Today is a day to celebrate! Not just St. Patrick’s Day but also the 5th anniversary of ZacJohnson.com! It seems like just the other day I was first getting into the blogging space and putting together the first designs and blog posts for the site. Over the past five years the blog has allowed me to connect with a ton of amazing people and open up who new world of opportunities, such as speaking all across the country and even doing a keynote in Australia!

With all of that said, I highly recommend anyone who is thinking about creating a blog of their own to start right now. The benefits of starting a blog to document your affiliate success or even just to build new connections and contribute another voice to the web. The connections and branding that you will receive from having a blog of your own is priceless.

It’s also important not to start a blog with the expectations to make money, but instead focus on whatever topic or niche you are going to be writing about… the rest will come later as your blog and brand grows with time.

You can see a yearly report of all the previous ZacJohnson.com birthdays and how the site has changed over the years below.

• Happy St. Patrick’s Day – We are Live! (first blog post)
• Super Affiliate Blog Birthday, 1 Year Later
• Super Affiliate Blog Birthday – 2 Years in the Making
• The Evolution of ZacJohnson.com – 3 Years Strong
• Cheers for Four Years! – Blog Anniversary

Does anyone remember the classic blog designs from ZacJohnson.com past? The site has gone through a lot of design changes over the years, but the branding and content basis has always remained the same, contributing year after year to making the site more of an authority for internet and affiliate marketing news every day.

Here’s to another 100 years and I thank you all so much for being one of the many loyal readers of ZacJohnson.com and making it what it is today. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Have you ever looked at the way different ad copies are written and how they play into the emotion of the customer? You will never see a weight loss offer that just says “Lose Weight”… there always has to be something in there that grabs the attention of the reader. Take a look at the following examples and see how they can be a lot more attention grabbing and more personal, which makes people want to click and take action.

• Summer is Coming! Are You Bathing Suit Ready?
• 1 Quick Tip to Losing an Extra 10 Pounds This Week
• Three Foods You Must Not Eat to Lose Weight!

As you can see, they are all worded differently and play into different human emotions. The first one will make people feel insecure about their bodies and how they look, the second will interest people with a quick way to lose weight without really working, while the last ad copy will get people interested just for pure curiosity.

Using Emotions in Online Ad Campaigns

Playing with people’s emotions is one of the best ways to not only get attention, but to sell people as well. This is how nearly all infomercials are created. Think about the last time you saw an ad for weight or hair loss. First they will show people who are over weight or balding, then the music changes for the better and everyone is attractive again and they are selling you on the dream.

A while back I wrote a post about an article focusing on “Writing PPC Ad Copy that Delivers” by David Rodnitzky and it focused on human emotions as one of the best practices. You can see a breakdown of the main different emotions and how they can be used while promoting different offers and ad campaigns online.

All of these same principles have been used like crazy in the weight loss and free trial offers which have made a lot of people a ton of money over the past several years. Of course the FTC is now involved and going after the marketers who got those people to sign up for those $3.95 free trials, then getting re-billed like crazy. As much as the FTC want’s to blame the marketers, it’s also on the customer to make sure they are reading the fine print and seeing what they are signing up for, instead of just “buying a dream“, which is what we are focusing on in this article.

Just like words are used to convince and pull out different emotions from customers, colors are also a huge influencer in getting clicks and conversions. When creating your next ppc or social networking ad campaigns, be sure to rotate a bunch of different creatives that are focused on targeting emotions and see what type of differences they cause in click rate and overall conversions.

So you want to build strong backlinks easily?

First, congratulations to all those affiliate marketers who are making a living from this business model. And for those who are still hustling to make few sales per week, I’m here to clear the stumps off your path. After reading this post, every of your niche affiliate blogs would receive a push and start bringing the required cash you need.

You need to know the importance of ranking on Google top 10. When you finally attain a high ranking on major search engines, even the crappiest sales copy will sell like hot cakes. I’m an affiliate marketer and I know how targeted traffic affects sales.

I’ve been reading Zac Johnson’s blog for over 6 months and he’s a strong advocate to affiliate marketing especially cost per lead. In line with this, I want to share 7 smart & effective ways to build quality and strong backlinks. I want to lighten up your link building knowledge a bit and give you the master-plan for successful niche domination. Enjoy it…

1. Savvy Comment Strategy

Do you know that placing comments on a blog post is one of the best ways to get quality backlinks? Alright, I’ll tell you why. What Google is seeking for is engagement; active blogs and sites where readers come and get relaxed. When you comment on such blogs, your link will be attributed with relevance and quality. It means you’re contributing to the well-being of readers (Google’s #1 goal).

