I know many of you use article marketing as a means to brand your blogs and websites and to drive traffic to them. That’s cool, I do for some of my blogs and websites also. Article marketing is a very good way to get the word out about your product or service.

The problem for many blog and website owners is deciding on which article submission site or service to use. There are many article submission sites on the Internet today. For the purpose of this head-to-head review, I’m choosing the most popular article submission sites that I know of. Some are free and several are paid. I have either used these services in the past and/or I currently use them. The article submission websites are Ezinearticles, iSnare, GoArticles, Article Marketer, Article Marketing Automation and Unique Article Wizard.

How The Article Marketing Smackdown Will Be Judged

To judge the Smackdown, I wrote an original article for a specific website of mine. I made it unique for each article submission site (as best as I could, each site has it’s own rules). I then submitted the article to each submission service and I’ve been waiting on the outcome for a few weeks. I believe enough results have come in now to bring this Smackdown to an end.

So, without further delay…I bring you the results of the article submission smackdown!

Unique Article Wizard

I’ve been using Unique Article Wizard (UAW) for about 6 months now.

I’m here to tell you that this has been a very good investment for me. I simply love UAW!

UAW’s is a very unique service. Due to the non-disclosure letter you have to sign when joining, I can’t go into details about how UAW works, just trust me when I say it will bring in a lot of one way links to your sites by distributing unique article to blogs, websites and directories. This service has been the fastest way to build legitimate one way back links that I’ve found, bar none!

But that’s not all. Unique Article Wizard also has another very powerful feature in that it can make each of your resource boxes unique as well. It’s possible to add links to many websites with just one article.

You can also choose how many times your article is distributed each day. You can have it blasted out to all the places at once or choose your own number. I like to “drip” my articles out as I think having a bunch of backlinks show up at once is not good for a site. Especially small sites. So I “drip” my articles out by choosing to have them submitted at a rate of about 20 to 30 per day.

After your article has been distributed, you can check to see the actual number of sites and email subscribers where your article was submitted to. You find this button in your dashboard in the column next to your article title. Neat stuff.

Now, the article I submitted to was distributed to 543 websites and directories and 71 email subscribers. Out of that number, I can track about 107 backlinks (as of this writing, I expect this number to increase over time) I received to the website I had listed in my resource boxes. That’s a pretty high number! (I’ve actually had some articles do better than that!)

The cool thing is, as people find these articles, they’ll use them and I’ll still be getting backlinks long after the submission is over with.

Another benefit that isn’t advertised is this. Hit the page reload button on your browser when you’re viewing your article on UAW and you’ll see a completely new article every time your refresh (again, I can’t tell you how they do this, but it is very powerful). It’s awesome. I then will take one of these unique articles and submit it to the free article submission sites. I’ve also submitted them to Article Marketer to have them submitted. If you have blogs or websites in the same niche, you could use one of these unique articles that UAW makes as content on your site.

Click here to learn more about Unique Article Marketing.

Article Marketing Automation (AMA)

I’ll be honest and tell you that I passed Article Marketing Automation the first time I heard about it. I wasn’t impressed with the advertising or the $47 per month price tag. Besides, I was already using UAW and figured that this service couldn’t be any better. Plus they used the words “spin” and “spun” in their advertising and that sounded cheap to me. I had visions of my sentences looking like “Affiliate marketing rolls down ice cubes after desert” or some other crap like that.

Thankfully, I was wrong.

But about two months ago an Internet Marketer who I trust told me I should be using AMA. He told me it was as powerful as UAW and had some other cool features that UAW didn’t.

So I signed up, figuring “What the hell, I’ll cancel if I don’t like it“.

Do I think that AMA is as good or better than UAW? No. But it’s close, damn close!

What I like about AMA is that its network is only made up of websites and blogs, not directories. Also, my favorite feature is that you can add up to 3 links to the body of the content. There is no resource box! All links go into the body. In my opinion, these anchored links will pass more authority when in the body of the article than a resource box. (some site owners either remove the resource box or nofollow the links in resource boxes when using other article submission services)

Here’s a big tip for you. Whether it’s an article you’re submitting or whether it’s your own site, put the links as near to the top as you can get. Google figures they must be important if you put them near the top and you’ll get more weight passed on to your site or to an interior page if the link happens to be on your site.

What I don’t like about AMA is that their network seems pretty small. They advertise 2000 sites, but I haven’t seen near that many. Of course, I know that my articles don’t go out to all of them, but the best I’ve seen is a few hundred. Word has it that they’re continually building their network, so that is the good news. Since they’re fairly new, it may take a little while longer for them to get to the size that some of the others are.

