My favourite forum is the one over at Digital Point. While lurking there the other day I stumbled across an interesting thread on affiliate marketing.

A bunch of people who had never tried affiliate marketing decided to give it a go. They selected a product, got Adsense accounts and started advertising.

Some of the results were none too shabby. And the honesty of the posts made the thread compelling reading.

So much so that I resolved to build some more affiliate content into my sites.

It also showed me that Adsense is a viable advertising medium for some affiliate programs. I had earlier flagged it away for everying but one campaign where I get paid $2.00 for everyone who joins a free program.

You can get to the thread by clicking here Digital Point Forum

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Here is an article which was submitted to our article directory today. Because it’s very topical decided to publish here as well.

The article lists at good page rank prediction tool. If you wish to follow-up there is another good one at http://www.searchengineengine.com/

Anyway here is the article ………………

With much enthusiasm and equally much concern, there are clear signs that a new Google PageRank update is happening right now as we speak.

Most of you, web site owners, publishers and SEO consultants, are probably dreading these updates just as much as I do: after a period of working hard into acquiring new valuable links, the inevitable question is “Will I be rewarded? And if so, just how much?”

Let’s take a glimpse into what the new PageRank update is bringing:

First, let’s see what will your page’s new PageRank be?

If you haven’t done this yet, check the page(s) that interest you using a Future PageRank tool (available from http://www.teawithedge.com/google_pr_update.html ).

This simple tool sends queries to known Google data centers in order to retrieve the PageRank of the given URL. It should normally show the same PageRank for all centers, however, if you run the tool during an actual PageRank update, you can see variations from one data center to another thus previewing what your page’s future PageRank will be.

Caught any changes?

Whatever the answer, there are some logical explanations for it.

After studying the performance of several web sites, these are the conclusions I have come upon:

1. The trend to reward links from content-related web sites continues.

Web sites that have focused on gathering quality links, both reciprocal and non-reciprocal, from web sites with related content, shall expect to see their efforts to be successful: a relatively small amount of related links, even if reciprocal, proves to be much more beneficial than thousands of totally unrelated links.

However, one must not forget that climbing on the PageRank ladder becomes increasingly difficult as you ascend. If your web site already had a good PageRank before this update (i.e. 4 and above) it is possible not to see an improvement on the 0 to 10 scale. The true PageRank scale is exponential: the distance from 3 to 4 is much smaller than the distance from 4 to 5, and the distance from 4 to 5 is tiny compared to the distance from 5 to 6!
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Todays post is about our latest project a Free Article Directory.

I wanted to find a way of growing the size of the www.bestrealincome.com site to over 10,000 pages and to eventually have over 10,000 backlinks.

I figure that if I can achieve that then I’ll get a decent visitor volume and should be able to get to the point where I can make a living off it.

Getting to this milestone would also help with search engine positions.

So stage one of the plan is to start a new free article directory. One that will grow over time, with lots of unique content and lots of links back my site.

I have published a small number of articles and they have served me well. Each article has generated 50 – 80 one-way backlinks from all kinds of sites. These in turn have contributed to growing my traffic. Article writing is recognised as an essential component in any site online marketing plan.

You can see the free article directory at http://www.AFreeArticle.com. There you can submit articles for free and collect free articles for your own use.

There are only a few articles on the site right now, so if you do write articles or were just thinking of it, why not submit one ?

Usually you need to pay to get your articles submitted to a large number of sites. That is if you dont have time to do it yourself. It can be done manually but its a long and tedious process.

As an opening special we are giving away a free article submitter with every approved article. This submitter automates the manual process and will submit your article to over 200 (and growing) article directories.

Please visit our site, submit an article and by doing so grow your links, reputation, search engine ranking and pick up a great piece of free software.

Heres that link again A Free Article

Internet marketing and search engine optimization in your home based business hinge on knowing what keyword or keywords web search surfers are searching for on the web. By doing extensive keyword analysis you can zero in on the best keyword terms to use when setting up pay per click advertising, writing keyword articles, and optimizing web pages.

Not only is it necessary to know what keywords are searched for the most but also how many times particular keywords have been searched. There are a number of effective tools available for keyword analysis and keyword suggestion.

Yahoo Search Marketing
Yahoo has an excellent tool for helping webmasters and home based business marketers determine what keywords people are searching for on a monthly basis. This tool, located at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/index.php is powered by Yahoo Search Marketing that was previously known as Overture.

Wordtracker
One of the more popular tools for doing keyword research is Wordtracker.
WordTracker can be found at http://www.wordtracker.com/. Keyword results provided by Wordtracker are compiled from Dogpile and Metacrawler. Wordtracker is not free but with the ability to do targeted keyword research the results can quickly pay for the software.

Once you have done some preliminary research you will need to decide which keywords or keyword phrases to target for your home based business. It is best to choose keywords that have a good amount of traffic without too much competition for placement.

For example, let’s say you are marketing a variety of photography books and you search on photography only to find that it had more than 1,000,000 searches last month. The competition for placement with this keyword is probably going to be pretty tough. Try researching on more targeted phrases such as nature photography, landscape photography, photography books, etc.

You will likely find that these terms have less monthly searches and much less competition. There will be a lower search to competition ratio. Generally, a keyword with 30,000 to 50,000 monthly searches is going to be one that you can compete for in terms of placement and being found on the search engines. Instead of spinning your wheels marketing for those who are searching for photography instead create multiple campaigns that market to more targeted keyword phrases.

You can evaluate the search to competition ratio by taking the number of searchs of a particular keyword and dividing by the number of web site which return for that keyword when searched. The higher the number the better. For example, if you have a keyword that is searched for 100 times in a month and when you search on that keyword you return 1000 results then the ratio is 100/1000 or 0.10. If you have a keyword that is searched for 100 times but there are 10,000 search return results then the ratio goes down to 0.01. The larger the ratio the better in terms of your ability to be competitive.

Finding the best keywords to use in your home based business is vital to effectively driving targeted traffic to your web site. Take the time to find out what people are searching for and your efforts will pay off in terms of traffic and sales conversion.

One of the keys to success in your home based business is advertising. On the internet, well placed text links have always been an effective means of increasing page rank and traffic.

Over the last few months I tried a number of text linking schemes. This one has worked best for me. I have seen an increase in backlinks and in traffic as a result of putting this free tool in place.

Its called Link-Vault. All you do is place a bit of code on your site which displays a few links from fellow members. Then in turn your links are shown on other members sites.

Very simple. I found it easy to get up and running.

Here is the link – check it out Link-Vault

My home based business is better for it and I’m sure yours will be too.

Enjoy !