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Now playing: Last Night by Al Jarreau
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Finding a good niche is half the battle when it comes to affiliate marketing. It is also the cause of much angst and hair-pulling by newbies. But chin up, baldy, because there are still tons of good niches left, and you can find them in places you might not have considered, namely, not on the computer.

Can you see the signs?

As I write this, we are driving along the street in Panama City, and on every block there are dozens of potential niche ideas. (Never mind why I'm working while on vacation. I just can't help myself.) Signs, businesses, buildings, window displays, trees, vehicles, workers, pedestrians—you get the idea.

I'm not saying that any of these things is a niche in itself; they are too broad and some of them are simply idea catalysts. But observing them can bring hundreds of possible niches to mind. Here's an RV dealership: Could a certain type of RV or RV accessory be a good niche? What about other products that RV'ers/campers/travelers need? There's someone who appears to be a student walking on the sidewalk with a backpack. Could you make a site about college textbooks or backpacks and bags or simple furniture for a college dorm?

Here's an old Mercedes in a car lot. If you like a certain make of car, or a particular component of classic or sports cars or whatever, is there a niche there? There's a billboard advertising a landscaping service. Do you have an interest in gardening, fencing, or any other product related to landscaping?

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that these niche ideas are necessarily profitable ones because I haven't researched them. I'm just making the point that keyword ideas are literally everywhere. They're not just lists of words on a computer screen.

Look around you

So if you're stuck and can't come up with a possible niche, take a drive, take a walk, go to a movie, go out to eat, read a book—whatever will stimulate your mind and your senses. Let your mind wander, do some free associations. Have a notepad with you so you can jot down ideas as they occur to you. Write everything down, even if you don't think it will work as a niche. It can prompt you to think of other related things later that might work.

Affiliate marketing is about providing web searchers with products related to their interests. They are real people with real lives and real needs just like you, and if you think of them that way rather than just disembodied hands clicking a mouse somewhere, you'll never be short of possibilities for your web sites.

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I'm sorry, I haven't had a chance to post a Friday Foolishness video for a couple of weeks, but I'm back at it with this Weird Al Yankovic palindrome song. If you like words, this is pretty amazing. And funny!

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If you use WordPress, Thesis is a definite must-have, or at least must-try. I recently purchased a developer's license and am in the process of switching some of my blogs over to it. I can already see that it was money well spent.

Now that I have Thesis, themes that I used to get for free from various web sites just aren't good enough anymore. True, much of the design work is already done with these themes, but if you want to make any customizations to them, you have to dig into the code and get your hands dirty. Not all of us are comfortable doing that!

The Thesis theme allows you to make major changes to your blog's appearance and structure from a plain English interface. Here's a screenshot of some of the options having to do with meta tags, what to have in the navigation menus and the header—basically, the behind-the-scenes stuff. This is only half of the screen; there's much more below this in the actual admin area.

Under Thesis Design Options, below is part of what you'll see. This is where you choose fonts, colors, number and order of columns, header, sidebar, and footer options, and much more.

There's also a fantastic free plugin for Thesis called Thesis OpenHook. This allows you to insert banners, buttons, text, or just about anything you want at various places on the page, such as before or after the header, before or after posts, before or after sidebars, etc. This makes it incredibly easy to customize this theme for your various sites. You can buy the developer's option and use Thesis on as many sites as you want, and it will never look the same.

Once you try this premium theme, you'll never go back to free. Thesis theme creators, DIY Themes, have made an outstanding product, worth every penny.

I'll be bringing you more information about this theme in future posts. For now, would you like to see a video on how it can work for you? Watch a Thesis video here.

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Is the use of social sites such as Twitter or Facebook necessary in order to succeed in affiliate marketing? If you're a cut-to-the-chase kind of person and want a yes or no, the answer is no. If you'd like a little explanation of my reasons for saying that—and possibly a little rambling—read on.

Social media marketing is big, there's no doubt. It seems like every time you turn around, the words Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace, and many others, are smacking you in the face. If you're not using them at this point, constantly hearing about them can get a little annoying, can't it? In fact, if you're irritated enough, you might even be "boycotting" them in protest.

So should you worry that not jumping on the social media bandwagon will hurt your affiliate business? No, I don't think so.

Social marketing definitely has its place. And, done well, it certainly won't hurt you. But if you're building niche affiliate sites, it is by no means necessary. In my opinion, it might even be a detriment in some cases because you might get carried away with the social sites and not give your sites the attention they deserve: creating lots of interesting, well written, and helpful content.

