Top 5 Best Affiliate Keyword Research Tools

Affiliate marketing is more than just playing with your landing pages and finding the right offers. Sure. Finding products that people can actually buy and get value from is a part of the process. But you want to make sure people can get to your landing pages and get connected with what you are trying to convey. That’s why you need to invest in a premium keyword research tool to help you with your affiliate campaigns.

You can always get away with using free keyword tools when you are starting, but if you want to expand your business, you are going to need the right tools. With that in mind, here are top 5 best affiliate keyword tools that can help you take your campaign to the next level:

Keyword Country: The ultimate tool for affiliate marketers that often goes unnoticed. It’s used by both Adwords and Adsense experts. Great way to put the right foot forward in a new niche. It can help you discover new markets too.

Keyword Spy: one of the most powerful keyword spying tools on the market. Whether you are interested in spying on your competitors or just want to figure out what markets can be lucrative for you to enter, Keyword Spy comes handy.

SpyFu: another one of those top spying tools that helps you develop long keyword lists, spy on your competitors, and find out new markets to enter to. You can use Kombat feature to compare your campaigns against your competitors. (more…)

8 Best Wordpress Themes for Affiliates

A lot of affiliates are now starting to understand the power of Wordpress when it comes to developing affiliate portals to make money online. A few years ago, people used to use those good old HTML based websites to get their affiliate landing pages up and running. But with the power of Wordpress, you can manage huge portals easily without sweating a break. Best of all, Wordpress is for free, so you’ve really got nothing to lose by using Wordpress for your affiliate websites. Just make sure you choose a good theme to keep things looking as professional as possible.

If you are looking for a cool affiliate theme for Wordpress that not only is well-designed but it gives you the chance to make more sales everyday, here are 8 affiliate Wordpress themes you should consider:

eShop: many affiliate marketers make money by selling products from Amazon and eBay. If you happen to be in that group, you are going to find eShop for Wordpress pretty useful. Makes it easy to create a store around affiliate products.

Kidz Store: another attractive e-shop Wordpress theme that you can use to sell affiliate products. You can even build your own store and mix it up with your affiliate products. The choice is yours.

Classipress: a powerful classified listing theme for affiliate marketers. While you can use this theme to create a fully-fledged classified website, you can also build a killer affiliate portal. Just be creative!

Affiliate Theme: the ultimate theme for affiliate marketers. If you are looking to start your review site or just manage your landing pages, Affiliate Theme comes in very handy. (more…)

3 Killer Affiliate Keyword Research Tools You Must Try

If you have been involved in the affiliate marketing industry for a while, you know the importance of choosing the right keywords to target your prospects. Not all keyword phrases are created equal. Some are capable of making you a lot of money, while there are others that could cause you a big headache and baffle you on their performance. What sets apart top affiliates from rest is not only just the strategies used but also the affiliate tools and how they are used to develop more optimized campaigns. A lot of newbie affiliates use those free tools on the market to set up their affiliate campaigns. That may work for a while, but if you intend to build a real business around your affiliate efforts, you are going to spend money to earn money.

There are plenty of tools that you can choose from to get your keyword research done properly. Affiliates have been using WordTracker, Keyword Discover, and Wordze in the past to develop their affiliate campaigns. These tools are nice on the surface, but they don’t provide you with affiliate specific information. There are keyword tools out there that not only help you build up your affiliate lists, but they also help you find out what other affiliates are doing and whether you should go after a specific keyword. If that is what you are looking for, here are 3 killer affiliate tools you should try:

Keyword Spy: my favorite affiliate keyword research tool. It’s one of the best tools on the market for pay per click affiliate marketers. The tool shows you how much competition you are going to face per each keyword and how much you may have to pay to achieve results with your pay per click marketing campaigns.

Keyword Country: this tool is the prime example of a keyword research tool that has something for everyone. Whether you are an Adsense marketer or just want to start a profitable affiliate marketing campaign on Google Adwords, Keyword Country has something for you. Great tool for bloggers as well.

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Mass Article Control Pro 2009 Review

Article marketing is one of the best ways to get traffic to your affiliate offers and make money online. I remember reading Affiliate Project X years ago and learned how you can earn money writing articles for a living. You need to have a real strategy if you want to make money with article marketing and keep your traffic going. Article marketing not only sends targeted traffic to your website, it can also help you increase your search engine rankings and get some free traffic that way as well. The key to having success on article directories is not how many articles you have but rather how many people you can get to republish your articles. I know. You can write thousands of articles and get a decent amount of traffic to your website, but if SEO is a part of your strategy as well, you want to focus on articles that people want to publish as well.

