The growing online popularity of videos has opened up big doors to those who are a YouTube affiliate. Just the fact that Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion dollars gives you an idea how big this online video platform has become. Many have already taken advantage of this lucrative opportunity. You can see your commissions go through the roof as well if you become a YouTube affiliate.

To be a YouTube Affiliate, the first thing that you are going to need to do is to get some good screencasting software. This is done to capture the image of your computer and turns it into a video. It is also called a video screen capture. Usually this will involve a narration so work on getting your best professional sounding voice. There are a few good screen casting software programs out.

Camtasia is very good and comes highly recommended. It isn’t cheap but it is well worth the price.Imovie is also very good and comes bundled with Mac computers much of the time. If you are limited in your funds then you will find The Jing Project useful because it is free. Once you find the screencasting software that best suits you then you can begin gathering the content for your video.

Your content should be simple and easy to understand. It should also give people a reason to believe that not only do you know what you are talking about but you should also give them a reason to visit your affiliate link. If you want to make money online as a YouTube affiliate, you have to know to properly bait your potential customer with just enough information to get them hungry but don’t give them the whole package.

Get them wanting more and then make it so they want to follow your link to see what you have to offer. Your affiliate network should have plenty of opportunities for you and your affiliate programs will have all the information that you need.

Because YouTube is free, anyone can make an account and doing so is easy. Just follow the instructions. Once you have done that you will be able to publish your video on YouTube. Doing that isn’t complicated either.

If you need some help they have a video tutorial that you will find very helpful. Once it is uploaded to YouTube it will be seen among the 100,000′s of videos uploaded daily. The only difference as a YouTube affiliate is that your videos will be making you money.

Affiliates using YouTube can really boost sales and help generate a higher click through rate. Done correctly it will also help convert that CTR into sales. Make it a part of your marketing mix.

Use it in conjunction with your article marketing efforts. There are many ways that Youtube can boost your affiliate marketing ventures. The only limit is your imagination.

Technorati Tags: How to Use YouTube to Boost your Affiliate Sales

But before I jump into the details, let me say this: The Dogpile Search Engine is one of the first meta search engines that queries multiple sites all at one time. Even better, you’ll get results from the largest search engines to the smallest search engines all combined together and compiled neatly for you.

Bear in mind that a meta search engine is not designed to index or rank websites. That’s right, it simply queries several sites at once to deliver a results page that combines the best sites from all the search engines.

What this means is, the higher a site is ranked on individual search engines, the higher it will rank on the Dogpile Search Engine.

To begin with, search engine order has been predefined. In fact, if a website ranks higher on one of the first search engines, chances are the site will rank higher in Dogpile.

What’s more, if you are a website owner, and you want to get your site listed on the Dogpile Search Engine, you will have to manually submit your site to one of its many search engine partners.

I’m sorry to say that direct submissions are not currently accepted.

But, here’s some good news for you. In most cases, your site will be listed immediately once you submit.

But wait, there’s more. Dogpile offers a search toolbar that is designed to provide every user added convenience and lightening fast access to information.

Right off the bat, you can download the toolbar directly to you web browser. In a combined fashion, results from any page on the Internet including yellow and white pages are delivered to you immediately.

When the dust settles, with Dogpile, you can search up to 50% more of the Web than any other search engine.

Now get this, you can choose to search a particular search engine or get the best of all search engines. This choice dramatically changes your results.

So far, so good. Right?

As if that’s not enough, there’s a news search that will sort your results by relevance and dates. For added convenience, there is an “Are You Looking For” feature available to steer you to a better-worded search query.

For all these reasons, Dogpile stands out. Consider this. You can use the “Bold Search Terms” option, to have all of you keyword search terms stand out on all the results pages.

And what’s more, you can track and display your previous 15 recent searches if there is something you want to go back and look at.

All in all, using the Dogpile Search Engine to search several search engines and directories at once is a huge time saver, and lots of fun. You can find what you are looking for faster, and in a more accurate way. And that’s really what you want isn’t it?

