Blogging | Affiliate Marketing Tips from Super Affiliate Zac Johnson

Where Do You Get Your Daily Affiliate Marketing Fix?

Let’s face it, when it comes to affiliate marketing and industry news… there is just way too much to digest. For anyone starting out and trying to make their first money in this industry, it can be a great, but also bad at the same time. With so much information at hand, many people will continually read and read and read about what’s going on, and never take action of their own. While it’s great to do research, it’s best to learn by process, especially when you create failed campaigns, then turn them profitable.

With all of that said, there are plenty of great news sites and forums that can get you started and pointed in the right direction, without having to wade through a sea of information and affiliate marketing blogs. I have listed some of the best places for you to get your daily fix of what’s hot and working well in the affiliate industry.

AffDaily.com

Powered by AffPaying.com, AffDaily is a collection of the top affiliate marketing blogs and Twitter feeds all in one place. Highlights of the site include the ability to create an account and customize what feeds you would like to follow, along with having a page full of top affiliate marketers and their Twitter accounts. Each day new “popular” content will be added to the top menu section of the site. (Facebook Fan Page)

AffBuzz.com

One of the first big sites to create a news platform for affiliate marketing blogs, AffBuzz has quite the following. The most read and interesting posts are highlighted in the top section of the site and updated on a daily basis. (Facebook Fan Page)

IMToday.com

A new affiliate and internet marketing new and discussion agreator is IMToday.com, which displays the trending blog posts, news and forums discussions that related to all online marketers. You can register on their web site to change around what sites you want to receive news from, or use their sorting options for the most recent or latest posts. There are currently over 250 internet marketing blogs, forums and twitter users currently covered through IMToday.

Twitter Affiliate Marketing

Even today, I still haven’t been that active on Twitter, but I know that so many others are. Instead of having to seek out every top marketer worth following, through the power of “Twitter Lists”, you can follow them all in one simple click. @JonathanVolk has created a great list of nearly 500 affiliate marketers who are currently on Twitter. To follow them all, simply follow his Affiliate Marketing list.

StackThatMoney Forum

Right now Stack That Money forums is at the top of my list for where to interact and read up on what’s hot in the industry. Not only is through forum run by a bunch of guys I know personally, but the content and support inside is just killer. From tutorials, case studies, tools and guides, everything you could ever want as an affiliate marketer is in this one site. (Facebook Fan Page)

IMGrind Forum

To finish off the list, IMGrind has also seen phenomenal growth over the past few months and they have an excellent community of their own. Ruck and Ryan are building quality content, while coaching forum members on the best ways to build out new web sites and membership programs, outside the normal thought process, while driving incredible results. A huge plus in this forum is when Ruck and Ryan write out their success stories from past web sites and campaigns… one of the best ways to get yourself motivated to create the next big thing! (Facebook Fan Page)

Where do you go for your affiliate fix?

There are plenty of blogs, sites, news feeds and forums out there, so be sure to leave a comment on your favorite place for connecting with other marketers and reading up on the latest blog posts and news.

21 November, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging

The Hard Work Behind Every Successful Small Business

Let’s face it… running an online business takes a lot of dedication and work. It’s stressful and needs to be treated like a real business. Just because we have blogs, conference parties and seems like everything is cake, there is really a ton of grunt work that is put into every ad campaign, web site and blog that finds success. Running a small business is serious work, and should be treated no differently than any other business or life changing task.

The Idea of Running Your Own Small Business

There’s two types of people in the world. Those who work for themselves, and those who work for other people. There is nothing wrong with the path you decide to take, and running your own business definitely isn’t for everyone. If you have a family and costs that need to be paid, it will take a lot of work, dedication and sacrifice to have those responsibilities looming over your head month after month without a secure pay check coming in every week.

With all of that said, the benefits of running your own business can pay off big. Along with all of the stress and dedication, comes big benefits such as potentially making a lot of money, being your own boss, and building a business the way you want and maybe even selling for millions of dollars in the future. You can only work so many hours, and make a limited amount of money when you are working for someone else, but when it’s your own business, you are in control of your salary and the business’ earnings.

What Does It Take to Run a Small Business

Personally for me, it was an undying drive and dedication that brought me to where I am today. I always had a passion for business and thinking up new ways to make money. When I first started making money online, I was around 15 years old, and didn’t have a lot of financial responsibilities, which helped put me in a unique position to start my own business. At the same time, I was also investing everything I made right back into the business, and never took any investment money or loans to start the company. I started from scratch, learned everything I could about making web sites and affiliate marketing and everything else that has brought me to where I am today.

