Around six months ago I wrote a post stating that I was going to learn touch typing. When I wrote it I was already using all my fingers to type, but my speed was terrible. I was typing around 30 words per minute….

That is where we left the story. Then a couple of weeks ago one reader emailed me asking how the touch typing experiment was going, so I decided to write an update.

The experiment went out very well and just as planned. I had tried to learn touch typing in the past, but I always went back to typing with two fingers after a couple of days because it was easier. Then one day I decided I would learn all the positions of the finger and make the switch for good (which is when I wrote that post). That is, I would not return to two-finger typing no matter what.

On the first couple of weeks I felt miserable, typing 30 words per minute. Writing emails was a pain, let alone posts for the blog…. But I started to notice fast improvements, and within a couple of months I was already back to 60 words per minute or so. From there I stopped paying attention to how fast I was typing, but I kept getting faster and faster.

How fast? Today I got curious and decided to go back to the speed test. On my first trial I got 100 words per minute. I am guessing that warmed up I could get over 105 words per minute.

Six months ago I was typing at 65 words per minute, so I basically increased my typing productivity by more than 50%!

This is probably one of the best skills I have learned in a while, and I definitely recommend anyone who is not touch typing yet to make the switch as soon as possible.

Finally, if you are going to measure how fast you type, make sure to not get confused with the number of characters and words you can type per minute. The comparison is always made with words per minute. On my last post there was a guy who wrote a comment like this: “I swear to God! 152 characters per minute! 29 right and 0 wrong“….

My friend Jonathan Volk just released a guide titled Affiliate Marketing 101. The guide is completely free, and you just need to subscribe to his email newsletter to get access.

I just went there to check the material, and I must say that it is really solid. Jonathan covers pretty much all you need to know to get started with affiliate marketing. He generated over $4 million last year in affiliate sales, so he sure knows what he is talking about, too.

Here is a list of the sections included:

• Introduction
• What Is Affiliate Marketing?
• What Is An Affiliate Network?
• Recommended Affiliate Networks
• How Does All This Come Together?
• The “Pregame”
• The “Pregame” Pt. 2 – Know Your Demographics
• The “Pregame” Pt. 3 – Setting Up Hosting / Domain Name
• Setting Up A Simple PHP Redirect
• The Landing Page
• Affiliate Marketing Methods (Basic Overview)
• Social Media Affiliate Marketing Guide
• Pay Per View Affiliate Marketing Guide
• Pay Per Click Affiliate Marketing Guide
• Media Buying Affiliate Marketing Guide
• After Your Campaigns Are Ready To Launch
• Conclusion

You’ll find the sections where he talks about affiliate marketing methods particularly useful, because he goes into details about the techniques he uses, the tricks that he found effective to generate more sales and so on.

Finally, he is also having a contest where the two people sending more referrals to the affiliate marketing guide we’ll win an Apple iPad. You’ll get your referral link once you subscribe to the newsletter. Neat promotional idea by the way, huh?

You probably have already seen a bio like this one on Twitter, LinkedIn or on some other social networking site:

John Doe is a web designer, programmer, SEO consultant, web entrepreneur, author, speaker, business coach, journalist and tech enthusiast.

Not sure about you, but when I come across bios like the one above I immediately conclude two things: 1) the person is not really sure about what she wants to do professionally and 2) she is not going to achieve outstanding results on any of the mentioned fields.

This concept applies to any aspect of our lives, and he is one offline example to illustrate it. I play the saxophone, and I used to study on a local music school. I remember that we had two sax teachers there. One of them had only played the sax his whole life. The other played the sax, but also played violin, guitar, flute, and a bunch of other instruments.

The first teacher was considered a sax master, and as a result he was requested to play around all the time, made a good living from giving private lessons and so on. The other one was seen just as an average player, on all the instruments he played. As a result he struggled to get recognition and financial rewards.

You can find similar stories inside the corporate world, too. There are employees who do a bit of everything. They do some marketing work, move to the finance department, then they spend some months working with the human resources manager and so on. But those usually have a flat career. Employees who are very specialized and deliver outstanding results, on the other hand, usually get promoted and reach leadership positions pretty fast.

If you want to achieve success, therefore, you must specialize in something and be among the best people who do that thing. Sure there are some cases of brilliant people who were the best doing several different things, but that is the exception that confirms the rule.

Great painters only paint.

Great programmers only code.

Great entrepreneurs only build businesses.

Great authors only write.

So on and so forth.

What about you, do you already know what you want to do? If you do, focus all your energies on it and become one of the best people in the world who can do that. If you don’t know yet, well, figure it out instead of trying to do a bit of everything. The least thing you want to become is a jack of all trades. In fact the figure of speech goes like this: “Jack of all trades, master of none.”

This is a guest post by Ann Smarty. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

The two best known ways to find blogs accepting guest posts are:

• Looking around your current contacts. Guest posting at your friends' sites will only make your old relationships stronger and more active. Besides, this is a good way to "learn" to guest post: adapt to various types of audience and blogging atmosphere.
• Searching Google. I've posted about some advanced tips on searching Google to hunt great (and tightly targeted) guest posting opportunities previously, so you just need to go and check it if you haven't yet.

