Advertiser key drivers of content publishing business

Yes, you can make money from content business. But, where does the money come from? Who pays the bill? Most of the money made by content publishers comes from advertisers. Advertisers are key drivers of the content business. Advertisers make monetisation possible. Without advertisers, there will be no business for the content publisher and the internet will not be as rich with content as it is today.

Advertisers are continuously looking for more space for placing their ads, and with millions of people now visiting the internet daily, the internet provides advertisers with an additional platform for displaying their ads and making sales.

While people are surfing the internet they provide an avenue for advertisers to place their ads, which in itself is an avenue for the content publisher, on whose site the ads are published, to make money. Happy publishers and advertisers keep the content business alive.

Attracting advertising money is key to succeeding in the content business. To attract advertisers your content must be useful and relevant. Your content must also attract people. More visits to your site mean more money. Many visitors will come to your website only if you stick to the objective of the content business, which to satisfy human want for useful and relevant information.

In the past attracting advertisers to place ads on your site was an uphill task. First, you need a good website rich with content with large volume of visitors. Then you need a dedicated advertising sales force to market your site to advertisers. Attracting advertising revenue in the past took a lot of time and required considerably investment. This was very challenging for small publishers and even big-time publishers. How things have changed today for the better.

Attracting advert money to your website is now simple for small publishers. All you need is to signup to an advertising service like Google Adsense. Then copy and paste Google adsense ad-code for any ad format you want to the location you want on your website and in a couple of minutes ads tailored to the contents on your website will start appearing providing you a means of monetising your content.

Off course, if you are large you can also attract advertisers directly using your dedicated ad sales force.

There are also advertising programmes that will advertise on your site and pay you a certain commission if a visitor buys a product on there site through an ad link from your website. These programmes are called referral programmes, associate programmes, or affiliate programmes.

Examples of affiliate programmes include Amazon, Circuit City, ClickBank, and so on. In affiliate program, you choose a specific product you want to promote or advertise and paste the code on your site. If a visitor clicks on the product Ad on your site they are taken to the affiliate’s website and if they go ahead to buy you are paid a commission.

To make money from advertising you must have useful and relevant contents on your website. Advertisers are the fuel that drive the content business.

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Affiliate Marketing Selling products

Affiliate marketing programs are programmes that allow you to promote products online and pay you a certain percentage as commission for each successful sale. Some popular affiliate programs on the internet today include Amazon, Google Affiliate Network, Circuit city, ClickBank, and so on. One challenge for affiliate marketers is how to advertise the products and services that they are selling.

You can promote your affiliate products online in a number of ways. One is with your website. Another way is with online advertising services like Google Adwords. You can also promote your affiliate products via email. You can also use all these methods at the same time.

Selling Affiliate products with your website


For selling affiliate products with your website to be successful, your website must contain content relevant to the products you wish to sell via the affiliate marketing program. If you have a website on mobile phones, look for affiliates that sell mobile phones or mobile phone applications and accessories. This will ensure that your affiliate Ads will add value to your visitors by providing an opportunity for them to buy or at least get more information on a product they are looking for.

One great advantage of selling affiliate products from your website is that you get free advertising. If your website is already optimised for keywords relevant to the affiliate products you are selling, you will be getting free traffic from search engines without paying a dime.

You should also write special copies on the affiliate products you are selling, ensuring that you are targeting keywords relevant to those affiliate products. These will ensure that your visitors are highly targeted.

If you are interested in marketing via email, you should use your site to build an email list. Find a way to make your visitors give you their emails. One way is to offer free newsletters. They will need to submit their email to you if they want to receive your newsletter. However, make sure to keep your promise of sending free newsletters.

You can rely on traffic from your website alone if it generates a lot of traffic, however if your website does not generate sufficient traffic you need to compliment it with advertising. You can advertise your website via any means, but the most effective means for online affiliate programs is with online advertising services like Google Adwords.

Selling Affiliate products with Ads


If your website does not generate sufficient traffic or you do not have a website, you can promote your affiliate products with advertising. Online advertising services like Google Adwords allows you to promote your website or affiliate website online. Your Affiliate Ads appear on search pages and on websites that contain content relevant to your affiliate products.

Pay-per-click Ads are very effective. In these Ad schemes, you pay only when a visitor clicks on your Ad. Google Adwords is also contextual, this means that your Ads appear on pages and search pages that contain keywords relevant to your Affiliate products. This will result in qualified customers viewing Ads and will result in more sales.

When using contextual Ad services, you will be required to choose keywords that your Ads will appear on. This is where you have to put lots of care and analysis. Find out keywords that those who buy your kind of affiliate products use when searching the internet and bid for such keywords.

You will write your Ad copy yourself or with the help of a consultant. Make sure your Ad copies are persuasive. Also, include some of your keywords in your Ad copy.

Note that some keywords are more popular than others are. Popular keywords will cost more per click. The higher your bid the more often your Ads will appear.

Selling Affiliate products with email


You can market affiliate programs via email. To do this you must have emails to promote your affiliate products. This means you need to have an email list. You will need a website to build a legitimate email list or you might end up sending annoying spam emails to people.

One way of building an email list with your website is to offer free items on your website like free newsletters. Your visitors will have to submit their emails to receive the free gift.

You can also advertise your affiliate products in a newspaper or electronic media. In the Ad, you provide an email so that interested readers can reach you. That way you will have their email address for your affiliate marketing.

Selling affiliate products is one effective way of making money online. First, you must choose an affiliate program with a good reputation. Then, you have to promote only affiliate products that you can sell. You can use your website, online Ad, or email to promote your affiliate links and products.

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Signup to Webmaster Tools Google Bing Yahoo

Once your website is ready, you need to inform search engines of its existence. This you do by registering or submitting your domain name to search engines. Register with Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others. It is a good idea to signup with the webmaster tools of any search engine you register your website in, do not just submit and leave.

Webmaster tools enable professional web publishers to do more than just submit their websites’ domain name. Webmaster tools enable webmasters and publishers to manage and maintain their websites. Signing up to a search engine’s webmaster tools will enable you access useful information about your website. Some information provided by Webmaster tools include:
  • Problems stopping robots from crawling your website
  • Pages on your website that have been indexed i.e. added to the search engine database
  • Websites linking to your website
  • Missing or broken links on your website
  • Errors on your website

Google webmaster tools will even go the extra mile of providing list of keywords that have the potential of bringing lots of visitors to your website. You could be missing a lot if you do not signup to webmaster tools of your popular search engines especially Google.

With webmaster tools, you can inform search engines of your sitemap location, which will help them crawl your website better. A sitemap in its most simple form is a list of URL of pages on your site. It may also include more than just URLs. If you are using blogger, you should submit your blog feed address as your sitemap address to webmaster tools.

You can manage more than one website with one webmaster tool account. Hence, webmaster tools provide webmaster with a convenient way of managing and maintaining all their websites.

Once your website has up to five pages, you should register it to a webmaster tool. The first thing you will be required to do once you submit your website URL is to authenticate the website. Authenticating your website will enable you benefit from the power of webmaster tools.

Most webmaster tools provide you with two authentication methods. One method is Meta tag method. In this method, the webmaster tool generates a Meta tag to be pasted on your website. Simply copy and paste this Meta tag on all your pages within the head tag section. If you are using blogger, open your template and look for the head tag, paste after this tag. Once you save in Blogger, it will be published on all your pages. Meta tag method is your best if you are using templates.

A second method is the HTML method. If you want to use this method, create an html file and copy a code generated by your webmaster tool into the file. This html file should be saved at the highest level in your directory structure. For example, if your web address is www.mywebsite.com, your authentication file should be at www.mywebsite.com/erk3990.html assuming that the name of the file is erk3990.html. Note that some search engines’ webmaster tool will tell you the name you must give to your authentication file.

HTML method is best when you are not using a template as it saves you from having to paste a meta code on every page, just create a page and save it in your highest directory and the search engine will find it their and authenticate your website.

Once you authenticate your website, in a couple of weeks you will start receiving useful information about your website from your webmaster tool. A visit every two weeks is okay initially, weekly visits are necessary once a few pages have been indexed on your website. Once your website is stable, generating daily and consistent traffic, you should visit webmaster tool whenever, you are online.

Maintaining and managing your website with webmaster tools is all about visiting it regularly and observing if there are any issues with your website. Errors on your website should be handled promptly. For example, if your webmaster tool informs you of a missing page on your site, you should restore the missing page on your website or remove links to such pages from your other pages.

Some Webmaster Tools


  • Google Webmaster Central

  • Yahoo Site Explorer

  • Bing Webmaster

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    What are Keywords to Web Publishers

    Keywords are important words in a page. These words bring traffic to a website via search engines. Keywords are words that internet surfers usually enter in search engine search-bars when they searching for information on the internet. Writing for the internet is all about keywords. To succeed as a web publisher, you must identify keywords relevant to your industry and provide contents targeted at those keywords.

    Most people depend on search engines when searching for information online. This means that if a search engine does not index your website or your website is not ranking high on search engines, you will get very little traffic to your website. Having your website indexed is easy, but ranking high on search engines is a tough task.

    For your website to rank high, your pages must be purposeful. The easiest way of writing purposeful pages is to target keywords that people who are searching for information contained in your page would enter in a search engine search-bar.

    Search engines use keyword index to predict what your web page is about. Keyword index of a word in a page is the ratio of the frequency of that word to the total number of words in a page. Keyword index of between 0.02 (2.0%) and 0.06 (6.0%) are recognised by search engines. Therefore, when targeting keywords ensure that your keyword of interest is within this range.

    Keywords are very important to web publishers. You cannot make money as a web publisher if you do not target popular keywords in your industry. Each page on your website should target one keyword.

    Now we will go through the different keyword types that web publishers come across.

    Raw Keywords


    Raw keywords are your first keywords. Raw keywords are keywords that you generate with common sense. It is a guess and is unrefined. You should not base your pages on raw keywords. Raw keywords should be generated before writing each page, but should be analysed to find more refined keywords that are relevant. Before you start any website, you must first generate raw keywords relevant to your industry.

    You can generate raw keywords by yourself or with the help of friends and colleagues. For example if you intend to launch a website that provide information on cars, some of your raw keywords may include:

    • Car

    • Toyota

    • Toyota Corolla

    • Car reviews

    • Car specs



    Raw keywords are raw materials and should be researched on to find out those that are relevant.

    Relevant Keywords


    Relevant keywords are refined keywords. They are the result of keyword analysis on your raw keywords. Relevant keywords are words that people actually enter in search bars when searching for information online. You identify relevant keyword by using a keyword analysis tool like Google Insights, which will give ideas of your relevant keywords.

    Simply enter each of your raw keyword in a keyword analysis tool like Google Insights and the tool will reveal how searchers use such a keyword. For example, entering the raw keyword Car may reveal relevant keywords like:

    • Cars

    • Car insurance

    • used cars

    • Car reviews

    • Car hire


    These are the keywords you should actually target when writing copies on your website. You can also do a further keyword analysis on all these keywords to discover keywords that are more refined.

    Active Keywords


    Active keywords are words that actually bring visitors to your website. You can look up your active keywords in your keyword log. You can use a tool like Google Analytics to lookup your active keywords. Active keywords give you an idea of what visitors to your website are looking for. With this information, you can determine if you are satisfying their needs.

    Compare your active keywords with your relevant keywords. If they match each other, it means you are doing very well. If there is a huge disparity then you still have a lot of work ahead of you. However, note that it takes time before you can properly rank high on your relevant keywords.

    Google webmaster tool provides you with a list of keywords that brings the most visitors to your website on Google search. Improve your targeting on these keywords.

    Potential Active Keywords


    Potential active keywords are keywords that your website appears on, but because it is ranking low, they are not bringing visitors to your website. Let us say, your website is number 50 on the keyword Nokia. That is good news but you will notice that because your website appears on the 5th page your website will not get visitors to your website via this keyword.

    Google webmaster tools gives you two lists of keywords the first are words in which your website appear the most on Google search (list A). The second list is a list of the top 20 keywords that bring visitors to your site (list B/active keywords).

    List A are keywords that if you rank high on them will bring you more traffic, while list B are those that are currently bringing you traffic. Compare your list A and list B if they match then you are doing very well. Keywords that appear on list A but do not appear on list B are your potential active keywords. You should research on why you are not performing well on these keywords. When you discover the problem, solve it and more visitors will be coming to your website.