So what does it take for YOU to start your own business online? I keep saying it, but it’s the truth, you actually NEED to WANT to do this. I have so many friends that think I am so “lucky” to be where I am, but there are thousands of hours and blood, sweat and tears behind every successful business. For every successful idea, there are thousands of wasted hours and dollars lost in failed ideas. The bottom line is, you need to have the drive to keep going til you hit that next big success!

Depending on what type of business you want to create, you will need some investment money. To start with a web site or blog, your investment is minimal (not counting advertising dollars). You can get started with a domain and web hosting for just a few dollars a year. If you wanted to focus on affiliate marketing and creating ad campaigns, you would want to start with at least $500-$5000 to get an idea of how campaigns works, while turning them profitable.

For every successful web site or ad campaign we build, there are tons of failures we’ve hit before them. The difference between those who succeed and fail, is the driving passion and dedication to not fail, and keep working those extra long nights and learning what it takes to make a profit.

You Have an Established Small Business… Now What?

Congratulations, you now have a successful business and are your own boss, now what? All the time people are saying “Why would they keep working?“, in reference to the millionaires and billionaires out there running big companies. The answer is simple, go right back to what we talked about in step one… it’s all about the passion! When you are in business long enough, and doing well at it, it’s more like a game than anything else. You want to keep succeeding, hitting new levels (whether that is revenue or personal goals).

This is the driving force behind every business and online marketer who stays up to 5am in the morning, continually pushing out new ad campaigns, and pushing conversions for that extra 1%. We are the future of business and if this is the game you want to play, you have to take it seriously and never doubt yourself for a second!

I received compensation from Visa for sharing my views in this post, but the views expressed here are solely mine, not Visa’s. This post was sponsored by Visa Small Business as part of their #gobiz Sweepstakes for @VisaSmallBusiness. Visa will be rewarding small business owners with $10,000 in prizes for their hard work from October 25^th through November 17^th. Visit here http://hosting.thetenthwave.com/visasb/ for more details, and follow @VisaSmallBiz for ways to help make your small business more efficient and successful. Discover more at http://visa.com/business.

08 November, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Make Money

Buy and Sell Websites through Rouper

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Rouper for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Recently, all the buzz has been about buying and selling web sites. Over the past couple of years, the process of buying and selling web sites has become a lot easier through the use of online marketplaces. No longer do you have to search through old forums, or try and contact web site owners directly. Here are just a few of the problems you may come across when it comes to buying or trying to sell your website outside of using a third party or market place.

Annoyance of finding contact information
No medium for actual value of web site
Accepting or actually getting paid
Fraud, scams and denial/refund of payment

The list can go on and on, which leads to why we need a marketplace for buying and selling web site. Flippa has shown us the importance of having a marketplace where buyers and sellers can connect and they are pushing some massive volume the amount of web sites trading hands on a daily basis… however, there is plenty of room for competition.

Rouper.com, a new marketplace for buying and selling web sites has caught my eye recently. I’m starting to see their banners appear on many familiar web sites, and as I’ve been watching their web site over the past weeks, I am seeing more people listing web sites and using the service. Though the marketplace is new, I think if they play their cards right, they can be a top competitor in this unsaturated game. In the screenshot below you will a preview of one of the site listings.

If Rouper.com wants to compete in this competitive space, they will need to be offer something the top players in the game aren’t. I also think some extra work into their site design is needed. Right now the site is a bit too plain and could use the following upgrades to their site:

Main page shows full directory, and not option to choose to BUY or SELL
All listings with in directory should include screenshots
Minimum amount of listing information and text required
Provide all web site information/stats/seller info etc on listing page (no tabs)
Increase overall activity and attract some big site sales

As mentioned earlier, the marketplace is new, but that doesn’t mean they should be overlooked. You never know who may come across Rouper.com and find a web site they really like, and end up purchasing. As for listing fees, you can see the Rouper.com rates below, which are listed in their terms and conditions.

Success Fee. Payable upon any sale.	5% of the dollar value of the sale net of any taxes. The minimum success fee is $100.
Success Fee (upfront option)	Instead of paying the 5% success fee upon sale completion you may choose to pay a non-refundable $499 success fee upfront when creating your listing.