Besides, social traffic is generally not buying traffic. Your main goal in social media marketing is more to network with others than to attract buyers, so it has more of an indirect benefit than you might be thinking. In other words, you can't expect that each tweet to Twitter will not result in X number of sales. Rather, you'll be building relationships through these sites, improving your reputation, and creating trust in the information you're putting out there.

So these sites can be very valuable in your overall marketing strategy. But they shouldn't be your focus to the exclusion of writing good content for your site. You're better off putting 95% of your effort, if not more, into building your affiliate sites and obtaining backlinks. These activities will do the most to help you build authority and climb the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

By doing that you'll capture the buyers out there who are actively using the search engines to find information on your topic, and that is job one if you want success in affiliate marketing.

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The term "keyword" may seem fairly obvious, but in reality its definition in connection with affiliate marketing is not always automatically known by those brand new to the field. When I started, I didn't understand what keywords were (other than that I knew they must be words of some sort!) or what they had to do with anything.

To put it simply, keywords consist of anything a web searcher types into a search engine. We'll talk about why we need to know this in a minute, but first let's look at some examples.

If you were searching for information on dog breeds online, what might you type into Google (or your search engine of choice)? You might put one of these options:

dogs
dog breeds
dog breeding
which dog breed is right for me

Well, each of these is a keyword; in other words, there are 4 keywords above. Notice that a keyword can actually be made up of several words but still be considered "a keyword."

The last one, "which dog breed is right for me," is called a long-tail keyword, obviously because it is quite long—in fact, this one happens to be an entire sentence.

With keywords, word order and plurals make a difference. So "dog" is a different keyword than "dogs," even though they refer to the same thing. "Dog breeds" is a different keyword than "breeds dog" or "breeds of dog."

So why do we care?

Well, in affiliate marketing, how people search the web is of great importance. When they search, you want them to find your site, so you need to know how they are searching in order to best position yourself to be found.

When someone types "dog breeds" into Google, it looks for all the web sites that have the keyword "dog breeds" in them and ranks them in order of relevance and quality using an algorithm that nobody fully understands and is constantly changing.

Therefore, if we know what keywords people are typing into Google, we can incorporate them in our sites. If you build a site about various dog breeds, you'll want to include the keyword "dog breeds" so that you will appear in the pages of results that Google serves up to the searcher. How to get ranked high in the results, like on the first page, is beyond the scope of this particular article. For now you just need to know that in order to be in the list, you have to have the keywords people are using on your site.

People are different (duh, right?)

Obviously, different people will use different terms to look for the same thing. Some tend to type in the main words in a term, and some like to type in a whole sentence, in essence asking the search engine a question like the fourth keyword above. So, if you're following my line of thought, you're already beginning to realize why keywords are important. If you can assemble a nice long list of keywords on your subject, your site can be found no matter what type of person is searching or what keywords they use.

The next question is, then, how can we find out what keywords people are using, other than by simply guessing? You might think guessing is enough, but let me tell you right now, it most assuredly is not. Not if you're serious about affiliate marketing. Successful and smart marketers always do their keyword research before beginning a web site.

They do this by making use of a variety of tools available that track the data they need. We will consider some of these tools in more detail in an upcoming post.

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Google is a very familiar tool to Internet marketers and online shoppers/searchers alike. But there are some things you can do with it that might have escaped your attention. I know I was not aware of many of the search parameters that are built in for the user's convenience. Here are a few that I find particularly useful. You can find a full list at google.com/help/features.html.

Remember that these should be typed into the Google search bar, not the address bar of your browser where you type in URLs such as http://skipthescams.com. Most browsers have a search bar built in (or you can install an add-on) so that it's easy to use these features right from wherever you are. If you don't want to leave the page you're on, you could just keep a second tab or window open to the Google home page.

Time

Need to know what time it is in another part of the world? Just type "time" and the city or country in question.

time Madrid
or
time Australia

If, like in Australia, there are several time zones, it will show a list of cities with their respective times. As an interesting side note, I didn't realize that Australia had "half-hour" zones. When it's 8:00 in Perth on the west and 11:00 in Sydney on the east, it's 9:35 in Darwin in the middle. Hmm.

Calculator

When I'm comfy on the couch working on my laptop, I don't want to get up to get the calculator when I need to add or multiply something. (It's not easy to get up from the couch these days.) Fortunately, I can just type the calculation into the Google search bar.

1,492.93 + 3,697.01 + 4,822.60=
or
60*4/2=
(60 times 4 divided by 2)

Unit conversions

This one is really cool. How many of us know how to convert inches to centimeters or liters to quarts or yen to dollars? Me either. So type what you need to know into the search bar like this:

4 quarts in liters
or
80 dollars to yen

Note you can use the word "in" or "to" between the units. Very handy.