But how do you make your comments savvy in order to add link-juice to it? It’s very simple but unusual. You need to research do follow blogs in your niche, subscribe to their RSS feeds via email and get alerted when new posts are up. Then head over to these blogs, read through the post and be the first to comment. That’s not all…

When commenting, add creativity into it. Since you’re the first to comment, make it a bit interactive so that other commentators can reply to it. The more active your comment is, the more relevance your links would be – give it a shot and share your experience.

2. Link-Wheel Strategy

I find this an advanced topic in link building. But specifically, it talks about link-wheels. You know how a wheel works – it revolves around a hub. If you visit most manufacturing companies, you’ll notice how wheels work to produce a circular motion while strengthening the hub.

That’s how powerful a link-wheel is. If you want your affiliate niche blogs to be ‘firm’ on major search engines without getting bugged by Google panda updates and competing web pages, you need to create a link wheel.

You start by creating an epic content around your primary keyword. For instance, if you’re into web hosting, create a detailed article (800 – 5000 word counts) with that keyword on the title and make it original.

Then start linking to this web page with guest posts, article marketing social media etc. At the end of the day, connect your first linking site to the last and you’ll create a strong link-wheel system.

3. RSS Feeds Syndication

How about creating a fresh article and have 10s of links pointing to it from authority networks instantly? That’s the power of RSS Feeds syndication. But before this can work for your blogs, you need to set it up.

If you search Google for Feed aggregators, you’ll get thousands of them. Now, spend time on these feed sites. Submit your web page links manually and if you’ve huge budget outlay, get a premium service and have software do it for you.

Within 24 hours, you could have 100 authority and high PR sites linking back to you. Each time you create a new blog post or product review, you’ll automatically generate 100s backlinks to it on autopilot.

As others (affiliate marketers and bloggers) struggle to build few quality backlinks, you would be ranking on Google top 10 already. I’ve been using this strategy since 2009, it’s never failed me – I’m sure you know what to do!

4. Guest Blogging Contest Strategy

Are you a blogger or aspiring entrepreneur?

You must have seen the rich gossip flying around the web about guest blogging and how powerful it is. If you ask me, I think guest blogging is the #1 promotional system for bloggers. However, what I’m after is what happens to your contents to make the link strong and relevant.

A lot of people entered guest blogging contest because of the monetary gains. Yes, its part of it, but the last contest I participated in brought me over $700 in affiliate sales. Even though I didn’t win the $250, I still was able to build relevant backlinks with it.

The concept behind writing contest is simple. You’ll invite your readers and encourage them to promote your post. Why? You’re looking for extra points because it’s a determining factor to winning.

The higher your points the higher your chances of winning – imagine if 100 bloggers with 1000 facebook fans each and RSS readers share your contents willingly. That’s about 100 quality links to your affiliate blogs. Wow, wonderful isn’t it?

5. Twisted Article Marketing Strategy

You don’t need any fortune teller to tell you that traditional article marketing is dead. Yes, it is. I wrote over 914 articles and published on article directories. When Google updates started rolling out mightily, my friendly directories were buried along with my articles and links.

Suddenly, I no longer get traffic to my affiliate blogs and sales started demeaning.

But there is a better way to do article marketing in this 21st century. Instead of writing and syndicating valuable contents on these directories where your links carry little or no SEO juice, contact active blog owners and contribute.

You can call it guest posting, but I like to call it ‘twisted article marketing’ because guest posting is an arm of article marketing.

They both make use of contents; article, video, podcasts to promote a particular product or web page. So, start linking back from niche sites and blogs in your market. Use Google to find plenty of them – write quality and evergreen irresistible contents and link back to your affiliate blog.

6. Web 2.0 Contextual Linking Strategy

There was a time when web 2.0 sites were popular and everyone was using them to build backlinks. But after Google smashed a lot of them, people emigrated to other link building systems and left web 2.0 to perish.

But can I tell you something? You can still build relevant links from squidoo.com, hubpages.com and tumblr.com provided the link appears right on the article body. We call this “contextual links” because it helps the reader understand the meaning of certain words and phrases used in a given article.

However, when linking from web 2.0 sites, ensure you naturally link to your inner pages.

Don’t try to squeeze in anchor links, do it as if the reader asked for it. What matters on the internet is the satisfaction your readers derive from your contents and that’s why several sites lost their ranking because they don’t satisfy readers.

One good thing about web 2.0 sites is that you can sell your products direct to active users and also boost your top 10 ranking on major search engines, where your major sales would come. Will you use this strategy to improve your affiliate blogs or…?

7. Create A Linkable Content

Why chase backlinks manually when you can trigger it to come?