Before you go around counting your future visitors, you need to be able to write articles properly. It’s not just about having a decent piece but doing your keyword research and write a piece of content that can get ranked high on search engines as well. And don’t forget that you have a lot of opportunities to maximize what you get back with each and every article by optimizing your summery and resources box.

Unfortunately, a lot of affiliates don’t know how to write articles properly and a lot of those who do flood the market with duplicate entries and shoot themselves in the foot. There are many article directories that you can submit your articles to, but that doesn’t mean you should without changing things around a bit. You’ve got to know the facts and make sure you build your credibility as an author and avoid SEO flags in the process.
Mass Article Control Pro is a cool article marketing kit designed for affiliates who want to seriously pursue article marketing as a channel to make money online. If you are tired of writing articles and getting few results, you should seriously consider changing your strategies. Mass Article Control comes with two software packages to let you get the most out of your article marketing efforts. First, you can use use Mass Article Creator to simplify the process of creating multiple versions of your articles. So when you submit your articles to thousands of directories, you no longer get penalized for having duplicate content by search engines. At first, I was skeptical about this whole changing words around claim but your articles are going to be different enough not to get flagged by search engines. (more…)

Innovation is Key for Affiliates

A lot of affiliates are good at copying what others are doing to make money online. Affiliate marketing is a tough business, and what a better way than following the leaders and piggybacking on what they have done. There is nothing wrong with that. A lot of top online marketers you do that, and even they do it in their own business. But what you don’t want to be in the affiliate marketing world is a pure follower. There is a right way and wrong way to piggyback. If you are just borrowing other people’s strategy and just cloning their business strategies, you may see some short-term results, but you are not going to succeed on a long term basis. The person who’s concocted the strategy that you are borrowing is always going to have an edge over you as they know exactly where to take their business whereas you are just following.

Top affiliate marketers usually analyze other folks’ strategy and try to absorb the strengths and get rid of the weaknesses. Then they add their own innovations to make even more money online. You can be a follower, and there is nothing wrong with that. But you don’t have to follow someone all the way to the bank. You can always take a short-cut along the way or find better ways to proceed. Top marketers do a little bit of both. They have the luxury of knowing other top marketers. These folks are super networkers, so when they borrow strategies from others, they do so from the cream of the crop. Even then, a lot of these folks take time to analyze what they are borrowing and how they can improve upon it.

Top affiliate marketers also understand that there is more money in developing their own products than actually promoting what other people have made. When you are promoting other people’s products, you are only settling for a small percentage of the revenue. You can always promote ClickBank, and there is a lot of money to be earned there, but I personally prefer working on a real business strategy than looking for new ClickBank products to promote each and every week. ClickBank and other info products could be a part of your overall strategy but shouldn’t be the only thing you focus on. You can always try to sell your own info product to find out what it takes to develop and launch a product.

At the end of the day, you want to think outside the box and come up with your very own strategies to promote products and take your business to the next level. Affiliate marketing is not the be all end all when it comes to making money online. I’d like to think it as a training ground for folks who want to own their own products and grow their companies on a consistent basis. The commission checks can be great, but it’s much tougher to make it as a millionaire as a pure affiliate marketer than it is by having your own products and services. If you don’t like risking too much, you can’t expect high rewards, now can you?

4 Camcorders To Get Started With Affiliate Videos

Traditional affiliate marketing tactics may still work these days, but there is no question that the emergence of video marketing has opened new doors for online marketers. And unlike a few years ago, you don’t have to spend a fortune to get your hands on a camcorder that allows you to take videos whether you are at your office or on the go. HD mini camcorders are great to record affiliate training videos or product reviews online, and they are very convenient to take with you when you are on the go.

Here are top 4 recent mini camcorders that affiliate marketers can use to start with their affiliate videos:

Sony Webbie HD: Sony Webbie MHS-PM1 HD Camcorder is a decent HD camcorder for vloggers and people on the go.

Flip UltraHD: the Flip needs no introduction. It has been around for years and is great for vlogging.

Kodak Zx1 HD: An affordable mini HD Camcorder for those constantly on the go.