Definitions

There are lots of dictionary sites where you can type in a word and get the definition. But you can save time by simply typing "define" and the word into Google.

define astute
or
define habeas corpus

Usually before you even have to hit enter, the definition pops up.

Movie showtimes

Just type in the word "movies"—or the name of a current movie you're interested in seeing—and your zip code.

movies 54401
or
dear john 48197

It will return showtimes at theaters near you. Husbands/boyfriends, get off this computer for a while and take your lovely wife/girlfriend to a movie! And I mean a movie she will enjoy. (I believe real men are not afraid to watch a chick flick in public.)

Airline information

You can find the status of a flight by typing the name of the airline and the flight number.

Delta 25

Find information on delays at a specific airport by entering the city name or three-letter airport code and "airport."

JFK airport

If you're on board a plane with Internet access and the captain isn't too forthcoming with information about whether you're on schedule, I suppose you could type in your own flight number and get the scoop that way, although I haven't tried it myself.

Package tracking

Simply input your tracking number, and that's it.

1Z9999X7777888888999

How does it do this? When you type a number into Google, it checks to see if it has a recognizable pattern, such as for tracking numbers, zip codes, area codes, VIN numbers, and more. Pretty cool.

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So there you go! There's a lot more information available in Google's help center to help you put the world's most popular search engine to work for you. Check out http://www.google.com/support.

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In the last post, we discussed 6 factors that influence the amount of time it takes a beginner to make decent money at affiliate marketing. We've got 6 more to look at today, and these may be even more important. Some of them are related concepts, but we'll take them separately. Again, they are not in any particular order.

7) Amount of time available to put in
8)Time management skills
9) Ability to focus
10) Work ethic
11) The general economy
12) Patience and perseverance

7) Amount of time available to put in

This one is pretty obvious. If all you can do is an hour or two a day, it's going to take a while. Don't get me wrong: It's still worth it. But you will reach your goals much faster if you are able to devote at least part-time hours to it, like 3 or 4 hours a day. Full-time hours are even better, but most people have to keep working their "real" job while learning affiliate marketing, so it may not be possible. Keep in mind, too, the fact that it's hard to build and maintain momentum with only a few minutes or an hour a day.

8)Time management skills

When time is limited, good management of those precious minutes and hours is even more important. Making a schedule and then sticking to it is vital. Saying to yourself that you'll work on it whenever you have a few minutes is not likely to work. Aren't we all looking for that "few minutes"? Do we ever find them? Not often enough to really make progress.

Managing your time well also means not frittering it away on checking e-mail, reading Internet forums, and playing on Facebook or Twitter. Using your time for real work instead will get you farther faster.

9) Ability to focus

Related to time management is the ability to keep focus on one task at a time, one goal at a time, one day at a time. Countless new Internet marketers have fallen into the trap of constantly moving from one technique to another, always chasing what's new and "groundbreaking," never following through to the point of actual success with any one method. Others jump around simply because they get bored. When they get to the more tedious, less exciting aspects of a method, they lose interest and move on.

Yet another group allow themselves to constantly be distracted by TV, family, Internet surfing, food, e-mail, you name it. Now, I'm not saying Internet marketing is more important than your family. Or food. But you will need to be able to work without distractions and interruptions to a reasonable degree if you hope to ever accomplish anything.

10) Work ethic

People who get into this field expecting to make easy money are inevitably disullusioned once they realize there is work involved. Much of the fault for this lies with scam artists who prey on desperation and naivete by promising boatloads of cash for little to no work. People have been conditioned to believe that Internet marketing is an easy road to riches, and the only reason they haven't made any money at it is that they just haven't found the "secret" yet.

Well, here's the secret: W. O. R. K. The sooner a person realizes this and acts on it, the sooner they succeed. Simple as that.

11) The general economy

Affiliate marketing, like any means of income, can be affected by a poor economy. I personally don't believe it is affected as much—and in fact, depending on the niche, it may actually get better—but it would be unrealistic to say economic conditions in general don't matter. If you happen to get started in AM when times are tough, it may take longer to make it pay than if things are good. Sounds rather simplistic, but why complicate a fairly obvious concept?

12) Patience and perseverance

Whether you're a patient person or not doesn't directly relate to how fast things happen for you, but obviously, if you're willing to hang in there and keep at it despite setbacks or times when you wonder whether you'll ever reach your goals, you will reach them sooner than someone who gives up after a few months.

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It's clear that there are lots of variables involved in the common question, How long does it take? The good news is that most of the 12 factors we've discussed are entirely within your power to control!

Picture yourself a year from now. Whether you give affiliate marketing a try or not, you will be a year older. You will look back on this year and evaluate your life. Whether it makes you smile with satisfaction or chafe with regret is up to you.

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