It will be interesting to see how Rouper grows and continues to develop their marketplace in the coming months. It would be healthy for competition and the business of buying and selling web sites, to see a few more big resources and names pop up in the industry.

List Your Web Site on Rouper

Now that you have an idea on what Rouper is all about, why not list a web site and see what happens? From now til October 31st Rouper is offering a coupon “64W0SJ87“ that will allow sellers to list for only $1 instead of the regular $49 price. In the meantime, whether you are a buyer or seller, keep Rouper.com on your radar and check out their site listings for any hidden winners.

20 October, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Blogging, Site Reviews, Web Developement

10 SEO Tips To Quickly Rank in the Search Results

Starting a new website or blog can be very exciting and fulfilling. The only downside is waiting for your site to get a pagerank and waiting on those rankings to increase. For some people this is something that happens pretty quickly, while others anxiously and impatiently wait and wait and often end up with disappointing results. What gives? Well, unless you really have a good grasp of SEO, then you’ll end up frustrated and wanting to give up. Don’t give up though because we’re about to give you 10 tips to help improve your rankings more quickly and also boost your motivation.

Scope Out the Competition

It’s good to know as much as possible about your competition so that you can know who you’re up against and what you should strive for. For instance, you may want to start by finding out how many incoming links your competitors have. This way, you have a good idea of how many you need in order to pass them. Also take a look at where they rank in search engines, what keywords they’re using, and what’s in their meta tags. You can’t strive for the top spot unless you know what you’re competing for. So be sure to analyze your competition as an initial plan of action.

Research Your Keywords

It’s one thing to optimize your website for keywords, but if you’re using keywords that are not even being searched for then it’s a huge waste of your time. There are plenty of free tools available on the Internet that can help you find the best keywords that are being searched for consistently. These are the keywords that you want to optimize your site for. Also think about using long tail keywords, which are keyword phrases that have 3-5 words in them. These are great for drawing in targeted, quality traffic. Lastly, be sure to use evergreen keywords which have longevity and will be relevant for years to come. This way you can always count on them to bring you traffic.

Write Quality Content

If you’re not writing quality content, you really don’t stand a chance at ranking very high. Your content needs to be useful and original. When you create content, keep in mind that you want something that will make others want to link to it and share it. Try to focus on How To’s, tutorials, and lists because these tend to generate the most traffic. If you can, add numerous supportive facts and references. Also be sure to link keywords within your content to other useful and relevant web pages. When others see that you’ve linked to them, it will encourage them to link to you which will in turn help boost your rankings. Images and visual examples like charts, videos, images, and screenshots are also very useful and add to the quality of your content.

Deep Link to Other Pages

Deep linking involves linking to other pages within your site (other than the homepage) from within your content. It’s important to link to internal pages with anchor text that contain at least 3 of the keywords for that page. This will not only help with rankings, but it also helps to keep people on your site longer – thus reducing the bounce rate. We worked heavily on this at a neon signs store I advised to and it showed great results.

Optimize Your Meta Tags

Google hates duplicate content, so if you want your website to be indexed properly then you have to make sure to optimize your meta tags. The title tag and meta tags should be different on each page of your website or else you could risk penalties. One thing that you don’t have to worry about too much are the meta keywords, since Google has already stated that they do not use these in their ranking criteria anymore.

A few pointers to remember is to keep the title tag under 60 characters and the description under 160 characters. Both of these tags both should also be relevant to the content on the page. You want to stay away from spam-like methods such as keyword stuffing and falsification of what’s in your content. Remember that in order to get to the top of the rankings, your information (that is displayed in search results) has to be attention grabbing so that people will click on it within the search results.

Optimize Your Headings and Subheadings

Just like your meta tags, you also want to be sure to optimize your headings and subheadings. These are your H-tags (H1, H2, H3, etc) and they really play an important role in organizing the information on your web pages. You should have only one H1 tag (the largest header) on your page; this is usually the title of the page or the title of your article (i.e. if you have a blog). You can then break up sections in to H2 tags and even further into H3 if needed.

Each of these heading tags should contain a keywords that you want to rank for. Since search engines consider the headings to be more important than the actual content, it’s really important to get those keywords in there.

Optimize Your Title and ALT Tags in Images

Next we have the title and alt tags that are used within images to describe what they pertain to. Again, these can be optimized with keywords to help you rank higher. Remember that most search engines now have image search capabilities. When users search for specific images, the search engines use the keywords within your title and alt tags to help them display relevant images. This is why it’s so important to use them and include your keywords, so that people can also find your content through image searching.