Technorati Tags: dogpile metasearch engine, dogpile search engine, dogpile search engines

Business owners who want to take advantage of Internet marketing strategies such as banner ads but are on a limited budget may find banner exchanges to be quite useful. The ideal use of banner ads would include placing your banner ad on a website which receives a great deal of traffic and attracts an audience who will likely be interested in your products or services. Additionally, this website should not directly compete for your business. This scenario may be difficult to find and even when a business owner is able to find this type of situation, purchasing advertisement space may be expensive especially if it is a highly competitive niche. These business owners may find banner exchanges to be an affordable alternative.

The most appealing factor of banner ad exchanges is the cost effectiveness of these situations. Most banner ad exchange groups are free to participants. Unlike placing a banner ad independently, there is no financial cost for the appearance of the banner ad on another website but the business owner does have an obligation to fulfill. Most banner ad exchanges will find another website to post your advertisement without charging a fee but they will require you to post at least one banner ad, and sometimes more, on your website in exchange for having your banner ad displayed on another website. Many banner ad exchanges will work to attempt to match your banner ad to a relevant website but this is not always possible and your banner ad may wind up on a website which is not relevant to your products or services. This will likely mean that the banner ads will generate very little interest in your products and services. Similarly the advertisements you are asked to post may not complement your website well. You will likely have the opportunity to reject advertisements in particular categories you find to be offensive but will have little control beyond that to moderate the banner ads on your website.

Another very affordable option for placing your banner ads on the Internet may include starting an affiliate marketing campaign. This is an Internet marketing campaign in which website owners, or affiliates, post your banner ad on their website and attempt to promote your products and services for you. The banner ads typically include graphics and text which entice Internet users to click through the ad to your website and also include embedded code which provides you with feedback detailing which affiliates generated the website traffic. This information is necessary because affiliates are typically not paid unless they achieve a desired result such as enticing Internet users to click through the banner ad or make a purchase. The affiliates are typically compensated either on a cost per click basis or a cost per sale basis. Cost per click means the affiliate receives a predetermined amount of money each time a user clicks on the ad. Cost per sale means the affiliate receives either a flat fee or a percentage of the sale for each sale generated by the affiliate. Affiliates may also be paid on a cost per lead basis which means they are compensated when a user performs a specific action such as registering with a website or filling out a survey. Most people favor affiliate programs because it is a cost effective way to place your banner ads online and because they only have to pay affiliates who are successful.

As marketers, we are told that we should be article marketing.  It is how you make money as an affiliate, it is how you promote your websites and it is how you add content to your virtual real estate empire.

Many people find article writing difficult to do because they are not used to writing.  If you have the money, it can be outsourced.  However, for many people starting out online, money is tight and so they can’t afford an outsourcer.

You can get articles written for a couple of dollars, but they are likely to be very poor quality.  For a decent 400 to 500 word article you are looking to pay around ten dollars, possibly more depending on the niche and the author.

You can write the articles yourself, and it’s not that difficult to do if you follow a system.  Many people suffer from writers block or are just not used to writing an article.  It can be very daunting to sit down and write if it is something you are not used to.

Below is a system that works very well, it is one I use myself and you can be writing high quality articles surprisingly quickly with this technique.  It really isn’t that hard and it enables even the most novice of writers to create decent articles rapidly.

Step 1 : Decide upon the niche you are writing in.

Step 2 : Determine which keyword(s) you are targeting in your article.

Step 3 : Determine the subject your article will be about.

Step 4 : Type into Google some of your keywords and see what problems and issues people are facing in that niche.  What do they want to know?  What is their pain?  What solutions are they looking for?

Step 5 : Write a powerful, interest building title with your keyword at the start, if possible.

Step 6 : Write out four or five short sentences about the problem (don’t give away too much … you want your reader to buy).

Step 7 : Turn each sentence into more descriptive paragraphs, remembering not to give away too much information.

Step 8 : Write a paragraph introducing the article at the top.

Step 9 : Write a paragraph summarizing what was in the article at the bottom.

And there you have a good quality, unique article that you could spin or just submit to an article directory or use on your website.  Content is king on the Internet, and unique content provides you with an edge over the competition.

This method will help you to quickly write articles, and it won’t be long before you can write a high quality article in under ten minutes.  With practise, you will be able to do them in five to seven minutes easily!

And remember the more articles you have out there, the more you can potentially earn!

Many marketers get so caught up in the stampede for traffic that they spend all their time building links.  They forget that one of the most vital parts of SEO are the on page factors.

