So, you’re an online marketer with a great idea that you know will be loved by your target market.  You’re quite certain that it’s going to be a venerable cash cow once it is implemented properly.  The problem is, your resources are quite wanting at the moment.  For starters, you have yet to establish a credible brand that could instantly win consumer confidence.  You will not be able to sell the product that would result from your idea on the strength of your name alone.  Also, your mailing list is composed of ten subscribers, all of whom you have painstakingly sought out throughout two years… or even more.  More importantly, you don’t have the financial capital to fund the production of your idea.

So, what should be done?  Should you give up on your grand idea just like that?

Hold your horses, dear friend.  There is a way that you could avail of to have your idea see the light of day.

It’s called joint venturing, or JV as it has fondly been called in the online marketing scene.  Joint ventures are partnerships between two or more online marketers, all of whom pool together their resources to ensure the success of a particular project.  Once profit is realized, these partners employ a previously established profit-sharing scheme.  Everyone who chipped in would be given his just share.  And everyone would go home happy.

If you don’t have the resources for the idea you have in mind, you could seek out some online businessmen who would be willing to enter a joint venture with you.  Why would they want to partner up with someone like you?  Well, there are many benefits that can be had with joint ventures which they will find pretty hard to resist.

* Since several people will pool together their resources for a joint venture, the risks can be minimized.  Assuming the worst scenario that the project would fail, the losses would be less since it will be borne by several individuals, compared to the losses that can be incurred by a sole endeavor.

* Joint ventures allow online marketers to compensate for missing components in their portfolios.  Don’t have a big mailing list?  Partner up with someone who has tens and thousands of subscribers.  Don’t have the cash to fund production?  Seek out someone who has some extra money to invest.  Don’t have an idea that can be profitably pursued?  Seek out a creative soul beaming with novel concepts that are begging to be exploited.

*   Joint ventures help build your brand in the online marketing community.  If you’re an intermediate marketer who manages to enter a joint venture with a renowned guru, you’d be able to enjoy an instant boost to your reputation in the industry.

* Joint ventures foster great relationships between marketers.  The experience of having worked with each other can blossom into friendship and future partnerships.

There is no reason for an online marketer to refuse whatever helpful contribution you could provide for a project.  He may be a well established personality in the industry, and you’re just a cub who’s starting out, but you may possess something that he does not have, and this would make you a valuable part of the team.

The trick, really, is in knowing where to seek out some joint venture partners.  If you have a great idea backed up by an equally amazing business plan, then finding willing partners would be easy, if you’re looking for them in the right places.

Here’s a tip.  Join online business forums and start posting significant messages.  Be a helpful member of the community and build your reputation.  Then publish a thread the calls for joint venture partners.  Explain to your respondents what you have in mind, and chances are, they’ll be more than interested to get started at the soonest possible time.

Joint ventures prove that in internet marketing, there is no such thing as lack of resources.  What can lead to failure in this field is lack of imagination.

When it comes to doing business online, you will soon discover that it’s all about the traffic.  Traffic, or the number of internet users you’d be able to generate for your website, is and will always be the lifeblood of any online venture.  After all, what good is a website when there’s no one there to see its pages?  How successful will your digital products be if no one would be able to know about them?  Who will avail of your services when no one will get exposed to their existence?

Contrary to what many people believe, generating traffic for your website does not start once you pages are published and have gone live.  Traffic generation strategies start at the very moment you are conceptualizing an idea for the website itself.

This is what on page search engine optimization (SEO) is all about.  It is concerned with techniques that you could implement on your web pages themselves to ensure a good volume of traffic for your website.  80% of your traffic would come from the many search engines in the World Wide Web.  If each and every web page you have is optimized for these search engines, then your website would be in a good position to have a high rank for the results of every relevant query.

* Keyword selection.  Choosing the right keywords is essential for the success of your website.  Keywords are the popular search terms that people use to gather information from the search engines.  If your web pages are populated by the right density of the correct keywords, then you’ll have better chances of winning the attention of the search engine spiders.  To determine the appropriate keywords for the subject that your website will be servicing, use the free tools that can be found at www.nichebot.com .

* Keyword placement in content.  Content is the king of the internet.  But even royalty needs support.  Populate your content with the proper amount of keywords.  A density level of at least 2% should be sought.  This means that the right keywords should be mentioned at least twice for every 100 words of text.

* META tags.  META tags are HTML codes that do not have a bearing on the physical appearance of your web pages, but they do inform the search engine spiders that such web pages are appropriate for a particular query.  Always include the following META tags on the top portion of your source code.  You could copy-paste them from the list below, but do change the indicated fields.  Also, make sure that you include your keywords as much as you could on your META tags.

* ALT tags.  ALT tags refer to the text that would appear every time the mouse cursor would pass through an image.  Your ALT tags should include your keywords.