Optimize File Names

When you save your images (before uploading them to your site), what kind of file names are you using? Are you using something like image 1, image 2, image 3, etc? If you are doing this or anything similar, it’s a very bad idea because they don’t say anything about what your image is. Your file names should be relevant to the image and, you’ve guessed it, should also include keywords. Doing this also helps you rank high within image searches because it shows that your content is relevant to the search term.

Really anywhere you use any kind of words is an opportunity to optimize your website, include keywords, and increase your rankings. So also be sure to use this same type of technique with web page names as well as the slugs for your blog posts. Add those keywords where you can because unless you’ve blocked robots from viewing a certain page, all of your words are visible by search engines and will be indexed.

Use An XML Site Map

Sitemaps not only help your visitors find content faster, but they also help search engines understand the structure and layout of your website. This is one of the easiest ways to increase your rankings because web crawlers can quickly find your content. Also, sitemaps are fairly easy to create, so why not take advantage of them?

Validate Your Source Code

Lastly you want to be sure to validate your code and fix and errors that are found. This helps to ensure that you don’t have any broken links, images, or invalid code that may cause issues for your visitors. The easiest way to do this to use the free W3C Markup Validation Service. Google does penalize for a large number of errors, so be sure to fix as much as you can if you have any errors.

If you’re up for another tip, you can even go as far as validating your search engine optimization. A great tool for this is the Website Grader by Hubspot. It lets you see how well your website is doing and whether it has any SEO problems. It also shows you how well you’re doing on Twitter. So once you’re done with these 10 tips, also be sure to find out the grade of your website and use the provide tips to boost your SEO even further.

This guest post was written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant who works for various online companies including a popular online to-do list app and a psd to html company.

10 October, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Blogging, Web Developement

Steve Jobs’ Apple Logo

With the passing of Steve Jobs, everyone has their own special thoughts and memories about how Steve and Apple has changed the world. One of my favorite movies is “Pirates of Silicon Valley“, which is a fun movie about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates growing up, and how they both started their own companies and got to where they are today. Over the next few days you will probably learn a lot of new things above Steve that you never know, such as he played a part in the construction and design of those crazy glass stair cases in Apple stores, along with the sleek wooden tables, which are based off the same design of the desks in Apple headquarters.

Yes, Steve will be missed, but he did change the world in the process and his products and brand is well known through out the world today, and for many decades to come.

With all of that said, let’s take a look at the progression of the Apple logo over the years, and how it’s become one of the most recognized symbols in the world today.

What’s that funny logo at the beginning? Yes, it’s actually the Apple logo back in 1976! The concept is Isaac Newton sitting under an apples tree. As you can see from the dates under the logos, this one didn’t last long. It was missing simplicity and color, which Apple soon implemented into their colorful new Apple design, which lasted over twenty years. With more people using computers and the internet growing like crazy, it was time for another updated and sleek design. Apple would go live with their latest futuristic, yet still simplistic Apple logo.

So what was the story behind going from one crazy original design to a completely new concept?

Jobs thought that the overly complex [Newton] logo had something to do with the slow sales of the Apple I, so he commissioned Rob Janoff of the Regis McKenna Agency to design a new one. Janoff came up with the iconic rainbow-striped Apple logo used from 1976 to 1999. (source)

Works for me! Imagine if Apple still had they same logo today? Things could be very different. I can’t imagine seeing that logo lit up on the back of laptops everywhere, or people placing stickers on their cars or getting “Apple Computer Co” tattoos on their bodies, like we see today!

With the passing of Steve Jobs comes one more Apple Logo that will be sure to be used and spread around for many years to come. Another simple design, yet is speaks so strongly to all the Apple users around the world about the loss of Steve and his impact at Apple. This design was created by a 19-year-old artist named Jonathan Mak, a self-described designer, photographer and philosopher living in Hong Kong. Since posting his design, his page has had nearly 900 comments and has been receiving world wide television and internet exposure.

Simplicity and color are key when it comes to creating a brandable logo. Just think about the greatest and most well known companies/brands in the world… Pepsi, CocaCola, Apple, Nike and Starbucks. They’ve all made progression with their logos over the years, but have always stayed true to have a brandable design with simple colors and design that are memorable.

06 October, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Blogging, Marketing