These are not complex for you to do and are something that should be fundamental when you create a new site.  WordPress is an ideal platform as it typically lends itself well to search engine optimization.

The first step is for you to ensure you have set your title tag correctly.  This needs to be 64 characters in length.  Any longer and it will be cut off and this will look very odd in the search engine results.

The title tag needs to tell people what your site is about in such a way to entice them in to your web site.  It needs to include a keyword that is specific for the page the title tag is on.  Every page on your website should have its own unique title tag.  You should never use the same title tag on every page.

Next are your meta keywords and meta description.  These tell the search engine spiders what your site is about.  They are not massively important to the search engines, as most of them will analyse your site to see what it is really about.

These are important if you are using Adsense as without these meta tags in place, you find your Adsense ads are not focused on your niche.

The meta description is important because it appears in the search engine results.  It is 150 characters for you to get people to click on your link and come to your website.  You need to be concise and enticing in the same sentence.

Your meta keywords and description should also be unique for each page within your site.

Any images on your site have what is known as ALT tags.  These are tags which provide an alternative description for the visually impaired. These are noticed by the search engines and can get your images ranking well.  Make sure you do not attach the same keyword to too many ALT tags and add the word graphic, picture, image or something similar afterwards.  This will again help tell the search engines your website is relevant for those keywords.

On top of this you can include your keyword in the header 1 (h1) tag on your page, i.e. the title in the text.  This is another indicator to the search engines that your site is important for that keyword.

Using your keyword well within the text of your page and including related keywords around it will also help your site rank.

You must make sure you do not spam or keyword stuff any of your pages because it is a surefire way to get yourself dropped from the search engine results.

By performing some simple on page SEO optimization you can gain the advantage in the search engines.  Remember that not all marketers do this, and this can put you ahead of your competition, which is vital for your profitable success.

Web 2.0 technologies are taking the Internet by storm.  They have captured the hearts and minds not only of Internet Marketers, but of their target markets too.

More and more people are using Web 2.0 sites to either connect to their friends and family or to create their own hobby or fan sites.

These technologies can be extremely important in your traffic generation strategies because it allows you a method of direct contact with your target market.  Done well, web 2.0 technologies can provide you with thousands of visitors plus a valuable boost in the search engine rankings.

There are hundreds of Web 2.0 sites, with more cropping up every day in more focused niches.  These are the sites that are of particular interest to the Internet Marketer as you have a tightly focused niche of people who would be interested in your product or services.

Of course, you can’t just walk into a Web 2.0 site and start promoting your product.  Doing this will get yourself shot down in metaphorical flames.  Marketers who do this quickly find themselves hounded out of the market.

When you use a web 2.0 site you have to use it like you would a list. You have to establish yourself in the niche as an expert, someone to listen to and who knows what they are talking about.  Sometimes this means being yourself, other times you may have a pseudnym.

Whatever the case, you need to spend some time understanding the group and the market so that you can appeal to them in the best way.  Be helpful, provide valuable information and you will soon be viewed as an expert.

Once you have established yourself as an authority figure you can easily promote your products and services as people will link your expertise with them.  It allows you not only to promote your products, but to promote products as an affiliate.

One word of caution is to not spread yourself too thin.  Working on a social networking site to establish yourself as an authority can take a lot of your time and if you try to work on too many, you find yourself unable to do enough on any of the sites.  Pick just a couple to focus your attention on, one niche site and one general site.

Other web 2.0 sites allow you to create your own websites.  Some of these frown on overt commercialism, whereas others are pretty much a free for all.

This type of site is best used to push your product or information site up the search engine rankings.

You create sites on web 2.0 properties using unique content based around your keywords.  You then create active links through to your own website.  You do some simple promotion of these properties (pinging, social bookmarking, etc) to give them some link juice, and then they will work to boost your website in the search engine rankings.

Whilst this doesn’t give you direct traffic, it will give you a leg up the organic search engine rankings.  This will help to further increase your traffic.  Plus, the additional benefit is each of these Web 2.0 properties will rank in their own right and get traffic, some of which will be passed on to your main site.

Web 2.0 sites are an incredible method of getting traffic.  If you use them properly and spend the time on them, they can help you get thousands of additional visitors for free!

