Crazy End Of Summer Directory Submissions Sale

If you’ve been reading my blog the past several months, or know me from the BANS forum, then you know I’ve offered my own directory submission service. Well, I’ve decided to stop offering this, and am retiring from the directory submission service.

The good news for you is that my friend Lora is going to take over the business from me. She lives a mile and a half down the road from my house, and she’s already helped me with customers’ submission work (especially when I had a lot of orders at once). So Lora knows what to do, and she’ll do a fantastic job going forward.

Lora has decided to run a sale on the submission prices, and you can find more information on her site: Crazy End Of Summer Sale : Directory Submissions.

Are Directory Submissions Worthwhile?

Having said all that, you might be asking if directory submissions are even worthwhile nowadays. If you do a Google search, you’ll find lot’s of editorials stating not to bother.

Here’s my take on directory submissions… they’re one piece of the larger SEO puzzle. In and of themselves, you won’t rank high in the search engines just from directory submissions, but they definitely can help. They contribute by giving you more backlinks. Backlinks are backlinks, and every one helps.

If you had to spend an entire evening submitting your site to free directories yourself, then I would agree that directory submissions aren’t worthwhile. However you don’t have to do it yourself. You can have Lora perform the submissions for you very inexpensively.

So for what it’s worth, I plan on continuing to submit my new sites to free directories, and personally plan to have Lora do the submissions.

(Full Disclosure: I am not getting anything in return for recommending Lora’s service. I was just happy she was willing to take over the business… )

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Masking Affiliate Links with WP-Affiliate

If you use WordPress in any of your marketing efforts (and you should be), you probably need a way to mask your affiliate links. If that’s you, there’s a free plug-in you need to know about called WP-Affiliate.

WP-Affiliate let’s you setup blog-wide masked (cloaked) affiliate links. Basically you enter in the anchor text and the actual URL, and the plug-in will give you a masked URL you can use within posts on your blog.

So as an example, if you had an affiliate link that looked like this:

http://www.affiliateproduct.com/myaffiliateid/?=myaffiliatetrackingid

WP-Affiliate could transform that link to look like this instead:

http://www.mydomain.com/recommends/affiliateproduct

I think you’ll agree that second domain looks much nicer, and would provide a better experience for your blog’s readers. You can actually see how the plug-in works by clicking any of the links on this post!

Installing and configuring WP-Affiliate is really easy… just upload the plug-in to your site, activate it from the admin dashboard, and then setup your links from the options area in the write/edit post page.

The downside to WP-Affiliate is that it won’t automatically link your chosen anchor text. You use it to create the links, but then you have to manually add them to your post. It does have a shortcut to send your link to the editor window, but that is still a manual effort.

However considering how well it does what it does—and especially considering the price—I plan on using WP-Affiliate on this blog, and I encourage you to do the same!

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Announcing the “Affiliate Marketing Niche Blog Series”

I’ve decided to setup my next affiliate niche web site exclusively as a blog–which is something I’ve never done before–and then keep a journal of my progress here so everyone can follow along! As I work through the process from start to finish, I’m going to post updates on what I did, why I did it, and what the results were. My hope is that this series will serve as a guide to others who might want to try the same thing.

Read more

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More ideas for Inbound Links

I previously talked about how to get inbound links to your site. Here are some additional ideas for getting inbound links to your site:

• Yahoo Answers
  Create a Yahoo Answers account and answer questions relating to your site’s niche. Try to answer around 5 questions every day with

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Free Directory Submission with digiXMAS

I was browsing the Digital Point Forums earlier today and discovered a post about digiXMAS. This is a free software tool that allows you to submit your web sites to 150 directories. It uses an auto-submission process, so for each site you pick a category and enter in the CAPTCHA, and that’s it. After a few entries it starts to remember which categories apply to your site, so it will begin to automatically select them for you. So for most of the directories, all you have to do is type in the CAPTCHA if one exists, and click okay.

Pretty easy, and boom, your site is now listed with 150 directories. Those are free one-way backlinks to your site. Very nice!

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Social Bookmarking Widgets

Social marketing and Web 2.0 are important to your affiliate marketing efforts. I’ve had a lot of success using social bookmarking to promote my web sites and articles. Imagine how powerful it would be if your visitors helped promote your site through social bookmarks too!

I found a couple new widgets that adds a handy bookmark widget to your web sites. They make it super easy for visitors to submit your site to popular social bookmark sites.

Both widgets are completely free, and each give you a snippet of HTML code that you add to whatever pages on your web site that you want the widget to appear.

Add This - http://www.addthis.com/
This widget adds a small button to your web site that can either prompt the reader to “bookmark” the page, or “subscribe” to your site’s RSS feed. It makes it extremely easy for visitors to add the page to their favorites, or add the page to one of several popular social bookmarking sites. It does not allow visitors to e-mail the page to others. I’m currently adding the Add This bookmark button to my Build a Niche Store web sites. I add the widget in the header.php template, so the button automatically appears on every page.

Share This - http://www.sharethis.com/
This widget is similar to Add This, as it adds a button to your site. Unlike Add This, there are not options to bookmark or subscribe to an RSS feed, it only supports bookmarking. It also does not support adding the page to the visitor’s local browser favorites, but it does support all of the most popular social bookmarking sites. What makes Share This stand apart is that a visitor can use it to e-mail the current web page to their friends and family. I’m currently using the Share This widget on my Affiliate Marketing Blog, so you can check it out at the bottom of this post. I added the widget to the blog’s templates, so it automatically appears beneath every blog post.

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