But as an active (and long-term) guest blogger, I've become somewhat creative in hunting guest blogging opportunities and in this post I am sharing the three of them which turned really effective for me.

1. Look for New, Rapidly-Growing Competitors

Well, the first thing to keep in mind here is that there are no real competitors when it comes to blogging (this is one of the reasons why I love it). Blogs can't really compete because each of them has its unique voice and thus takes its own place.

But there are blogs in the same niche as you are and it is a good idea to find new, emerging and rapidly growing ones and see what they are doing.

One of the best advice I've ever got was: when it comes to competitive research, think young. It is not easy to follow already established, high-authority blogs: they already have solid contacts and fans which help them move further.

New bloggers have nothing; they are hungry and they've got to be creative. Watching what they are doing and following their steps, you can learn a lot. It doesn't mean you have to copy everything they are doing – you'll notice yourself get inspired by watching those active bloggers; you'll notice yourself find plenty of unique ideas and finding your own ways as well.

Look out for "places I guest posted" and "my guest posts" sections to see where those new and active bloggers promote their content and how:

2. Search and Track Twitter

This is somewhat related to the previous one: you won't be able to (easily) find new bloggers in Google (because they don't have enough link authority to outrank more established blogs) but you will surely find them Tweeting. Besides, Twitter search is real-time – meaning that you'll find new and fresh guest posting opportunities.

There are plenty of tools allowing to search and track Twitter; I am using Seesmic Desktop because it is cool, feature-rich and clutter-free. Here's how it noiselessly updates me of new related Tweets:

First thing to do is to configure its settings to notify you of new search results. Go to Settings > Notifications and put a tick next to "Notify about new search results":

You are almost done. Now use Seesmic built-in search option to search Twitter for what you need. I was searching for "guest posts" in general, you may want to restrict the search to your niche like [guest post diet], [guest post money].

Quick tip: create a separate search for each synonym you'd like to track: [guest post money], [guest post finance], [guest post save], etc.

Your search will be saved automatically and from now on Seesmic will quietly notify you of new search results via small pop-ups:

Now whenever you have new results, just go ahead and check out the new blogs and what they are doing.

3. Join Blogging Forums

Bloggers' communities are plenty. Some are generic ones where people discuss all things blogging. Others are more focused and targeted like, for example, Blogher (which unites blogging women) and 20 something bloggers that unites bloggers aged between 20 and 30 (and thus having common interested, styles, priorities, etc).

I have recently created another community specifically targeting people looking for guest bloggers and / or guest blogging opportunities. It is called My Blog Guest and if you are interested in guest blogging and plan to do a lot of it, you may want to check it out.

I am doing my best to keep the bar high enough: I don't really want the forum to turn into buy-sell thing, so only join it if you are interested in long-term partnerships and "pure deals".

If you've had some success hunting for guest blogging opportunities, please share your most effective methods in the comments!

Ann Smarty blogs on search, social media, branding and blogging at her SEOsmarty.com blog.

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Mathew asks:

Do you spend a lot of time and effort on SEO and getting some quality/relevant backlinks to them right away, or are they mostly organic links from people linking to them?

Also, what’s the best ways to get backlinks to my inner pages with older posts on them?

I was wondering because I’ve noticed almost all of your older posts have very good page rank.

I used to spend a lot of time and effort on SEO and on getting quality/relevant backlinks a couple of years ago. That is because the blog was new and had a small audience, so publishing outstanding content alone wouldn’t do the trick. How did I go about attracting backlinks? Doing three things mainly:

1. Submitting my posts to social bookmarking sites. There are plenty of do-follow social bookmarking sites out there that will send you link juice even if you are the only one voting for your story. On top of that I also tried to promote my killer articles on Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious, and whenever I managed to score a front page a big influx of organic links would come.

2. Networking with fellow bloggers. Building a relationship with bloggers inside your niche is essential. This means that I would link to them often, and many times they would return the favor. I am not talking about link exchanges but rather about natural links to quality content that your fellow bloggers post.

3. Guest blogging. As you probably know I am a big fan of guest blogging. Back in the day I used to do it a lot, which sent both new readers and backlinks my way. Sometimes instead of using the byline link to my homepage I would point it to a related post I had published on my blog, and that can help a lot with search rankings.

Over time, however, I started to spend less and less time trying to get backlinks, because as my audience increased so did the organic backlinks. That is, every time I publish a normal post these days I get 5-10 backlinks on it. When I post a killer article I get 50-100 backlinks. So I just focus on producing content these days, because the promotion side pretty much walks alone.

There are two other things you can do to maximize the link juice of your single posts, however. They are:

1. Having an HTML sitemap. This is basically a page within your blog that you’ll link to all posts you have ever published. You could make this by having an “Archives” section, as I do. This is a very efficient way to distribute your link equity because all pages of your blog will link there, and it will link back to all pages of your blog.

2. Cross linking between your posts. Linking to older and relevant posts is another practice that can increase your PageRank and search rankings, apart from adding more value to your readers. Whenever you are writing a new post, therefore, think about what you have published in the past and trying to find something relevant to link to.