* Page titles.  Page titles are the captions that appear at the very top of your web page.  Make sure that each web page in your website would have a different title that will include the appropriate keywords.

* Focus.  Remember, search engines will crawl through your website per page.  Each page is a different project altogether.  Focus is the key.  Ensure that each web page of yours would focus on a particular keyword or key phrase.  If there is an article in that page, make sure that the article will only discuss and include one keyword or key phrase from the list you have made.  Also, it would greatly help if you would name the page file in a manner that would include the keyword or key phrase it is focused on.  For example, www.thisisyourwebsite.com/thisisyourkeyword.html is a good page filename that would help boost your SEO efforts.

Following these guidelines would help you a lot in securing a favorable position in search engine results pages.  This in turn would guarantee for you a sustainable and sufficient volume of traffic that would make your website a genuine success.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a science of sorts that would enable you to ensure a favorably prominent position for your website in search engine results pages (SERPs). And since 80% of your traffic would come from the search engines, SEO methods take on a critical importance in the success of your online endeavor.

There are two kinds of SEO, on page and off page. This article will tackle the latter.

Off page SEO is all about the things you could to get a high page rank (PR) for your website after it has already gone live. These are the things which you actually execute outside the pages of your website, hence the name of this type of SEO.

What are these steps?

Well, all of them are concerned with building your link popularity. Your link popularity represents the number of back links your website has. To check you website’s current link popularity, head over to www.linkpopularity.com and use the free tool that can be found there. The higher your link popularity, the higher your PR will be.

Building your link popularity involves increasing the number of websites that will link to yours. This is easier said than done. It’s not a matter of getting reciprocal links like “you link to me and I’ll link to yours.” Google, in particular, despise reciprocal linking. You have to get unilateral links to your website.

The best way to do this is by ensuring that you have unique, highly informative content. Really, this is the number one strategy to invite websites to link to yours. But your content in the realm of on page SEO, and it is assumed that you have made all efforts to ensure great content.

What are the other ways by which you could build your link popularity? Try the following techniques:

* Article marketing. There are thousands of article directories on the Internet. You could submit articles to these websites. For every submission, you will be allotted a resource box where you could introduce yourself and share a link to your website. Now, some of these article directories have high page ranks. If your articles are accepted, they will be included in their pages. Having a website with high PR linking to yours would go a long way in increasing your own page rank. Additionally, if you will submit just one article to a thousand directories, you’d have a thousand pages linking to your website! Sounds like a daunting task? There are article directory submission services available. Seek them out. For as low as $25, they could submit your articles to as many as 200 directories.

* Forum marketing. There are online communities dedicated to the subject that your website is serving. Seek them out, then join them. You’d be allotted a signature box, which would appear in your every post. In your signature box, you could leave a link to your website. Then post as many significant messages as you could. For every post you will make, you’d have a page linking to your website.

* Advertise at www.craigslist.com . Now here’s a novel strategy. The website www.craigslist.com is a well known classifieds website with a PR7 score. A PR7 score is rarely high! To have a link in a website like this would give a tremendous boost to your own website. Simply go to that site and choose the category that your pages belong to, then post your advertisement, with your link of course. It doesn’t matter that no one would get to read it. What matters is that the search engine spiders would find your website as they would come from a PR7 site.

* Look for partners who are willing to include your list in their pages. The easiest way to do this is to use the free tool at www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php .

* Try triangular linking. Google despises reciprocal linking, but triangular linking is one way of going around this limitation. Look for two or more webmasters who are willing to give it a shot. Webmaster A could post a link to Webmaster B’s website in his own pages. Webmaster B can post a link to Webmaster C’s website in his own pages. And webmaster C can post a link to Webmaster A’s website in his own pages. It may enforce the same principle as reciprocal linking, but the search engine spiders are not programmed to figure this out… yet.

A registered domain name would give you an address in the virtual world. A web hosting service would give you a lot. It’s time to build your house.

But there are many kinds of houses, with each type serving a particular need. In the same light, there are many kinds of websites, and each type would also serve a particular need. Our goal right now is to determine the kinds of websites you could create to best serve you affiliate marketing concerns.

As an affiliate, here are a number of website models you could decide to employ. Let’s take a look at them.

A Review Center

You could create a website, preferably using a blogging software like that offered by www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com , which seeks to review the products that are released in the market. Here’s the deal, though. Review the products you are promoting. Naturally, you’d want your reviews to be favorable for the affiliate merchant’s offerings. So stress the beneficial points of the products so that your visitors may be encouraged to click on your affiliate link and be redirected to the affiliate merchant’s sales page.