Creative Labs Vado HD Camcorder: Creative Labs Vado HD 720p Pocket Video Camcorder with 8 GB Video Storage and 2x Digital Zoom is another pocket HD camcorder for those who live a mobile life.

You don’t have to a millionaire to get started with affiliate marketing or upgrade your old equipment. All you have to do is spend about $200 in your business. The quality of these camcorders may not be as high as a $20,000 professional camcorder, but they get the job done. These gadgets give you the most affordable way to take your affiliate business to the next level.

Flip Mino HD: An Affiliate’s Best Friend

Affiliate marketing is a very competitive business. If you intend to keep making money in the affiliate marketing industry, you’ve got to take time to learn new tricks and innovate yourself and your campaigns to make more money. One of the best ways to innovate your campaigns is by adding videos to increase your sales. Video blogging is one the rise, and it is no longer something only early adopters do. Most bloggers, affiliate marketers, and industry experts have started their vlogs. Video can help you increase your sales dramatically in more ways than one. For starters, prospects seem to eat up great video content. If you are planning to sell a product, you can do a video review on it. If you plan to sell a service, you can provide free video tips. As long as you don’t ramble on, provide real value, and sell your product in your videos, you can expect to convert more folks.

A few years ago, it wasn’t really possible to create videos without having to spend $500-$1000 on a camcorder. Not everyone afforded that kind of money and cheap camcorders were not exactly great for creating affiliate videos. But devices such as Flip Mino have made it extremely easy to shoot affiliate videos fast. Flip Mino HD is designed for video-bloggers. It’s a portable mini camcorder that allows you to shoot decent quality videos without having to break the bank (see a preview here).

What I like about Flip Mino HD is that you don’t have to read a 200 page manual to get a handle of this gadget. It’s so easy even a caveman can do it. All you have to do is press the record button and keep the camcorder steady. Once you have recorded your videos, you can use the USB feature to upload them to your computer and use FlipShare software to put your videos on YouTube. If you can afford to host your own videos, that’s even better. But the moral of story is, you don’t have to be a rich affiliate to make videos when you can buy Flip Video MinoHD for about $200. And the SEO benefits that you get by putting videos online is going to make it all worth your while. Affiliate videos are not the only thing you need to concentrate on, but it’s a great way to compliment your campaigns in other channels and bring down your overall CPA.

Promote Your Affiliate Content With Market Samurai

If you have been paying attention to the online marketing industry in the past few months, there is a good chance you have heard of Market Samurai. I was personally introduced to Market Samurai through the Immediate Edge. At the time, I was using WordTracker and Google Keyword tool to find niches and do my market research. But affiliate marketing can be tough if you do these things by hand. There is no reason you should spend more time than you have to get your research process done. Market Samurai does all the research process for you and more. But what I was impressed about was how you could use it to find backlinks to your affiliate sites. We are not talking about any backlink but the “do follow” ones.

Here is how it works. Once you have identified a core keyword for your market, it’s time to get down and do some research to find places you get links from to your blog or affiliate website. Market Samurai has a buit-in system that lets you find juicy sites fast.

You can find related pages on hubpages, Squidoo, Weebly, and forums in your niche. This is not something that can’t be done by hand. But think about it. How much time would you have to spend to find places you can post your link and get involved to drive traffic back to your affiliate website.

Now here is the killer part. You can sort through these sites based on their Page-Rank, Follow-No follow attribute, and even the number of backlinks to them. If you are planning to move your site to the top of the search engines, getting links (tons of them) is one of the best way to go. With Market Samurai, you won’t even have to make more than 2 clicks to get all this data. That’s what I call proper outsourcing. And best of all, there is no human error involved.

Stay tuned for a more comprehensive Market Samurai review!

AffiliateReport.com Review

Affiliate marketing is a game of numbers. Every guru would tell you that. No matter how good your landing pages are or how much traffic you are driving to your website, if you are not constantly monitoring your numbers and improving every aspect of your website, you can’t expect to make any real money online. If you have been in the affiliate business for a while, chances are you are already using pay per click marketing to drive leads to your website. Any PPC marketer knows that the goal is stay ahead of the engines to keep your quality score high and your minimum bids low. And it helps if you could bring up your conversion rate. You need to do all that plus work with affiliate programs that you are associated with. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had an integrated software solution that allowed you to get more out of your campaigns? AffiliateReporting.com is an online service that allows you to increase your ROI and get more from your affiliate programs.

If you need a dashboard that aggregates data from all sources and gives you a better overall view of your campaigns, AffiliateReporting has a solution for you. AffiliateReporting provides you with:

• Aggregate Commission Data: CJ, Linkshare, Performics (Google Affiliate Network), ShareASale, PepperJam Network, ClickBank, PartnerFusion, Converseon, Kowabunga are all included in Affiliatereporting.com. I don’t know about you, but tracking these networks’ numbers on an individual basis is not the best way to track your progress as an affiliate.
• PPC Cost Data: AffiliateReporting.com allows you to aggregate your cost data from top search engines such as Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter.
• ROI Analysis: ROI should not be the only metric that you are concerned about, but it’s a very significant metric. With AffiliateReporting, you get sophisticated ROI reports without having to do all the hard spreadsheet work. Saves a lot of time.
• Alarm system: you also get an alarm system that notifies you if there are problems with your campaigns. If you are a busy affiliate like me, you’d appreciate this feature.
• Search Engine Management: wouldn’t it be nice if you could create multiple campaigns on top search engines at once? You can do it all with AffiliateReporting.com. And there is a bid management tool integrated into this system as well. So, if you have trouble optimizing your bids, you can always use the bid management software to keep you on track.
• Deep Reports: Not only you get top level reports on AffiliateReporting.com, you also get deep keyword, ad, and adgroup level reports from the system. The more numbers you can look at, the better, more knowledgeable decision you can make.

AffiliateReporting is not for everyone. It’s a sophisticated solution that costs a lot of money and is designed only for super-affiliates. The minimum fee you’ll have to pay is $500, and 2% of your ad spends are added to your monthly bill. If you are making lots of money in this business, you are going to save a lot of time and money, offsetting the fee. But if you are a newbie, you may want to stay away until you have enough revenue to justify purchasing this package.

Affiliate Theme Review

One of the biggest challenges that new affiliate marketers face is building their landing pages. I have heard from a lot of experts that you can make a lot of money from Google cash (direct linking). That may be true, but if you go in that route, you will be competing with top guns who have automated bid management systems that can overwhelm your bids and leave you with no real profit to show for. It’s never smart to get in a bidding war with super-affiliates. So, if you really want to make money in this business, you’ve got to create your landing pages, and you’ve got to be create a lot of them to test out and increase your conversion rate.

Building landing pages can prove too difficult for a lot of affiliate marketers. A lot of folks are scared of touching anything technical. A few others have no confidence in their web development abilities and often overestimate the obstacles in this area. Whichever group you belong you, you won’t have to worry about developing your own landing pages from scratch with Affiliate Theme. It’s a new theme that’s been released the help affiliate marketers build and test multiple affiliate landing pages fast.

Wordpress is an affiliate marketer’s best friend. With Wordpress you can set up your affiliate website in less than 5 minutes. But till now, you would have to program your landing page yourself, or use one of those dull themes that are available for free online. Affiliate Theme is a premium Wordpress theme that is designed specifically for marketers who want to test things out to improve their conversion rates. The theme comes with 6 different layouts, perfect for testing and figuring out what works for your niche.

You also get a color picker feature that allows you to change the look and feel of your website fast (in accordance to your niche). Let’s say you have a website about X-box. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could change the look and feel of your website to make it more attractive to your target audience, X-Box fans?

But what I like about Affiliate Theme is the fact that it’s highly optimized for PPC and SEO. Let’s say you want to start a new pay per click campaign on a cool new affiliate product. Wouldn’t it be nice if your landing page was optimized to give you the highest quality score possible? How about getting free traffic from search engines? Affiliate Theme comes with a clean HTML/CSS code, and the developers have used proper tagging to give you the best chance to get those high quality scores you need to run profitable PPC campaigns.

Affiliate Theme is highly customizable. Not only you get 6 layouts to work with, you can easily change the code to completely redesign your landing pages. The code is simple to understand and very easy to change. If you know any coding, you are going to find it very easy to create your very own layouts. You also have unlimited support, which means you can always ask if you are stuck.

Overall, Affiliate Theme is a great tool for affiliate marketers who want to spend less time coding and more time optimizing. By using Affiliate Theme, you can easily set up thousands of affiliate landing pages fast. And you can test them all too by changing the colors, fonts, and everything else in between. Talk about saving a lot of time and effort!

Download your copy here.