Url Shorteners – Why Affiliate Marketers Should Use Them

admin    Twitter     Affiliate, Marketers, Shorteners, Should, them

Url Shorteners – Why Affiliate Marketers Should Use Them

There are many things that you need to do when you are operating your own successful affiliate marketing business. If you have join any online affiliate network like Clickbank, Amazon or other major networks, you should have realized that the link that is inclusive of your ID tends to very long and ugly. Here are the 3 main reasons why you want to make use of url shortener.

The first reason is that you will want to make it more presentable. If you are going to place a long link inside your website or the emails that you send your customers, it will looks very ugly and your customers might not want to click on it. Most of the visitors online have the perception most of the long and ugly links is always associated with websites that contains spyware or adult materials.

The second reason is that you will want to cloak your own unique ID within your referral link. There are some visitors who will try to replace it with their own ID so that they will be able to get a discount of the product when they purchase it through their own referral link. You will be providing one more extra layer of security to ensure that you will get your commission if the customer purchases the product through your link.

The third reason is that you might want to shorten the link so that you can place it in your twitter message if you are using twitter marketing. There is very limited space of 140 characters that you can place on your tweets and you will want to make use of the url shortener so that you place a live link within your message. If you have build a good relationship with your followers and you want to recommend one good product to them, you will want to make use of this services.

Here are the 3 main reasons why affiliate marketers should be using the url shortener. There are many of these free services available online and you will want to make good use of it so that you will get more clicks to your links which will means more profits for your business.

Related Twitter Marketing Articles

New Twitter Users’ Biggest Mistakes: How to Avoid Them

admin    Twitter     Avoid, Biggest, Mistakes, them, Twitter, Users

I am not usually a big fan of rules when it comes to social media, but I do think there are ways to make your experience using tools such as Twitter more beneficial to yourself and others. There are some common mistakes I see new users make that I want to share with you. The good news is, once you are aware of them they are really easy to avoid!

Mistake: Not using a real picture of yourself for your avatar.

When I first joined Twitter over a year ago I was guilty of using a cartoon-type picture of me for mine. I thought it was cute and it happened to be part of the design I had on my previous blog. However, I switched to an actual photo of myself a few months later, and more than a few people commented that they were glad to see the real me.

I feel the same about others now. A picture of you is a lot more personable than a picture of your dog or a company logo. People like to see your smile!

Mistake: Automating pushy direct messages for new followers.

Many Twitter users use a service such as TweetLater to set up automatic messages to go to anyone who begins following them. This is a bit controversial among people on Twitter. If you are automating a friendly message to just say thanks for following me, that’s one thing, but a message with a link to one of your products when we haven’t even connected yet is generally frowned upon.

Mistake: Starting to follow people without posting a couple of your updates.

It may feel like you are talking to yourself to do this, especially if you don’t have any followers yourself. But when someone comes upon your page and is deciding whether or not to follow you, they need something to go on. People are looking for some sign of life or personality.

Mistake: Not spending a good amount of time interacting.

There is nothing wrong with letting others know what you did last night or what your plans are for the day. Just be sure to intersperse your tweets with some two-way conversation. Ask questions, re-tweet others, reply to questions, comment on others tweets, etc. This builds community and keeps things balanced and interesting.

Mistake: Mass following right out of the gate.

My ratio of followers to those I am following is pretty even, mainly because I like to follow back most of the people who follow me as long as they don’t look like spammers.

However, I find it hard to follow others who, in addition to having only a couple of updates, are following thousands of people and have only a few people following them. It feels spammy, like they don’t have much interest in having a relationship or conversation with anyone.

Mistake: Doing everything from the web instead of using a Twitter client.

Installing a client such as Tweetdeck gives you more functionality than what you can do from the Twitter website alone. For example, Tweetdeck allows you to place people in groups which make it easier to keep track of them, especially once you are following lots of people. Plus, you don’t have to be connected to the web to use these types of clients. I find they make tweeting a lot easier and more convenient for keeping track of your replies, direct messages and followers.

Mistake: All promotion, all the time.

As I have mentioned in previous articles, no one likes to follow someone who is constantly selling and promoting without giving anything back. Keep things balanced and respect that others do not want to be pitched all of the time. That being said…

Mistake: Not leveraging Twitter as part of your business marketing strategy.

If you are in business and using social media, you are looking at Twitter as a tool to get results in that business, not to just socialize all day. Remember that it is a great way to reinforce your brand, form strategic alliances and build credibility and trust.

SEO for Bing and Google: Keywords and where to use them

admin    MSN Bing     Bing, Google, Keywords, them

How/where to place your keywords

When the bots/crawlers, whether they be google’s or msn’s, crawl your website they look for the keywords in places where a human reader might expect them.  That means that placement in relevant areas, and tailored to an actual reader is key to good results.

If you’re writing an essay or paper, the title will often tell the reader what the article is about right off the bat.  This is similar with the crawlers in that what you say in your <title> tags is weighted more heavily than inside the <body> tags.  Actually, keep that analogy in mind.  
Think of your website as an anthology or a collection of pieces of literature(i.e. a book of poems for example).  You have your website’s url which is important in that it is like the name of your anthology.  Now if your anthology’s name was “Poems I Like” versus “The Collected Works of Dr. Seuss”, which do you think would be more specific?. The latter of course, but don’t freak out if your website url doesn’t have some of the keywords you’re trying to attract. It definitely helps though.  I read an interesting article over at Them.pro about Google vs. Bing when it comes to having keywords in your URL. According to their test it does seem that Bing gives more weight to having a keyword in your URL. If your website was about pokemon… when you’re starting off it might be a good idea to have “pokemon” in your url.  You don’t have to have that perfect URL with all the right words… but it helps.

Now of course take this with a grain of salt… I recently started a blog that is now number 1 on google for “optimizing bing” … however with Bing… even with both keywords in the url, it’s nowhere to be seen.  There are many more factors to look into as I continue with articles.

Moving on … we discussed keywords in title tags… Those are like your book’s titles. What would be the next relevant source of info for finding out the structure of a book? It would probably be chapter names. We can think of these as the h1, h2, etc headers.  Header tags which are direct and help summarize your body text can go a long way with your SEO.

According to the Bing Webmasters, the other two relevant places for keywords would be within the “meta tags” and in outgoing links within the <a> tags.  Describing where your link is taking someone is useful in that the crawlers love when you link relevant material.  So if you’re linking to a site that is related to yours using your targeted keywords, those keywords will probably get indexed for your site. Sharing is caring!

I think you’re tired of the analogy… and I don’t even want to try and stretch it that far to incorporate those last two. Meta tags could get it’s own article later. Hopefully you get the general idea though.
Summary of Important Keyword Locations

1. Keywords in URL
2. Keywords in Page titles
3. Keywords in Body header h1, h2 tags
4. Keywords in Meta Tags
5. Keywords in Outgoing links <a> tags

Things to note… Don’t bother stuffing your tags or these areas with keywords if it has nothing to do with your article.  This is going to help you in the long run if you focus on the content… which is of course king.