Finally, notice that having lots of backlinks pointing to each of your single posts is not necessary to make sure they will have a good PageRank. If you have a good amount of backlinks pointing to your homepage, and use the two methods I mentioned above, your link equity will naturally spread all over your website, and even single posts will no backlinks at all will gain some PageRank.

The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Research Takes Time

The process of researching your keywords isn’t something that should be rushed. Each phase of the research process needs to be performed deliberately, ensuring that you take the time to find all relevant terms and discard the irrelevant. Any attempts to rush through the keyword research process will likely lead you down the wrong paths at best and at worst cause you to have to rethink your entire keyword targeting strategy.

Unfortunately the research process isn’t always linear. You can often be working on several phases of the research process at a time depending on what your focus is on at a given moment. There is a lot of overlap and moving backward and forward through the processes but care needs to be taken that you don’t skip over or leave any of the phases out.

Brainstorming Keywords

You can start the keyword research process anywhere, but I like to start with a clean slate. What keywords do you start the research process with? Do some brainstorming.

Brainstorming allows you to get a list of keywords from an unbiased perspective. The brainstorming process doesn’t mean just sitting around and thinking up phrases, though can be a part of it. Good brainstorming starts with asking questions that can then lead to answers. More times than not, those answers will also be your keywords.

First, think of what questions are relevant for you. Don’t try to answer them, you have time for that later, but compile your list of quetions that will help you find the keywords you are looking for.

Once you have a good list of questions do whatever research is needed to find the answers. Those answers give you a base of keywords you can then take to the online research tools to look for related phrases. These related phrases produce a wide-range of variations in how your topic is searched. Some relevant, others not so much.

Find Core Terms First

Undoubtedly in the brainstorming and research process you’ll amass a list of hundreds of phrases. You want to keep the process as simplified as possible so we’ll start by eliminating everything that is not a core term.

A core term is a keyword phrase boiled down to the essentials. It’s specific enough to produce a relevant result but broad enough to cover a wide range of much more targeted phrases. Generally a good core term is two, maybe three words. On rare occasions a core term can be a single word, but only when there is no room for alternate interpretations.

Only use qualifiers on a core term when it is necessary to ensure that the searcher will be led to a relevant page. For example the word “bag” could mean anything from a garbage bag to a sleeping bag to a travel bag. This is a core term that needs a qualifier in order to be relevant to the searcher. If it’s not relevant it’s not a core term.

Each page of your website should have a single core term associated with it. You may find several pages on your site that are a good fit for a single term. That’s fine during this research process but later you’ll want to make sure you select only the most appropriate page for any single core term. The others will have to find their own core terms.

Don’t stop your core term research until you are certain there are no more possible variations that produce measurable traffic. Using the keyword suggestion tools available in most keyword research programs, find all relevant variations on each of your core terms. For example a “travel bag” can also be a “back pack”, “luggage” (a rare case of a one-word core term) and a “duffel bag.” Each of these can be searched to find even more possible core term variants.

In almost every industry I have worked with I have been able to find different ways searchers think of the same product that the site owner hadn’t. Sometimes these variations don’t get searched much while other times they are more popular than the terms that the site owner said were the most important. Knowing these options in advance can make a dramatic difference in the direction you go with your optimization campaign.

Core Term Site Mapping

After you have put together an exhaustive list of core terms and before you start performing deeper research into finding specific phrases, you want to map out where your core terms will be integrated into your site. For some industries it’s as easy as looking at the content and assigning core terms to pages. For others, where there are a lot of core term variations that mean the exact same thing, it can be more difficult.

Assigning core terms to pages must be done very carefully. You need to ensure that the content of each page is either a 100% natural fit or the content can easily be adapted to fit that core term. A good example is “cost segregation” versus “cost segmentation”. Both essentially mean the same thing but both are frequently searched (though one more than the other.) The content of a page about “cost segregation” can easily be adapted for “cost segmentation” without altering the meaning or focus of the page.

If you can’t make a keyword fit without significantly altering the message of a page, then you find another core term, or another page for the core term.

I recommend prioritizing your core terms before assigning pages to them. Figure out which terms get more search volume, are most relevant, bring in targeted audience and which produce the best sales. These are all important factors of determining which core terms are more important than others.

By prioritizing your core terms you can research and optimize those that are most important first before moving on to lower priority terms. The optimization of your high priority terms can take some time so leaving the secondary terms for later is good optimization strategy.

Before you move into the next phase of the keyword research process you have enough information to start optimizing your website. With the core terms and the map of where each core term will be implemented, you can begin to perform a very broad and quick optimization of the website. Going a page at a time, optimize title tags, meta description tags, headings and even a bit of content.

I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on each page as you can go do a more indepth optimization later, once you have more keywords to work with.