Yahoo Answers is a source of very targeted traffic that many marketers overlook.  The time involved with it and the ease with which it appears Yahoo ban people puts them off.

The basic premise of Yahoo Answers is that people ask questions and other people answer them.  Think of it as an advice board, if you like.  Some of the questions are bizarre, some peculiar, whereas others are normal.

The quality of answers varies too from the single sentence, to the rude to the outstanding.  The latter is the type of answer you want to be providing.

Firstly, people are only banned if they abuse the system and provide consistently poor answers.  So long as you stay on the right side of their terms of service and provide good quality answers you will have no trouble keeping your account.  People have had the same account for years and have accumulated thousands of points, whereas others lose theirs in a few weeks because they break the terms of service.

The key to succeeding with Yahoo Answers is to find questions that you can answer and your website provides more information on.

The benefits of Answers are threefold.

1)  You gain traffic from people reading your answer
2)  Your answer, if chosen as the best answer, will rank in the search engines and get traffic directly
3)  You can get a backlink from your answer which will boost your sites rankings.

As Yahoo Answers is considered an authority site by the other search engines, having links from it are considered highly relevant and very beneficial.

You must do an advanced search to find the best questions to answer.  Search only questions opened in the last 7 days with your keyword.  This will give you the most relevant questions.  You then need to go through each question and find the ones you can answer well.

In order to keep your account and to get voted as the best answer, you need to provide high quality answers.  This means reading the question thoroughly and understand what is asked.

Start your answer with a greeting, e.g. “Hi there” or “Hi, thanks for your question”.  This instantly makes your answer stand out from the crowd and will start to build a relationship with the questioner.

Then provide your answer and sign off with something equally friendly such as “Hope this helps you out” and then sign out with your name.

You should only put your link in your answer directly if it has been asked for.  Putting your link in every answer is likely to get your account banned.  Your link needs to go in the resources box below.  Don’t worry, it will get seen and clicked on, particularly if your answer is voted the best answer.

Yahoo Answers provides a very good method of generating targeted traffic through to your website.  It works well for most types of sites and some people earn decent money just from Yahoo Answers.  Use it well and wisely and you can receive many benefits from it.

We all love traffic coming to our website.  The more the merrier in most cases.

However, as a marketer, that isn’t the case.  Marketers want targeted traffic and they want to know where it is coming from.  Not knowing where your traffic is coming from means you don’t know which traffic generation methods are working.

The majority of marketers make no effort to track their traffic and are grateful for any visitors to their website.

If you are paying for advertising and not tracking your traffic you are throwing money away!  You have to know which adverts are working and which are not.  This way you can do more advertising that is earning you money and less of that which isn’t.

Tracking your traffic doesn’t need to be complex and can be done very easily.  You can invest in scripts and services that will track your website traffic for you.  These vary from the cheap to the expensive, the good and to the brilliant.

You don’t need to have a script or service to track your traffic, but it can often make it much easier for you.

A simple traffic tracking method is to use Google Analytics.  This is a free to sign up service that many marketers are using.  The good thing about it is that it offers in depth stats and can track almost anything.  The downside of it that it offers in depth stats and can track almost anything!

The complexity of it is a good and a bad thing because you can find out so much about your website that it will initially confuse you.  However, once you have spent some time analysing the results it will prove very useful.

Firstly you have to add the code to your website.  This code is unique for each of your websites and needs to be inserted at the bottom of each page in your website just before the closing body tag.

Once it is reporting data, you need to drive a decent amount of visitors to your site to get some good results.

Analytics will report on all activity on your website and even go as far to overlay where people are clicking to help you understand the activity on your website.  You can link your analytics account with your Adsense and Adwords accounts to further help you understand how well they are working for you.

One of the biggest benefits of Analytics is that it can provide goal tracking to track sales and sign ups to lists.  It can be a bit tricky to get working behind scripts and membership sites, but is worth using.

The big appeal to most marketers is the fact that it has a lot of features, more than many scripts and is completely free.  Of course, Google get to understand exactly what happens on your website, but that is a small trade off for such in depth analytics.

Using Google Analytics will give you a good understanding of where your traffic is coming from and what it is doing on your site.  Through this you can improve your conversion rate, and in turn, your profits.