In your affiliate blog, you should create some epic contents. This type of content must be valuable, helpful and slightly controversial. You’ve to visualize what other bloggers and affiliate marketers are looking for right now, and what they would desperately need in the future.

Research your topic in and out and craft an irresistible content. Just like the post you’re reading now, I’m sure a lot of people will reference to it in the future. Why? It’s valuable, helpful and detailed – no other link building system has been defined in such clear way.

People will gladly link back to your page if you satisfy them. They’ll share on social media networks and send to their email subscribers with a “refer a friend” link. Your link would go viral quickly, enhancing your SEO ranking performance and generating affiliate sales ultimately.

Link Building Quote:

“I prefer 10 backlinks that are news worthy and linkable than 100 dormant backlinks”
- Michael Chibuzor

So, when you build backlinks, aim for authority, relevant and news related sites. The reason is simple, search engine spider visit these portals often and your links would be rewarded consistently. I hope you’ve enjoyed and ready to take action. I’ve three words for you – GO TO WORK!

This guest post was written by Michael Chibuzor who specializes in link building services. Also learn SEO content writing in his blog and improve your top 10 ranking.

When I first started making money online nearly 15 years ago, I was doing quite well in the free stuff and sweepstakes industry. This was way before there were a ton of networks out there and loaded up with email submit offers. Back then the free stuff offers were actually free, and you could get free mouse pads without having to complete an endless amount of offers and co-registration forms.

Nonetheless, many years later and the free stuff market is still killing it and making money for web site owners and affiliates like never before. The bottom line is, people love free stuff and promotions. Thankfully, so do marketers and they also create killer ad campaigns that convert well and almost always make money.

In this long post (guide) we are going to walk through the complete process of how to create a free stuff related web site and focus on how to start making money within a short period of time.

Best of all, there are minimal costs and investments needed to break into this niche and start making money in just a few days!

First Thing First… You Need a Site or Blog!

We are going to focus this post around the concept of running a blog. It’s now much easier to create and update a site through a blog, then a traditional HTML based web site.

If you don’t have a web site or blog, you can sign up for one free at Blogger or WordPress. When signing up for a free account with the services above, you will not have a custom domain name or your own hosting, it will all be shared and hosted under their servers.

It is recommended that you sign up for your own domain name and hosting. The cost is only $10 a year for a domain name and around $7 a month for web hosting. After you are setup with your blog hosting, you can then install wordpress on your server and be ready to go.

If you don’t currently have your own web hosting or looking to have someone install and setup a blog for you, BloggingTips.com us currently running a promotion for a free wordpress installation service, which offers you a premium theme for your site and also installs a bunch of the top wordpress plugins right into your blog for you.

It’s Time to Find Some Free Stuff Offers!

Now that you are setup with your own web site or blog, you can start applying to the many affiliate networks out there. Before applying, it’s important to have some quality content on your web site, as they will be looking at your site before approving you for the network.

The reason you are wanting to join an affiliate network, is because they have a wide selection of free stuff, contests and trial offers for you to promote through your web site. Every time someone completes one of these offers, you will earn a commission.

Two of the best networks to join for free stuff related offers are PeerFly and Neverblue. Between the two of these sites they have several hundreds of offers for you to post to your site.

In addition to posting free stuff affiliate offers on your site, you will also want to list other free stuff offers found around the web. You can find these offers through other free stuff web sites, forums or on brand web sites.

Not everyone wants to sign up for free stuff offers with their email address or complete a survey. By updating your site content with free stuff offers and coupons found around the internet, you are providing real quality content on your blog that will keep bringing people back.

Create a Newsletter to Keep Them Coming Back!

Have you ever heard the saying, “The Money is in the List!”? Well it’s true, and it’s referring to creating a newsletter or mailing list for your web site.

Through the use of a mailing service like Aweber, you can create a free newsletter for your site traffic to sign up to for daily, weekly or monthly updates. The best part about having a newsletter for your web site, is that every time you send out a mailing, you will make money!

Setting up a newsletter for your site is very easy. All you need to do is create an account with Aweber and you will be setup with a subscribe form that you can throw onto your web site. Aweber is currently running a promotion where the cost is only $1 for your first month.

The only other thing you need to setup is a daily newsletter or mailing that you will send out as often as you like. Inside each of these mailings, you should include the top free stuff offers for the day. Make sure you mix in affiliate offers and real free stuff offers from around the web.

To incentivize people to sign up for your newsletter, you will need to entice them with something that isn’t offered somewhere else. This could be something as simple as bundling up the best coupons from around the web, or even offering a unique freebie of your own.