Missed a part of this series?
Part 1: Everything You Need To Know About SEO
Part 2: Everything You Need To Know About Title Tags
Part 3: Everything You Need To Know About Meta Description and Keyword Tags
Part 4: Everything You Need To Know About Heading Tags and Alt Attributes
Part 5: Everything You Need To Know About Domain Names
Part 6: Everything You Need To Know About Search Engine Friendly URLs & Broken Links
Part 7: Everything You Need To Know About Site Architecture and Internal Linking
Part 8: Everything You Need To Know About Keywords
Part 9: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Core Terms

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

As a small business, you probably pride yourself on being customer friendly. Even though you might work with large companies as your suppliers and partners, you go the extra mile for your customers when something goes wrong. You make your site search friendly. You put the information on it that customers need. And you stand behind what you sell. Except when that big company partner makes it impossible.

Image via CrunchBase

And that’s the problem. As a small business, you must be extremely careful about the big companies you work with, because sometimes you can’t paper over their big company ways. And when that happens, you get hurt. You can lose business and you can lose your good reputation.

All this was brought to mind from a purchase we made not long ago, buying a refurbished Microsoft Xbox 360 from a small business online. Now, you might say to yourself–there’s your mistake, buying some crappy refurbished model instead of a new one–but we frequently buy refurbished technology and have never had a problem. The site we purchased from was well done, clearly explained everything, provided a manufacturer’s warranty, and seemed entirely reputable. I still think that small business is entirely reputable, so I am not naming them in what might appear to be a negative story.

The problem wasn’t the small business. We searched for Xbox 360s and that site came up near the top of the list. We checked them out several different ways and they came up clean. The site looked good and the purchase experience was easy and we received the console quickly. Everything worked.

We had a minor problem that we called Microsoft about and they cheerfully verified our warranty was in force and sent us a replacement part for free. My son is happily playing with his Xbox and it’s another happy story about a small business that helps out consumers by selling refurbished units and a large business that services its customers.

But you know the story doesn’t end there, because that would be the most boring blog post of all time. Instead, the Xbox suddenly starts throwing the dreaded E73 and E74 errors, so we followed the troubleshooting procedures and were informed by the Microsoft support site that we needed to get the unit repaired, and we could do that online.

Except we couldn’t. We dutifully followed the instructions to register with Xbox Live to report our “Xbox dead.” We put in the serial number and pressed the “Request a repair” button, but it always provided an error message telling me that the service is temporarily unavailable. (It’s been temprarily unavailable for over a week now, which makes you wonder what a permanent outage would look like.)

So, I got on the phone and requested the repair and the technician verified that we were covered and promised to send us an empty box (and Xbox box, I guess) for us to return the unit to be fixed, which takes four business days. After five business days went by with no box, I called back and was told that we were ineligible for service (the technician actually said we were “illegible” for service, but I decided not to squawk about how neat my handwriting can be) because we had viloated the terms and conditions.

I won’t take you through the literally hours of phone calls with technicians and supervisors that ensued. There was a multitude of times that I was told that they had no record or only a partial record of my last call, that the person I talked to the last time was mistaken–all the usual big company support crap. But the bottom line is that Microsoft had banned our console from service, voided the warranty, because they claimed that we violated their terms of service. They refused to say how or when we had done this, and claimed that it could have been something the previous owner did.

I know, I know, none of this makes any sense. If the previous owner had done it, you’d think they would have known about when we had the minor repair done months ago, but they were unmoved by such logic. They even have a page posted on their Web site that explains that there is no appeal process for console bans. So, even if they make a mistake, you’re screwed. That is really their official policy. The support technicians won’t talk to you about it and their online forums have a policy that any posts about console bans are deleted without response.

So, at this point, I thought that this must be some weird situation that rarely happens. Hardly. I found similar stories of people banned here and here. Now, for all I know, Microsoft has never made an error in banning someone before they banned us. But because they won’t tell us why we were banned, I have no trust in their process. They know why they banned us, but they just won’t tell us. And they won’t tell us why they won’t tell us.

The moral of the story for small businesses is that you must choose your partners carefully. The small business did everything right, but Microsoft ruined the customer experience. I know enough about business to place the blame where it is due, so I am not running around online giving this poor small business bad reviews. But someone else might. And I can totally understand why. Microsoft threw the small business under the bus, intimating that it was because we purchased a refurbished console that all of this happened.

But that isn’t so. What’s really true is that Microsoft has a set of policies designed to protect Microsoft, rather than its customers. The refurbished story is just a ruse trotted out in this situation. The truth is that Microsoft does not tell people why they were banned, what they did, or when it happened. And they don’t have any process to appeal if Microsoft makes an error. That is a set of policies that no small business can live with, if they want to safeguard their reputation of caring for customers.

And sad to say, I won’t ever buy a refurbished Microsoft product again. We’re going to buy a brand-spanking-new Xbox 360 because we don’t want to punish our son by throwing away his Christmas present. It kills me to do this, because I am giving more money to Microsoft, precisely the company that is at fault in this entire mess. I’d rather say I’ll never buy a Microsoft product again, but I know I will.

I am hoping that if enough people speak out, that Microsoft will change its ridiculously secretive policies and enter the age of open information. If Microsoft has such iron-clad evidence that something was done to void the warranty, they could present that evidence, but they refuse.