    Note that you should not be happy just because list A and B matches, you should look at the placement of each keyword in the two lists. For example, if a keyword appears in number 1 position on list A but on number 3 position on list B it means that you still have some work to do. The ideal is that keywords in the two lists should also match in position.

    Popular Keywords


    Popular keywords are words that are popular in your industry. You should write web copies covering these keywords. However, you must note that it takes quite a long time before you can start getting result on popular keywords. Therefore, you must see targeting popular keywords as a medium to long term investment.

    One way of getting results immediately from popular keywords is to target them with identifiers. While it will be hard to get results targeting the keyword cars, targeting the keyword Toyota cars Chicago will be less difficult. In this case, the identifiers are Toyota and Chicago. Targeting longer keywords like this can help you get results immediately. However, do not forget that your major keyword is cars.

    Emerging Keywords


    Emerging keywords are keywords that may become popular in a few weeks, months or years. As a web publisher, you must constantly monitor trends in your industry to identify emerging trends. Target emerging keywords on time and you will get results. Targeting keywords early can increase your chances of topping search ranking on those keywords.

    Making money from web publishing is about how properly you can target keywords in your industry.

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    Affiliate marketing programs choosing one

    Affiliate marketing programs are programs that pay you commission for selling products for them. For an online affiliate marketing program, you point people to their website and if they buy a product or register for a service, you will be paid a fixed percentage of sales as commission. To make money from affiliate marketing programs you must select the right one. Here you will find a guide on choosing affiliate marketing programs.

    Starting an affiliate marketing program is very easy today. Because of this fact, there are thousands of affiliate programs today promising to pay you commissions for sales. While some are scams, many are genuine. You have to be alert when choosing an affiliate marketing program. Do not choose a marketing program just because it promises a high commission; do not forget that you will be paid only if you successfully sell a product.

    Here are few guides to choosing an affiliate marketing program:

    Choose products/services that you can sell


    When choosing an affiliate marketing program choose one that sell the kind of products and services that you can market online successfully. To sell a product you have to be convincing. If you are not well vast about a product, you will find it difficult convincing others to buy.

    If you have a website, you should choose affiliate marketing programs that promote products that you can directly market on your website. Do not choose a marketing program simply because it pays more commission as you will only be paid if you can successfully sell a product.

    Choose an affiliate program that supports your country


    While most affiliate marketing programs will support countries like USA, Canada and UK, some affiliate programs may not support countries like Nigeria. Hence, when choosing an affiliate program choose one that support your country.

    You may be tempted to claim you are from another country, but you have to remember that if an affiliate does not support your country, your earnings will not be sent to you in your country. Trying to cut corners can leave you at the mercy of fraudsters.

    What are the payment options?


    Related to support for country is payment option. If the payment options supported by your affiliate marketing program are not supported in your country, you will not be able to receive your payments. Hence, before selling for an affiliate, make sure you will be able to receive your money.

    The surest way to receive your affiliate earnings in Nigeria is US Dollar (USD) denominated cheques. With a domiciliary account, you will be able to cash such checks. However, make sure that Nigeria is supported by the affiliate, as they will not send checks to Nigeria if they do not support Nigeria.

    Other payment options available to Nigerians include egold, western union, moneygram and direct bank deposit. One popular option that is available worldwide, but which does not support Nigeria is PayPal.

    Choose an affiliate that supports you


    Your affiliate marketing program must help you to succeed after all your success is their success. They must provide you with up to date information about your click-through and sales. Your affiliate marketing program should also provide with information and tutorials on how to succeed in your business. Choose an affiliate that has a blog, user groups and forums that will help you succeed.

    A good affiliate marketing program should provide you with sales materials like banners and text links.

    How reliable is the affiliate


    Choose an affiliate marketing program with a reliable system. The system for tracking orders and sale must be reliable. Do they pay promptly? What is their quality of service? Search on the internet for news on the affiliate you want to join and check whether they have positive or negative publicity.

    When will you get paid


    You should also check the payment procedure of the affiliate program. What is the minimum balance you must accumulate before you are paid? How often will you receive a commission cheque?

    A good place to start when you visit an affiliate marketing website is the Frequently Asked Questions FAQ page. A good FAQ will answer all the questions listed here and more.

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