Adding Additional Sources for Revenue Generation

There are plenty of ways to make money and monetize traffic with a free stuff web site outside of just pushing affiliate offers and building a mailing list. It’s important to remember that your free stuff web site will only be as good as the free stuff offers you continually add to the site. As long as you are providing quality offers, people will keep looking through your site and content. Mixed in with the content you can add a nice amount of advertising to bring in addition revenue. Two recommended sources for revenue generation on free stuff sites is the inclusion of Google Adsense or Contextual Advertising to your site.

The majority of people coming to your web site are going to be looking for free stuff and samples offers. This is a very competitive market which is full of high paying advertisers. If you are going to place contextual advertising or Google Adsense on your site, you won’t have any issues with having your ad space being filled by high paying advertisers. Best of all, your free stuff related traffic will also find these links more relevant than other generic ads.

Grow Your Traffic and Branding Through Social Networks

The amount of people using social networks like Facebook and Twitter is just too big to ignore. Every web site must have a Fan Page and a way to connect and update social networking users. Just a simple search on Facebook will give you an idea of how many people actively search out and join free stuff and samples related pages. The examples below are minimal compared to some of the free stuff sites out there that have hundreds of thousands of fans.

When building a free stuff related web site, creating a Facebook Fan Page and a Twitter account is an excellent way to build a loyal audience that is actually interested and will sign up for the offers you promote. Since you are going to be adding fresh content to your site often, that means with each new update, a new status update or tweet will be sent out to your social followers. It is recommended that you build a large following on both Twitter and Facebook, as your latest offers and blog posts will automatically stream to each.

There is also a huge opportunity for niche sites that can be built around survey offers that promote “get paid for your opinions“, but have ad copy based around your site topic. If you have enough volume, you can approach your ad network and they may be able to create custom ad copy or landing pages for you.

Focus on Content, Backlinks and Becoming an Authority Web Site!

As you continue to add daily content your site, you will establish a sense of authority within the free stuff niche. Becoming an authority web site is not easy, and it’s very dependent on the amount of web sites that link back to you, in addition to the amount of content you are adding to your site.

Through the use of link building, you can increase your sites rankings in the search engines. The free stuff niche is loaded with keywords that people are searching for, such as “free stuff online”, “free samples”, “free samples by mail” and a million other combinations. Use the Google Keyword Tool to pull a quick report on what keywords are getting a lot of traffic, but also have a low level of competition. To get even more niche and direct, throw some product and brand names in there as well. When you are building your free stuff site, make sure you build category pages for all of these niche areas. Through link building, you may be able to rank your inner pages on the first page of results in the search engines. Again, this will take time and quality content, but it will pay off greatly as people are always searching for free stuff and brands name samples every day.

The end goal when creating any web site is to provide value and a long term source of revenue. In some cases, you can even build a web site with the focus of flipping your site for a big lump sum of cash. This is seen quite often in the free stuff niche.

Let’s Recap and Get Started!

Now that you have a pretty good idea how starting a free stuff web site can start making you money, it’s time to start the process. The majority of people will just read this blog post and think to themselves about how great the idea and concept is, but many will never take action.

Instead of having to read through the whole process again, a quick summary has been made below, along with links to help walk you through the process.

1. Setup a Domain, Web Hosting and Blog
2. Start to Gather Free Stuff Offers and Post to Site
3. Apply for PeerFly & Neverblue Affiliate Networks
4. Create a Mailing List for Your Site
5. Build Additional Traffic with Social Networking Pages
6. Continue to Add New Content & Monetize Traffic

With more successful affiliates and marketers looking to start networks of their own, there is definitely a need for more stable and reliable network solutions. With the recent outages out at DirectTrack, it’s easy for anyone to see how important it is to have a tracking solution that promises to stay up no matter what, while also offering everything you need to run an affiliate network.

It seems like more affiliate marketers think they have what it takes to run a affiliate network of their own after just making a few thousand dollars in their first couple of weeks or months. The honest truth is, as easy or hard you might think it is to make money with your own ad campaigns as an affiliate, it’s ten thousand times harder to run your own network. Not only are you now responsible for your own offers, but also the mix of advertisers and affiliates you have to manage. Don’t forget to throw in all of the money going back and forth, if someone doesn’t make a payment, you are the one on the hook.

With all of that said, no matter what type of network you decide to run, it’s important to make sure that you have a ad network platform that knows what they are doing and has the features to make your business grow. One of the latest affiliate network solutions fighting for your business is called Track Grid. Track Grid offers an all in one solution for anyone looking to start a large affiliate network, or just an in house affiliate program of their own.

Let’s take a look at the TrackGrid ad network platform and what they have to offer.

Whether you are looking to create a large ad network, or a simple platform to bring your single affiliate program in house, Track Grid has the features to network owners are looking for.