But, since the links are in the content instead of at the bottom of the page in a resource box, the backlinks I am getting are passing more weight to my sites. It’s probably only a small difference, but I’ll take all the help I can get!

The article I submitted to AMA has been published 77 times (as of this writing) and three quarters of those articles have been indexed by Google so far. Not bad!

If the level of service, both Customer service and the level of article submission, continues to grow, I see great things happening with Article Marketing Automation. Right now, I think it’s well worth the money. You can spend a lot more and get a helluva lot less with some of the other article submission services out there! This one is a keeper in my book! If they’re like any other Internet services, once they start growing, they will continue to raise the price, so you’d better get in quick if you want to lock in at a low price. Click here to learn more about Article Marketing Automation.

Ezinearticles

Ezinearticles has been around a while. In fact, I believe they were one of the first article directories. At least as best as I can remember. If any of you have read my previous post about Ezinearticles, then you know others as well as myself have had some problems with them over the years getting articles accepted. Looking back, I think this started in earnest whenever they started their “Premium” paid service. I don’t know if it was coincidence or not.

They offer both a free submission service and a $97 per month “Premium” service. I looked over the “features” of the premium service and to be honest, I don’t see the benefit. Certainly not $97 per month worth! There are too many other services that offer better service and more features for less than $97 per month IMHO.

But back to the smackdown.

I submitted the article about 3 weeks ago. It took several days for the article to be accepted. I have noticed over about the last month or so that my articles were being accepted faster. I don’t know why, I just know the last few times I’ve used them it has went off without a hitch.

Anyway, the article has been viewed 232 times and published 16 times as of the writing of this post.

Ezinearticle doesn’t tell you where they submitted the articles to or which sites have accepted your article. But judging from my WordPress dashboard, this article has sent me 19 backlinks to a site of mine. Looking through my sites, I found 8 visitors who came to my site through that article and my EZA dashboard said I’ve had 9 URL clicks. Not great, but better than nothing, especially on the backlinks.

GoArticles

GoArticles is a free submission site. Being free, the features are limited as to the stats you’ll get from your articles. The article I submitted has received 56 request since I submitted it. Now that doesn’t tell my everyone who has used my article because any article on GoArticles can be cut and pasted without requesting it.

One thing I really like about GoArticles is that you can put links in the body of the article and they don’t get bent out of shape about it.

As for the backlinks I received from that article, a search of my stats showed that I’ve received 8 backlinks from that article. One of them on an Authority blog.

Not great results, but remember, it’s free and you can add links in the body of the article without them getting all pissy about it. Also, I’ve never had an article rejected by GoArticles. From what I can tell, you’re article is accepted very quick. Hey, it’s free, what do you have to lose!

iSnare

This is a paid to submit an article service. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that they probably don’t make much money from this site because of the poor customer service and submission time I and others have had with them. It took over two weeks for my article to be accepted and distributed. From what I can tell, I haven’t received any traffic or backlinks from that article.

For the price you have to pay iSnare, their customer service and submission time should be a helluva lot better. I personally wouldn’t use them again until they start submitting articles for free or improve their customer service. There’s just too many good article submission sites out there, both free and paid ones, to put up with the B.S. from them.

Article Marketer

Update 2010: Article Marketer ceased operations around October of 2009. I figured this would happen because of the lousy service everyone was getting and the poor performance of the submitted articles. Sure enough, I was right. This service has been replaced by two other companies, which I’m now reviewing and waiting to see what the long term performance will be (or lack of). Look for the updated review here on my site. Thanks!

I’ve been using Article Marketer for over a year now. I’ve never really been happy with their service, but at the time they were one of the best article submission sites around. They advertise that you’re article will be reviewed by the next business day (or the use to advertise that, haven’t checked recently) but that hasn’t been my experience.

Here’s what normally happens. I submit an article and generally there’s something wrong with it in their eyes. Either it doesn’t meet the 400 word requirement, the keyword density is too high or a dozen other reasons I’ve had. They kick it back to me, I fix it and resubmit it. Now I’ve lost another day.

You see, apparently the “by the next day” starts at the time of the LATEST SUBMISSION, not when you originally submitted it. So when they reject your article and you go back and fix it, the submission process starts all over. You move to the back of the line.

The problem is, I think they’re overworked and their editors look for reasons to reject your articles. I’ve had some of my articles rejected for the stupidest reasons imaginable. One of the most common is that the article does not meet their 400 word requirement. Doesn’t matter that I just pulled it off MS Word document that showed the word count at 500 words. Or that I rewrote an article from EZA that said the article had 475 words. Somehow their counting doesn’t add up.

I also like their excuse. “Most directories won’t accept an article with less than 400 words” or something to that affect. Bull! I get 250 and 300 word articles accepted at many article directories all day long.

