Work From Home Carefree - Be Your Own Boss Get Rich Make Money Working From Home Weblog. Billion Dollar Industry!

The three most important things in the real estate market (according to the real estate gurus) are location, location and location.

According to internet marketing gurus, the three most important things for a profitable website are content, content and content. But new content doesn’t grow on trees.

If you have more than one web site, finding the time to write your own content is nearly impossible - even for a full time internet marketer. Still, we know we need content, lots of it, and on a very regular basis.

So, the question is, how do we come up with content that is new, original and doesn’t cost us an arm and leg or take hours of our valuable time? The answer is PLR material.

The biggest problem is that not all PLR material is created equal. You should always choose the PLR content you will use carefully.

Good PLR content will include a lot of facts, as well as be grammatically correct (written in good English). If it doesn’t meet those two criteria, you need to keep looking. Once you find good PLR content, though, the rest is really a piece of cake.

Customize PLR to Avoid Duplication

The first, and most important thing to do is to change the title. This isn’t really optional because it’s the first thing your visitors will see, as well as the Search Engines.  No one will read something they have seen a million times before, and you could get a duplicate content penalty from Google! 

It has been said that the Search Engines look more thoroughly at the first three paragraphs, so make sure those are completely different.  Also make sure the last paragraph is substantially revised.

Many people just write, and forget all about their Keywords.  After you’ve finished re-writing the content, make sure your main keyword is in the title, as well as in the first sentence,  and at least twice in the first paragraph. 

This may all sound a little complicated, but this kind of rewriting takes only a fraction of the time that writing new material takes and it is far less expensive than hiring a ghost writer to write for you.

Find good PLR materials and then rewrite them sufficiently to make them your own and you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to keep up with adding content to your web sites.

This is chapter 6, Getting the Word Out, of Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants.

I’ve got a handful of steps on how to promote your affiliate program, to get some awareness of the affiliate program and recruit for it.

The first step is that you’ve got to craft your message to sell your affiliate program. Put that message into the language of affiliates. Don’t just say you’ve got a great affiliate program that will earn fortunes for affiliates. Be honest when promoting your affiliate program.

Provide affiliates with hard numbers they can consider when looking at your affiliate program. Tell the affiliates your average order size, overall EPC, and any other relevant metrics that can help them determine the potential of your affiliate program for them.

Affiliates don’t fall for those proclamations that you offer the best affiliate program in the world. Give them some credit and sell the real attributes of your program.

The second step is building your list. For some reason, a lot of affiliate managers seem to think it’s acceptable to collect a bunch of e-mail addresses and Spam them about joining affiliate programs. It’s not.

Instead, develop a contact list of prospective affiliates. There are lots of methods for doing this. Personally, I use a program called Link Capture, which enables me to run queries on the various search engines for keywords to see which sites are ranking well.

It also enables me to see which sites are linking to other sites, and that can be helpful sometimes to determine who some of the affiliates are for your competition.

The results from queries on Link Capture can be exported. This includes the WHOIS information for the domain and other useful pieces of data. When you’ve gathered this contact information, I’d recommend phoning or snail mailing the prospective affiliates.

I’ve sent out lots of direct mail over time, including postcards that tout the attributes of affiliate programs, as well as hand-written notes to the target affiliates. Follow up with a phone call.

While it’s tempting to mass market your affiliate program, it’s far more effective to have the personal touch. In the end, you’ll begin some real relationships with qualified affiliates, rather than a bunch of random strangers in your affiliate program.

The third step is to look into affiliate directories. Now this is listed in my book, because directories were a useful resource back in 2000 when i wrote it. Even though I have an affiliate directory myself at AffiliateThing.com, the affiliate directory is something of an antiquated approach for recruiting affiliates.

Affiliates just aren’t using the directories much anymore. You should definitely not use one of those submission services to submit your affiliate program to the “top 50 affiliate directories” or whatever. It’s a joke that there are even 50 affiliate directories of any value.

The fourth step is affiliate recruiting, and it takes a lot of different forms. Visibility is a great advertisement for your affiliate program. Work on building a good reputation and that will help to sell the affiliate program. Affiliates will find the top affiliate programs.

They don’t necessarily want to be found by you. Affiliates will hear about your program in forums and blogs and by word of mouth. So you can be pretty successful by being a passive recruiter and putting some focus on branding your affiliate program and yourself.

The fifth and final step is to do some PR and advertising. Sponsor the places where affiliates are going, such as blogs and forums. Targeted newsletters are a good place to advertise your affiliate program, too. One of my favorite places to advertise is on the pay per click search engines.

And conference sponsorships can have a big impact for you. That provides a chance to get in front of hundreds of the bigger affiliates.

One thing you shouldn’t do is to issue a press release that simply announces that your affiliate program exists. So what? Where’s the story there?

If you’re going to put out a press release, and you should, have a story to tell. Don’t tell how you have this great affiliate program that is paying 7% commission - that’s so bland and it won’t get picked up by anybody. Have a story behind your press release and make it interesting.

Also, realize that recruiting is an ongoing effort. It’s not something you just do for a couple months and then magically get quality affiliates organically after you’ve pulled back your recruiting.

Always think about new ways you can get the word out about your affiliate program, and make it a point to tweak and improve your affiliate program all the time.

Videos of other chapters of Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants are available for free at http://www.affiliatemanager.net/videos.shtml.