So, small businesses get hurt because their sales drop off and their reputations are endangered, all because they are working with a big company that has policies they’d never adopt with their own customers. Beware the partners you keep, because they will end up reflecting on you in ways that you can’t control. Being in the refurbishing business is perfectly fine, as long as you can count on your partners to stand behind the products that you sell. If you can’t, then it’s your business that will likely take the fall.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

This is a guest post by Henri Junttila. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Blogging is hard work. It can easily take up to a year or two before your blog starts taking off, if it ever does. I’m not trying to be pessimistic, just realistic, because there are a lot of people out there that believe they can jump in, start writing and the money will start pouring in.

But when you mix passion with blogging savvy, the results can be amazing. Before I started my blog, I decided to join a blogging course. I have always been big on finding a mentor, someone who has done what I want to do and then learning everything I can from them.

If you are passionate about what you’re doing and have the determination to work hard, the internet is full of excellent blogging courses that will help take your blog from zero to hero. With all that said, let’s look at how you can find your passion:

1. The Elimination Method

The elimination method is extremely simple. You start by writing down every topic you’re interested in, you then compare each topic to each other one by one and eliminate anything that you do not like.

Say you like cats, dogs and parrots, just to keep it simple. Let’s start with cats. Compare cats to dogs, do you think you’re more passionate about dogs? If yes, then you discard cats and compare dogs to the rest. We only have dogs and parrots left, so whichever one you’re more passionate about, wins.

2. The Money Question

What would you do if money didn’t exist? Would you write about dogs? If you never had to worry about food, clothing and a place to live, you would have no choice but to do things you enjoy, because there would be no reason to do anything else.

This is a simple, yet powerful question. Really think about what you would want to do if money didn’t exist on the planet. There are no 9-5 jobs. Everyone is doing what they love. What would you be doing in this scenario?

3. Your Feelings

Most of us have been taught to ignore our feelings from a very early age, but the truth is that feelings act as signposts for if you’re heading in the right direction. If you’re working a 9-5 job that you hate, you will feel bad and it will only get worse with time.

Whenever you’re doing something you love, you’ll feel happy, content and at peace. Time just seems to fly by. This is how feelings were meant to be used. It takes some practice. It is easy to misinterpret your feelings, which is why many people think they are passionate about making money, which is basically a feeling rooted in fear.

4. Taking Action

If you’re not quite sure what you’re passion is, the best way to find out is to just start somewhere. You can sit there and analyze what it might be, but you will never get anywhere. It’s okay if you start a blog and find out that it isn’t what you like.

Mistakes are there to teach you. If you want things to be perfect before you start, you will never start. Believe me, I’ve been there and when I started feeling okay about making mistakes, my life became so much easier.

5. Feedback

Once you’ve been blogging for a few months, you’ll start to find your voice and start getting some traffic (if you chose a good niche). You will have a bunch of data that will tell you if you’re heading in the right direction.

Comments, e-mails, bounce rates and the average time people spend on your website. All of these factors vary from blog to blog, which is why it can get difficult and why a mentor can be so helpful. The main point I want to get across in this article is that without your passion, you will not have the fuel to keep going for the months or even years when nothing seems to be happening.

Henri Junttila writes about following your passion and being successful at life on his blog WakeUpCloud.com, he also shows you how you can discover your passion in 5 days.

A couple of months ago I asked our readers what affiliate marketing questions they would like to have answered. I then analyzed the submissions and filtered out the 15 most common questions. After that I sent the questions to three friends of mine who are affiliate marketing rock stars, and the result is what you will find below.

These guys need no introduction, but here we go anyway. Shawn Collins started doing affiliate marketing in the 90s, and today he is one of the most respected names in the industry. Jonathan Volk is the CEO of Surge Marketing, an affiliate marketing company that generates million of dollars in affiliate sales every year. Zac Johnson started making money online when he was 15, and today he is one of the most successful affiliate marketers around. Make sure to subscribe to all three sites if you want to learn more about affiliate marketing. Now to the questions and answers.

1. How do I get started with affiliate marketing if I am a complete newbie?

Shawn: I created a video overview on the steps I would take to set up a new affiliate site.

Jonathan: I would start out by joining some of the internet communities and reading the blogs. I think it’s a great idea to give you a head start. Additionally, on many of the blogs they have some “Getting started with affiliate marketing” type guides that can really help you to start your make money online journey.

Zac: The best way to get started is to get familiar with the lingo and how networks, cpa/cpc, social marketing and all aspects work. There are plenty of paid ebooks and “teaching” programs out there, but none of them are necessary. Do a simple google search and you will come across a ton of marketing blogs offering the same newbie information for free. Everything you need to get started is already out there for free if you just look for it.

2. Do I need to spend money (e.g., PPC, paid advertising, etc) to make money with affiliate marketing?

Shawn: There are many different ways to make money as an affiliate. If you have money to invest, and you’re willing to put a lot of time into testing, you can make money fairly fast with PPC. But if you have more time than money, and you want to build a long-term site, I’d suggest focusing on building a blog on a topic that interests you. This can be done for very little cost.

Jonathan: Yes. There is always going to be at least a minimal investment needed. You’ll need a website, domain, etc. You don’t have to pay for traffic but it’s the FASTEST way to begin to earn a living online. I would recommend starting out paying for PPC traffic and just setting your daily budget to whatever the affiliate commission is. Let’s say you earn $20 bucks per lead for an offer. Set your daily budget to $20 and see if you get anything.

Zac: As mentioned, everything is already out there. You definitely DO NOT need to spend money to make money online. However, it is all relevant in terms of how fast you want to make money and how much. When I first started making money online over a decade ago, I was making 5 figures a year without spending a dime on advertising costs. This took much longer to build up content and get search traffic… but didn’t cost any money.

3. Suppose I already have a website or blog with decent traffic. How can I use affiliate marketing to monetize my site?

Shawn: Find out which companies in your niche have affiliate programs and apply to them. Check them against each other to see which have the longest cookie durations, best payout, highest EPC, etc. Then start testing creative from these companies to compile data and determine which perform best for you and your audience.

Jonathan: First, you really need to know your demographic. Who visits your website? Then using that information go to your affiliate manager and ask them what particular offers might be working well for this demographic. For example, if your site primarily caters to 35-50 year old women, weight loss offers might be and offer you want to try.

Zac: Depending on the type of site you currently have, its likely one of the major affiliate networks will have a relevant CPA offer for you to blend in with your content. You always have the option of Google Adsense, but that is usually a last resource for seasoned marketers. The key is blending in relevant content/ads and making it look real.

4. Do you start by choosing an offer, and then building a website/email list/PPC campaign around it, or the other way around (i.e., first build a website or email list and then try to find suitable offers)?

Shawn: I choose offers that fit my sites, because I am more likely to maintain a site if I have an interest in it. But there are plenty of successful affiliates who are essentially mercenaries that create sites to capitalize on whatever is hot.

Jonathan: I actually find the market first. What I mean by this is that I find where there are high volumes of traffic and try to cater to their needs. That way I know the traffic is there, it’s just a matter of finding out what will convert profitably for that particular area (or demographic).

Zac: Personally, if I am selecting an offer from a network, I will go through their available offers. I already have a good idea of whats on every other network and most likely saturated, so I want to choose something that looks a bit unsaturated and not already being pushed by a ton of affiliates. This is usually a hard find, but if found, usually it is much easier to promote and make money.

5. What is affiliate scrubbing/shaving, and what do you think about it?

Shawn: I focus on retail/revenue share and this hasn’t been an issue for me.

Jonathan: Scrubbing is when an advertiser (not the network) scrubs out bad leads and you do not get paid for them. This is very common and happens on a majority of the advertiser pages. This could be as simple as scrubbing someone from another country when the advertiser is only asking for US based leads or as complicated as the lead having bogus information such as a fake email address (e.g., 129023i190i@fakemail.com).

Shaving is different. Shaving is when an affiliate network shaves leads from your leads. So maybe one in 100 of your leads does not get counted. The network still gets paid from the advertiser for this but you will never see anything. There are times when shaving is intentional (and some networks have been proven to shave) and sometimes when it is unintentional. Either way, it can be prevented by simply split testing the offer across multiple affiliate networks if possible.

Always remember that you should not accuse anyone of shaving unless you have a statistically significant number of leads to prove it. If you only have 10 leads per day on average and one day you have 5, it doesn’t mean the advertiser is shaving. It could mean a lot of things.

Zac: Since affiliate marketing first started online, it’s always been a scary issue and always in the back of our minds. Years ago, you pretty much had to rely on what the networks stats reported, but with more advanced reports and pixel/cookie tracking, you can compare network stats against your own. Unfortunately there are always going to be cheaters, lairs and people looking to take advantage of you. Before pushing some serious numbers with a company, make sure you can trust their stats and know who you are working with.

6. Do you fear the possibility of web surfers having their browsers to auto-clean cookies at the end of every browsing sessions? What if this becomes a default feature on browsers?

Shawn: There is a new threat that has some affiliate marketers frantic every six months. I just concentrate on producing quality content and don’t obsess about the threats. So long as my numbers are where I’d like them to be, the payout, conversion rate, etc. are secondary.

Jonathan: No. I think it will never become a standard. Too many people like to be logged into their facebook, myspace, email, etc without having to relogin every time. Plus some networks don’t even require cookies to track conversions.

Zac: I’m not concerned about individuals clearing out their cookies, but it would be interesting to see what happens if this was an automatic browser feature. I’m sure many of the bigger coupon sites and merchant networks would be affected heavily. I always liked the concept of whoever delivers the most recent cookie, gets the credit. Either way, the marketplace will adapt and find a new and better way to track leads.

7. Do you think that super affiliates necessarily need to use PPC to power their campaigns? Or is it possible to make big money with affiliate marketing without using PPC?

Shawn: PPC is just one area of affiliate marketing – there are plenty of affiliates using content sites, comparison shopping, email, coupons, etc. to generate big results.

Jonathan: PPC is not the only traffic source. There are many other traffic sources that you could use. I do feel that since Adwords has such a HUGE reach, it can prove to make someone extremely successful in finding large volumes of traffic.

Zac: It’s definitely possible to make a massive amount of money without relying on pay per click. PPC is always the big attraction because it can deliver fast and big numbers. What most people aren’t discussing or thinking about is the big costs also involved. I’ve always been a fan of creating niche sites, building them up over time and having them earn thousands of dollars in profit month and month, without having to worry about PPC management or costs.

8. How do I get quality affiliates to promote my own products and services?

Shawn: That’s not really something that can be answered in a couple sentences. However, I’ve created a free video series that goes over the steps for companies to set up and run a successful affiliate program, based on my decade as an affiliate manager.

Jonathan: I think it comes down to a few things.

1. Relationship. – If you have a relationship with the affiliate, they are way more likely to promote your stuff although it does not guarantee it.

2. (Most important) Conversion rate. – If you spend the time optimizing your page over and over, you will have the best converting sales page. Numbers don’t lie and at the end of the day, super affiliates want to make the most for their investment into traffic costs.

Zac: Most affiliates are lazy and just want to make money. They don’t want to be bothered and pestered with what offers to run and why your network is better than others. If you truly want an affiliate to run your offer, contact them with your exact numbers (and they better be good!), and a very easy way to get the campaign up and running. Nothing is worse then being pestered to run a campaign, then having to join a network, wait a couple days and so on… by then it’s already too late.

9. Clickbank seems to be the big thing among affiliate marketers. Do you use it extensively as well, or most of the offers you promote come from other places?

Shawn: ClickBank is popular with affiliates who focus on digital products. I tend to promote physical products, and work more with Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, LinkShare and ShareASale.

Jonathan: I used Clickbank in the beginning of my affiliate marketing career. Now my Dad owns a product on there and does very well with it. I have since moved on to entirely CPA networks with the exception of a few small marketing campaigns.

Zac: ClickBank has always been a massive powerhouse and the way they handle their payouts and backend is awesome. They get paid when a sale is made, so you never have to worry about an advertiser screwing over the network. From an affiliate aspect, they have an excellent selection of offers for almost any niche, with well written creatives and ad content. As an advertiser, you simply create an account, add a product, a few creatives and you are ready to go. ClickBank is genius!

10. What was your first affiliate marketing success?

Shawn: Back in the 90s, I started doing paid search arbitrage before I knew it had a name. There were lots of PPC affiliate programs then, and I would buy targeted clicks for a penney on GoTo.com and funnel them to affiliate links.

Jonathan: It’s been so long I cant even remember. I think I was linking directly from PPC campaigns to a clickbank ebook on golf. I was making like $20 bucks per day or so. I then moved into other niches and got up to $250 per day just linking directly from PPC Campaigns in google.

Zac: My earliest and most memorable affiliate successes was when I was first starting out and hitting $100,000 in sales with Amazon.com, with NO ad spending. This may not seem like a ton, but it was pretty cool for a kid starting high school. After promoting Amazon’s associate program for a while, I quickly got into CPA affiliate marketing, where things got even more exciting and fun.

11. There are so many offers out there to promote. How do I choose the right ones for my blog/audience?

Shawn: It depends on why your audience is there – think about the top 3-5 keywords that describe your site and search in Google for affiliate programs that related to those keywords.

Jonathan: This goes back to knowing your demographic / audience. Know what typically converts for that audience by asking around and you should do pretty ok!

Zac: It’s all a game of testing. Since there are literally thousands of offers to choose from, you can break down your decisions by profit potential, quality of offer and relevance to your web site. If you are selecting ads for your high quality/profile blog, you want to make sure you aren’t pushing crap off to your readers.

12. Do you believe that social media can be used to promote affiliate offers? If so, how?

Shawn: Yes, affiliates have been using video, Twitter, social networks, etc. for years to promote affiliate links.

Jonathan: You can promote affiliate offers through social media although it’s a lot more difficult. I think the best way would be referring friends to services, etc you are already using and enjoy. Sure, you won’t become a millionaire from it, but you’ll make some extra coin!

Zac: Without a doubt. I’ve seen some great results with Facebook Fan Pages and Twitter for building up niche sites that people are really interested. You would be surprised at how many people will retweet articles they are interested in, and gladly contribute on your blog feedback.

13. Do you use pre-sell/review pages when promoting affiliate offers, or do you send the traffic directly to the sales page of the merchant?

Shawn: I always send the traffic from my sites. I don’t think affiliates are bringing value to the table if they’re insinuating themselves into a search from a consumer for a product or service.

Jonathan: I almost always pre-sell my traffic before sending them to an affiliate offer. Doing so generally increases profit.

Zac: I will test both landing pages and direct linking. Direct linking is always easiest, but with the creation of a landing page, you may even increase conversions more. It’s very easy to split test offers while advertising on solutions like Facebook Ads, because you can get a decent flow of traffic very fast and have an idea where/what people are clicking on.

14. Do you lose money on offers while trying to find profitable ones? Is this process inevitable?

Shawn: That’s the nature of testing – the key is to closely monitor things to limit losses and scale gains.