An Affiliate Mall

An effective way of promoting your affiliate links is through an affiliate mall. You could make your website into an online catalogue of sorts. Display the products you are promoting, and attach your affiliate links. Provide a short but encouraging description for each product. Also include a small image of the product itself (as an affiliate, you are allowed to use the affiliate program’s images for your promotional campaigns, so you won’t be violating any copyrights by doing this).

This setup is quite empowering for your visitors. They are given the option to choose which among the products you are pre-selling would be most advantageous for them.

A Content Site

Content is king on the internet. People surf the World Wide Web in search for information. If you have the information they need, then you’re in business. You could focus on unique and quality information for your website, and include your affiliate links by way of recommendation or direct announcement.

There are many kinds of content sites which you could decide to build:

 a news site which offers the latest information on the market you will be catering to;
 an information hub containing guides and general information about the same market;
 a download center for valuable products you’re freely offering (this is great for a viral marketing campaign, which we will discuss in subsequent lessons)

An Opt-In Page

You will not be able to win all of them. You won’t even be able to win a majority of them. The best thing you could aim for is to gather the “yes” visitors, try your best to change the mind of the “no” visitors, and capture the contact information of the “maybe” visitors so that you could continue to convince them for a future sale. And this you could do with a mailing list.

By having them subscribe to your mailing list, you’d be able to contact them at any time, with new offers, or perhaps with some valuable tidbits that would warm them up to purchase what the affiliate merchant is selling. All you need is an account with an excellent autoresponder service, which you could integrate in such a page so that it will capture prospective leads on auto-pilot.

You could employ this strategy on any of the website models we have mentioned above, or you could make a web page specifically designed to capture the aforementioned contact details.

Though anyone can achieve success with affiliate programs, not everyone manages to do the same. The reason? Well, there are 10 of them, actually. These are the biggest mistakes that make success in affiliate marketing very elusive. Study them well, and read up on how to avoid them. Hurdling through these mistakes can spell the difference between monumental profits and dismal performance in your affiliate marketing campaigns.

1. Believing that people would just click on their affiliate links. Though an affiliate’s job is merely limited to pre-selling, pre-selling involves more than just displaying the affiliate links. It also entails encouraging people to click on them by enumerating the benefits that can be derived from the affiliate merchant’s products, giving favorable recommendations about the use of the same, and providing an encouraging offer that would entice readers to check out the package.

2. Believing that there’s such a thing as organic traffic. Organic traffic, or traffic that is naturally generated by a website, is a myth. There is no such thing! If you’re hosting your affiliate links in one website, you can’t expect people to find it just like that. You have to make them find it. This can be done through effective SEO techniques and efficient marketing strategies.

3. Believing that employing one marketing strategy is enough. Some people actually think that submitting one article to the article directories would give them the amount of traffic they need. This is a fatal mistake. Limiting yourself to a single, or even a couple, of marketing tactics would be limiting the number of visitors you could generate for your website. Also, you’ll fail to tap into other segments of your targeted market if your tactics aren’t flexible enough to expand.

4. Failing to study your campaign’s performance. Most affiliates merely check on how much they have earned per day, and if such an amount remains at low levels, they fail to make corresponding adjustments because, well, they don’t know which aspects of their campaigns need improving. It is important to study every facet of our marketing strategies. How many visitors are we generating for our website? How many of them are unique? How many are returning? How much time do they spend in our pages? Where are they coming from? To where are they exiting? These are the questions that can be answered by an excellent visitor tracking software program, and these are the questions that could help us improve the performance of our marketing endeavors.

5. Failing to find an affiliate program which actually offers sellable products. Some affiliate programs may offer as much as a 95% commission per sale. But if the products are impossible to sell, you’d never realize the profit the program promises.

6. Failing to find an affiliate program with a proven record of consumer satisfaction. The credibility of an enterprise depends on how people view it. If the affiliate program has established great relationships with the members of its target market, then it has established a brand which is recognizable for its excellent service. You’d have an easier time pre-selling such an affiliate program’s products.

7. Failing to keep abreast with the latest developments in the industry. There will come a time when the marketing knowledge we know would become obsolete, more so in the field of internet marketing where everything transpires at a rapid pace. You have to constantly update yourself with the newest trends, techniques and news in this field to always keep your competitive edge.

8. Failing to invest on knowledge. Knowledge likewise evolves and you have to evolve with it. Buy noteworthy eBooks, special reports and the likes… those which would teach you the latest tactics to help you conquer your field.

9. Resting on your laurels once a semblance of success is achieved. Success is not eternal. You have to sustain it. If you leave your business alone once it shows the promise of success, you’re just setting it up for failure.

10. Believing that affiliate marketing is a “get rich quick” scheme. It is not. You have to invest a certain level of commitment, a lot of time, some financial resources on occasions, and a whole lot of effort if you want to truly realize the many wonderful things that this field does promise.