Traffic is what all Internet Marketers are after.  Though to be more precise, we are after targeted traffic, not just any old traffic.  Targeted traffic means they are interested in what we have to offer and are therefore more likely to buy, signup or otherwise participate in our website.

Many marketers spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours building traffic to their websites.  In some cases, the cost of traffic generation far exceeds the meagre income made from the site itself.

Aside from the usual traffic generation methods, there are other Web 2.0 techniques you can use to increase your traffic.

One site in particular stands out with its ability to generate vast amounts of traffic very quickly.

This site is Stumbleupon.com.  It is a site that has a great following and offers something for people who are bored at work or at home.  The basic premise is that you find a site you think is interesting (you Stumbled Upon it) and submit it to Stumbleupon.

Visitors to Stumbleupon can look through the sites other people have found.  They can vote to say they like a site, which gets it more views, or say they don’t like it, which gets them less views.

In many ways, Stumbleupon appeals to that voyeuristic, reality TV mindset.  People can see what other people are doing and vote – something which is becoming ingrained into out culture.

In order for your site to do well on Stumbleupon it must be the kind of site that people will want to pass on and recommend.  Sales letters don’t tend to do very well, but controversial or contrarian articles do.  Anything that is cute, funny or entertaining will do well.

This can be an article, a video, or anything of a similar ilk.  It must be something that has social appeal to your niche.  You may have to think about how you can spin your content in order to give it wide ranging appeal.  It can be done though, and will get you traffic.

You can Stumbleupon your site yourself, but it is better to get someone else to do the original Stumbleupon for you.  This could be a friend, family or an outsourcer.  They will need a set of space separated tags plus a description and to know which category you want it placed in.

Once it has been Stumbleuponed, you need to get other people to say they like it through the Stumbleupon website.  This will help to kickstart the viral effect.  If you can, put a link to Stumbleupon on your website to make it easy for your visitors to say they like it.

A well written article with wide social appeal can get thousands of visitors in a single day from Stumbleupon.  It is a very powerful site that you, as a marketer, must be using.  With the traffic potential from this site, you are missing out on valuable backlinks and massive amounts of traffic if you are not using it.

Social bookmarking is one of the best ways to get your websites ranking well and for getting direct traffic.  The search engines know that the social bookmarking sites are a direct indicator of what people are actual interested in.  Sure, they know marketers use it, but they realise that the majority of content that is social bookmarked multiple times is real content that people are finding useful and interesting.

You can take advantage of this and use social bookmarking to get your sites ranking well for their keywords.

Firstly, you need to open an account on some social bookmarking sites.  Rather than social bookmark each site manually, look at software such as OnlyWire which semi-automates the process.  This will make your life a lot easier.

Once you have your account set up, find some Internet marketing colleagues, friends or family who would be willing to set up an account themselves with Onlywire.

Then you simply trade bookmarks.  They bookmark your sites, you bookmark theirs.

Most marketers only have their sites bookmarked once, and very occasionally more than once.  The search engines are probably very aware of this and so pay more attention to sites that have multiple bookmarks on a single site.

This simple technique can easily get you multiple bookmarks and will give your sites a much needed boost in the search engines.

Alternatively, you can outsource the bookmarking and hire people to do it for you.  This will very quickly add up if you are creating a lot of sites.  You can find people on forums such as Digitalpoint who will do it very cheaply for you, but it is still going to add up.

You can apply the same technique to sites such as Stumbleupon and Digg, both of which can potentially get you massive amounts of traffic.  These sites expect more newsworthy and interesting articles.  With a well written article you can expect thousands of visitors in a day, quite literally.

Setting up multiple social bookmarking accounts yourself and bookmarking your sites is possible.  However, these sites are smart and will realise what you are doing unless you hide behind proxies.  This can be done, but often the hassle isn’t worth it, particularly when it is easy to network with other marketers.

Networking with other marketers and trading bookmarks also has a side effect of building your network of contacts.  These could potentially turn into joint venture partners, product partners or more in the future.

Social bookmarking is an excellent way for you to get traffic both from the search engines and from the social bookmarking sites.  Do it well and you can benefit from great search engine rankings and massive traffic.

Technorati Tags: Blogging Tips