Placing banner advertisements on your website can increase your monthly revenue greatly. This option is better than being an affiliate for several companies because you will get one monthly fee no matter how many of your visitors go to the website or make a purchase. The main thing is for you to create an informative website filled with useful articles, so that you can generate a high amount of returning visitors. As your site rises on search engine rankings, the blank space on your site will begin to look more and more appealing to advertisers. Anyone can be an affiliate, but to have a banner placed in a good spot on a high-ranking website will bring in the most revenue for a company. Once you have established yourself as a site that can be profitable for them, you can rent out different spaces on your site for advertisers to place banner ads. Each month you will be paid the same fee, no matter how much they do or do not make from your site. (Word Count 184) Keyword density and placement are important parts of optimizing your articles for search engines. Search engine spiders scan a page in a way that makes it important to place your keywords where they will be detected and recognized as a keyword, so that your article will come up when someone searches for that keyword. What is a Keyword? A keyword is a word that is going to be placed in your article several times, not just once as that would make every word a keyword. When a spider sees that you have a word placed several times in an article, it will determine that your page may be useful to users that search for such a keyword. Over-Optimizing Your Articles It is important to note that there is also such a thing as over-optimizing your articles for particular words. This is known as “keyword stuffing”. When you stuff keywords in an article a spider will detect that you are trying to trick it into placing your article high in the search engine results for that word, and instead of giving you a high placement will actually penalize your site and your page. This may even affect the rankings of your other pages or get your site blacklisted from a particular search engine if you are found keyword stuffing too many times. What is Keyword Density? Keyword density is the number of times your keyword is placed in your article. Most use a percentage to determine how many times they will put a keyword in an article. For instance, if you have a 500 word article and want to achieve a keyword density of 5%, then you will need to have the keyword in your article exactly 25 times. You can find hundreds of resources and guides recommending one level of keyword density over another and the reasons behind the logic, but in the end you will have to determine which density is more profitable for your articles. Each webmaster has their own density that they like to achieve based on past results. As long as you don’t over optimize and you are making sufficient profit from your rankings, then you can choose whatever keyword density you like. The Right Density No matter what exact density you choose, it is important to place keywords so that there are more at the beginning and end to produce an hour-glass effect. Having the right keyword density in your article makes it more likely that you will make money from that article, because it will rise in the search engine results and be seen by more people. (Word Count 438) Here is a guide that will REALLY help you in writing articles the right way and in understanding how to include the keywords. When making money with articles, you need to find the perfect keywords to make your niche sites a success. However, many times it is expensive to utilize paid keyword search tools. For this reason, some new marketers may prefer to try and find their keywords for free. One of the best ways to do this is to use the free Yahoo Search Marketing tools that you can find on their website. First, go to the Yahoo website and choose Search Marketing under Yahoo Advertising Solutions. Scroll down to and click on Sponsored Search. You will see a section that says “How many searches can your business get?” where you will type in the main keyword of your decided niche. This will bring up a list a of words that have your niche subject in them and tell you how many people searched for that particular word the previous month. To get an idea of what the competition is like, take each word that had a substantial amount of searches and input it into the Yahoo search engine using parenthesis. This will give you a good idea of how many people search for a particular keyword and how many sites you will be in competition with for the top spots on the first two pages. This will of course take a lot more time than a paid software program and it may not give you all of the great ideas that a program might. On the other hand, it will be free and give you extra funds for other parts of your website. If you can do this for free on your own, search-engine optimize your site on your own, and write your own content, then the only thing you will have to spend money on is a website URL and web hosting. This is a great idea for those who have little to no start-up cash, a lot of time on their hands, are quick learners, and can wait for the profits to start coming in (which will pretty much be pure profit). However, if you prefer to go the easy route and utilize a keyword generating software program, you can find many online. Some are more popular than others and have been a proven way for people to dig up valuable keywords for their niche sites. (Word Count 403) To make money with articles that you place on websites, you will also need a variety of good affiliate links that will help to generate revenue. It is important that you know where to find affiliate programs and that you choose the best programs for you and your niche site. When you pick an affiliate program, it is important that you determine which companies you will profit best from, based on how frequently the product is likely to sell. There are several types of affiliate programs, and some will offer you more money from a sale than others will. Before you get hazy-eyed by dollar signs, however, remember some products are bound to sell more than others. If you sell one product four times a year from a little-known company that gives you $100 per sale, and sell a well-known product 3 times a week at the rate of $10 per sale, then you will make much more money with the $10 per sale product. Often large well-known companies will offer a very small profit per sale because they are established and know that their product is likely to sell well. Small, unknown companies, on the other hand, need all of the promotion they can get. Also, because they are unknown, their products are likely to sell less frequently. The most important rule when picking affiliate programs to promote on your site is to pick products that would be of interest to those who would be likely to visit your niche site. Otherwise you will be promoting a product to a group of people who do not even want or need it. If your niche site targets parents of young children, then promote baby products. If you niche site targets gardeners, then promote gardening products. If you promote baby products to gardeners, you are almost guaranteed not to make a profit no matter how much money the affiliate company offers for a sale. Lastly, there are two main ways to find an affiliate program for your niche website. You can sign up with a company that manages the accounts of hundreds of companies, big and small, and apply for the products within these accounts or you can do a web search for companies that would match well with your niche, visit their websites, and see if they advertise an affiliate program. (Word Count 402) |