Jonathan: All the time. In fact I’ve lost more money this year than I ever have. Why? Because I’ve tested a TON of offers aggressively. You can’t make everything work and sometimes it takes a bit of money to figure that out.

Zac: It’s a good bet that you will lose money while testing out new campaigns. It’s also ok and expected, which is why it’s called testing. You are throwing a lot of mud at the wall and seeing what sticks. Once you find the few keywords, ad copies or offers that work and weed out the best, you can see a quick swing to high profit margins.

15. What are the most important things to track and test when promoting affiliate offers.

Shawn: The effective CPM for all similar offers to see which ones to drop and which to give more prominence.

Jonathan: I think it’s always important to track what traffic source is converting best. If you’re promoting your site in multiple places, always make sure you know which site is bringing in what conversions. This can be done with a simple “subid” and helps dramatically.

For testing, the main thing I test is my headlines. Testing different headlines both in affiliate landing pages and ads is very important!

Zac: Obviously the ROI of an offer is what you are looking for, and how much you can expand on advertising. Once you have a campaign setup, it’s easy to see your profits and sit there and relax. A few days/weeks pass and you are slowing losing profit margin, then before you know it… you are pushing even/loss numbers. It’s important to always be on top of your ad campaigns. Don’t forget to search for other relevant and competing offers to see which may convert best.

This is a guest post by Eric Cummings. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

I loved Aditya Mahesh’s recent guest post, 4 Ways to Promote Your Blog Offline. We bloggers are used to thinking about blogging as something you only do behind a computer. There is the “real” world and the “digital” world, and never the two shall meet. Aditya’s post debunks this myth though she missed one obvious but often underutilized publicity technique area: reaching out to our existing, real world social networks. Or put simply, tell your friends, family and co-workers about your blog.

This may seem blindingly obvious, and in many ways it is. But whether out of fear, privacy, or embarrassment, many bloggers keep their digital and real lives separate. I know I did, and many times still do. For new bloggers, utilizing existing social networks will dramatically expand the reach of your blog in the rough, early days. It will help create a community, give you valuable feedback, and expand the reach of your blog.

So, how do you utilize your social network?

1. Start small. In the beginning, get feedback from trusted friends. Ask trusted friends to give you honest feedback. When my brother and I started On Violence, for the first three or four weeks, we only told five of our closest friends. They provided feedback that helped us re-format pages to make them easier to read. We also found out what posts grabbed their attention and they pointed out those pesky typos that dog beginning and expert bloggers. And your friends can tell you, as one of ours did, that your language sounds pretentious. (Not all of the criticism feels good, but it helps.)

2. Tell your friends and family. First, I targeted emails and phone calls to my friends who I thought would want to be part of our community. If you are truly passionate about your topic, I bet a bunch of your friends are too. But this is obvious, what about your Great Aunt Mable, or your weird uncle Ted? Surely they don’t care about your new blog on early 90’s hip-hop. Maybe, but maybe not. You never know who your blog will interest, or who your next loyal reader will be.

3. Tell your co-workers and fellow enthusiasts. Chances are, unless you write a blog on making money from blogging, your blog is about a hobby or interest area. You have other friends in that area; take advantage of this. If your blog covers surfing, then talk to the surfers you ride with at the beach. If they aren’t interested in your blog, who will be?

4. Advertise with Groups and Associations to which you belong. Do you belong to a fraternity or sorority? An industry group? A church with a newsletter? Send out an announcement about your blog.

5. Target the real world recipients of your blog. Similar to tip number three, you need to target the people who are probably interested in your blog that you’ve never met before. If your blog reviews local restaurant, then talk to restaurant owners you know. Basically, wherever your blog can connect with real world people, you need to let them know about it.

6. Ask friends to guest post. There are tangible benefits to this. It is one less post you have to worry about writing, provides another voice to your website, and will help expand your reach into your friend’s social network. The biggest benefit I’ve had is in discovering another wonderful writer. My friend Matt contributed a post about his experience as an aid worker on the Thailand/Burma border. It was meaningful, well written, on topic, and a joy to read. If we hadn’t reached out, he never would have shared this story with us, and our blog wouldn’t be the same.

7. Ask your friends to comment. Nothing is sadder than a blog post with no comments. People want to go to blogs with community. Our blog, though small, has one. When new people come to our blog, they feel free to comment without feeling like they are the only one commenting. (Though to be fair, on some days we still struggle with this.)

8. Invite your friends on facebook/myspace/linkedin. I have over 300 friends on facebook, why would I not invite them to our blog? The more interesting thing has been connecting with friends I haven’t talked to in a long time, and restarting conversations and relationships with them. You have a social network already, use it.

9. Tell people you meet, in real life. This seems obvious, but was hard for me in the beginning and it still is. It is hard to put yourself out there and say, “I have a blog.” It seems pretentious. But again, you never know who or when you could meet a new reader. I met one of our most loyal readers at three in the morning outside a hostel in Munich. A tip: order business cards. They are cheap, practical and will help give you an opening.

Eric Cummings writes about for On Violence, a blog on counter-insurgency warfare, military and foreign affairs, art, and violence, written by two brothers–one a soldier and the other a pacifist.