On of the easiest ways to get traffic flowing to your website is from Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns. Of course question is on whether or not it you can afford pay per click campaign on the offset of your adventure in the affiliate marketing business.

In my opinion pay per click is something worth trying. I would advise anyone before trying Pay Per Click campaign to try and get in touch with the affiliate manager of the program you will be promoting. Not only this is a great opportunity to develop business relationship. You may also find out some very valuable information from affiliate managers. It is very likely that they can provide you with some good keyword list and sometimes even with a creative to help you started your campaign.

Also next time you buy ad domain name or an entire web-hosting plans for multiple domains don’t overlook extra offers that may come with the package. Many web hosting providers offer credits toward PPC campaigns along with their hosting plans. Just to mention a few:

Bluehost- offers $50 in Yahoo Sponsored Search and $25 in Google Adwords.

HostICan- $50 in Yahoo Sponsored Search

IPower - $50 in Yahoo and $30 in Google

I am sure there are few others that offer credits towards Pay Per Click campaigns. Just look around next time you need to purchase a hosting plan.

For those of you who have been reading my blog for a while and may consider doing PPC on Yahoo! I have a special limited time promotion of $50 to advertise on Yahoo!

Tags: Affiliate Marketing

Mark over 45n5 has posted a video question to Shawn Collins in which he asked Shawn to give an advise to those who are new to Affiliate Marketing. I am anticipating with great interest Shawn’s response, and if you are interested in Shawn response I advise you to keep an eye on both Mark’s and Shawn’s blogs.

On my part I would like to lightly contribute to the conversation, although I am very behind when it comes to vblogging. (Sorry Mark, I do not even have a camera to do a video response).

In his video Mark asked Shawn variety of questions, which I think any one who is new to affiliate marketing would ask. One question in particular caught my attention was about how to choose for example a merchant from Commission Junction merchants.

I am sure Shawn is going to give more detailed and probably more insightful response. But here are my two cents…

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Tags: Affiliate Marketing

I do variety of other things. My latest adventure involved revamping the website of my church: St. Mary’s Russian Orthodox Church. This church is one of the oldest Orthodox Churches in America. In fact state of New Jersey is going to list the church building among 150 historical landmarks.

The reason for writing this is twofold. First I would like to give my parish website an incoming link. Secondly I would like to hear opinions from my fellow bloggers. I have chosen to power the website mainly using WordPress. Main reason for it was the benefit I get on my other sites that are WordPress site: easy syndication, more visitors, easy editing. I think WordPress can be used as a sort of CMS, but while working on the website more than once I have considered Joomla instead. Unfortunately my knowledge of Joomla is very limited. But I am willing to consider possibility of using it in the future. If you could tell me how Joomla differs and whether or not there are overwhelming benefits to use Joomla over WordPress. The reason I would slightly consider Joomla is that part of the website is in Russian and “localization files” that I have found were done for WordPress 1.5 and of course do not work with 2.1.

Anyway, if you ever go to Six Flags in NJ, the church is just 2 minutes away.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing

BumpZee just released for the general public use updated widgets for your blog. With the new widget, BumpZee will track the discussion on your blog. I believe to have inderectly contributed to the development of this new widget. All you have do do is to install the new version of BumpZee widgets and voila! BumpZee is tracking your blog’s discussions:

I am a big fan of BumpZee and here is why:

1. BumpZee is #2 referring URL, my prediction that it may become #1 referring URL for this blog for next few months.

2. According to both MSN and Yahoo, there are about 50 (follow :)) links from BumpZee poiting to my website. I believe this fact is already helping my blog.

3. I would have never discovered so many wonderful blogs and bright minds if it wasn’t for BumpZee.

4. Scott Jangro, the founder, is one of the best blogger and programmer out there.

5. All the affiliate blogs in one place-the reason BumpZee has become daily destination for me because of it. I actually find myself checking with BumZee at least three times a day.

Are these reasons good enough for you to join BumpZee?

Tags: Affiliate Marketing

Since Wikipedia famous “nofollow” trick, I have learned a lot about the term “nofollow”. But also thanks to many discussions that had happened recently I have come to love term “follow”.

But when it comes to Wikipedia, I simply do not care. Why did Wikipedia become a sorto of an online encylopedia is beyond me. I have come more than once across what you can call anything from omissions to errors in many materials on this famous website. Still I am amazed that so may people link to it! Unless of course I am the only one that came across these omissions and errors.

This is my point. If you were using a spam software to protect your blog. Would you keep the software if it protected you against 100 spam comments a day except one. Unfortunately I do not remember exactly where I’ve read it, but it was on one of the blogs I was reading recently. Some one said that one spam comment was one too many.

I wonder if some of the contributors had only one thing in mind by contributing to Wikipedia, that is to get an incoming link from these guys? And if this intention overshadowed everything else along the way.

So I guess my verdict is short. I will not send my readers to a source that contains errors. As to “nofollow” it may actually help them in the long term, since it will help to eliminate people who contributed only to gain a link.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing