keyword in Mind? Test it Out!

Have you been wondering how to find a profitable niche keyword? Maybe you are trying to determine a profitable niche?

I’m here to tell you that any niche can be profitable. Some are more profitable than others, some turn a profit and then something happens and the income dries up.  Others just hit the audience and go viral.

The best way to determine a consistent earner is to choose something in the Evergreen Niches.  No I’m not talking about trees.  I’m talking about the things that people are constantly thinking about.  These can be roughly classified as Health, Wealth and Happiness.  Choose something that connects with these niches and you should have a ready audience that will always want what you are promoting.

I’m not really here to talk about finding a niche this time.  My purpose here is to discuss how to find a good keyword. A keyword that is able to rank in your chosen niche and get ranked on the first page of Google where it will be seen by the people looking for your topic.

Lets say you have a topic, for demonstration purposes I’ll use the title of my post.  My first task is to see what Google can tell me with the Google instant tool. I typed in “How to find a good ke”  And Google finds the term How to find a good Keyword and offers additional choices. One is the one I want so I select and copy it and take the term over to Jaaxy for additional information.  It looks like several other terms might be useful in some of my other sites.

When we look at the results in the Jaaxy keyword tool I see a few terms that have good Keyword Quality Index (KQI) but when I look at the Monthly searches they appear to be quite poor.   The last term with good KQI has a fair number of searches but is difficult to use in a page or article.  I like the Quoted Search Results (QSR or the competition) for the 3 terms as I use a 350 top end for this term to guarantee that I can reach the top of the page rankings.  Without traffic they are pretty much useless.

So I tried the term with a few modifications and got the following results.

All three of these results are good keywords,  the last being better for traffic volume but the first is absolutely amazing for competition.  The first term has 7 competing sites for the exact term chosen.  In a short period of time this term should be able to attract a significant percentage of the traffic.  If you are able to use variations of all of these terms in your content, you have a good chance to increase your visitors by a significant amount.

To recap, use Google Instant to identify terms that are highly searched.  Use Jaaxy to check the terms that you locate with Google instant to find terms that are related to the Google results.  A good term has more than 100 searches per month and a competition below 350 QSR.

If you would like to give Jaaxy a try click on the box below and enter a search term.

I hope this discussion has helped you to understand the keyword search process a bit.  If you have any questions please comment below and I will do my best to provide you an answer.

Affiliate Marketing is an online technique that is very similar to the old traveling salesman model.  You are paid a commission on sales that you make for the vendor.  The customer of course is not someone you meet face to face but an online customer.  Rather than going door to door, you provide a space that people find through the search engines or social media channels.  This space or website promotes the product that you are affiliated with and drives people to the merchant’s sales page.  When your customer then buys the product, the merchant will pay you a percentage of the sale.

Set Up

To set this up you need a couple of things.  First, you need to have a website that makes the product attractive to the buyers  and helps to increase their confidence that this is in fact the product that they are looking for.  Second, you need to locate an affiliate program that will allow you to link with their product offerings.

Choose Your Product

Choosing your product is pretty much a personal thing.  You will be writing reviews and building a website around the product.  To do this you either need to be familiar with the product or be able to research the product sufficiently to provide a good thorough review of your product and several similar ones.  Reviews are the most effective way to provide customer confidence that you know what you are talking about and have their best interests in mind.

Build a Website

Building the actual website is actually easier than you might think.  There is a CMS (Content Management System) product that is used by the majority of online businesses,  called WordPress.  It is very easy to set-up and can even be done automatically by most hosting companies.  It will take you a bit of time to understand the nuances of this program but you can create a website in under 5 minutes. Your site can be customize to look just the way you like with Themes that are available.  Once the theme is chosen, it is a matter of writing good content and building pages.  This is all done in an editor that provides a visual representation of what the page will look like.  There is no need for you to understand coding or be a programmer.  Everything is click and type.

Find an Affiliate Program

Finding an Affiliate Program can be done online in a few minutes.  You type the name of your product followed by a Plus sign (+) and the words “Affiliate Program” into a Google search.  In a matter of seconds you will be provided with a list of the vendors that have this product or product line available to you.

One of the most popular Affiliate Programs that is available for most people is Amazon.com.  Amazon will pay you between 4 and 8% depending on the volume of sales that you make in their network.  All you have to do is sign up with their Affiliate Network and all of their products are available to you. There are a few products that Amazon does not pay commission on.  Their Kindle product is one.  Several Cameras are also on the no commission list.  There are a few other restrictions.  A few states have instituted laws that make it difficult for Amazon to do business in their states.  If you live in these states Amazon will not pay out any commissions to affiliates living inside their borders.  You can also get around these laws by incorporating your business in a state that will do business with Amazon.

Other networks are available that will allow you to do affiliate business in these states.  Several of the largest ones are Commission Junction and ShareASale.

Benefits

The benefits of doing an Affiliate Marketing business online are that you can make a significant income with very little investment.  The merchants like this system because you are providing them with free advertising.  Their outlay is also tied to your performance so their risk is very low.  They only pay out when a successful sale has occurred.

Drawbacks

There are some drawbacks.  The marketplace is quite full of other affiliates so you need to understand the mechanics of Affiliate Marketing to be able to find your customers and get them to your site.  There are some shady people on the net that will make your life difficult as well.  You need to understand how to protect your site from unwanted intruders and the occasional hacker attack.  WordPress has plugins that add functionality to your site. Security settings are available in several of these to keep your site safe and secure from hackers and spam.

Learning to be effective at Affiliate Marketing is not difficult but the marketplace is constantly changing.  You will want to join a community of people that are up to date with the latest techniques and Industry Standards.  It would also be prudent to join a free site that will teach you the ins and outs of this business.  I hope I have helped you to understand what Affiliate Marketing is all about.  If you have any questions or would like me to clarify some of these points please ask in the comments below.  I will do my best to provide you with the help you need.