Like I said, either their editors are snowed under or they are not native English speaking editors. I have a hunch it may be a little of both.

I once wrote an article on a classic consumer product. For the sake of this post, let’s say the article was over the Model T Ford. So in this article I’m giving the history of the Model T Ford and describing how automobiles have evolved over the years.

They rejected the article the first time due to ‘too many keywords’. So I changed it up and resubmitted it. Then it was “we don’t accept articles that are product reviews. You will have to either change the wording of the article or compare the product with two other like products”.

WTF! Who’s smoking crack over there!

So I changed the article up. Sounded really stupid without using the words Model T Ford, since it was an article over the Model T Ford (well, not over the Model T, but over a Classic product that has been in service for more than 50 years). But I hope you get the point.

That’s just a few of the problems I have with them. It’s not uncommon to take a week or more to get my articles accepted by them after jumping through all the hoops they put in your way.

Since this is a paid service, I expect a lot better Customer Service than that and way better service from their submissions. I noticed that they’ve lowered their price to $21 per month now. I wonder if those of us who are already subscribed will get a discount?

I have to be honest with you. Until their submission acceptance service and their Customer Service gets a lot better, I wouldn’t recommend them. Not at $21 per month. If this was a free service, I could handle it. But when I’m paying top dollar, I expect better service from a company.

Now, on to the submitted report. Their site says my article was submitted to 945 directories and websites. It doesn’t tell me how many accepted my article. NOTE: Just because your article is submitted to a directory or website doesn’t mean it will be accepted. The site owner has the final say. This is true with all services that I’m aware of.

Out of that 945 directories and websites, I can track 22 backlinks. The reason is because of Google’s duplicate content penalty. Since this service blast out the same article to a thousand or so directories and blogs, only a few will be indexed by Google.

And the Winner of the 1st Annual Article Marketing Smackdown is…

Well, IMHO it’s a tie between Unique Article Wizard and Article Marketing Automation.

The Pro’s of Unique Artilce Wizard is that my articles were submitted to more directories and websites, bringing me more backlinks.

The Pro’s of using Article Marketing Automation is that each article ends up on a website or blog, not an article directory (that’s not a bad thing either, it’s still a backlink to your site!). Plus, I love how the anchored links are embedded into the content, not at the bottom of the page in a resource box. While I got fewer links with AMA, the links I did get were embedded into content on legitimate blogs and websites. This equals maximum passing of the link juice if the subjects are relevant!

Article Marketer comes in at third simply because of the amount of directories it submits too. The number of backlinks should have been greater, but they weren’t. Which tells me not all of the articles are getting indexed because all 945 articles were same with the same resource box. Other factors could have contributed to this, I don’t know. 

Another negative about Article Marketer is that they use two types of resource boxes. One that you can only type in your url, which does not become a hyperlink on the site it ends up on. The other is the traditional resource box with two links in it. I speculate that many site owners choose to use the 1st resource box that only shows your URL as text. This could also be the reason for low backlinks versus the numbers of sites the article was submitted to.

Down at fourth we have Ezinearticles. Pretty decent backlinks for a free service. If I had to pay for this service, I drop it in a heartbeat due to the lack of submissions and the backlinks it produces.

GoArticles isn’t great, but they’re free and you can put links in the body of the article as well as the resource box. That alone makes it worth my time to add my articles to GoArticles.

iSnare. I wouldn’t waste a dollar or my time on them until they get their act together. When I hear others starting to have good results with them, maybe I’ll try them again, but not any time soon!

So there you have it. The finals of the Article Marketing Smackdown. If you’re on a limited budget, then use GoArticles and Ezinearticles until you can afford either Article Marketing Automation or Unique Article Wizard. You’ll build backlinks with the free sites, but at a much slower pace than you will with UAW or AMA. UAW and AMA will give you the most bang for the buck and help set your linkbuilding on the fast track to higher rankings.

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I’ve been experimenting for a few months on my Build A Niche Stores to see what would increase traffic and rankings. Other than building links to the BANS store. Don’t get me wrong, without links, your BANS store is dead in the water.

What I wanted was a way to increase my SERPS rankings, traffic and get more pages indexed in Google. I tried several things, but this is what I’ve come up with so far it is working like gangbusters.

Increasing Your Build A Niche Store Rankings and Traffic

What I started to do with my Build A Niche Store sites is add a WordPress blog to them. I choose a main keyword that I’ve been targeting the search engines with then I add a sub-domain onto my site. Then I install WordPress.

For example, let’s say you have a BANS site about Watches. Let’s say your site name is mybanswatchsite.com. When you add a sub-domain, it would look something like this: watchblog.mybanswatchsite.com.

Now, you also have another keyword in your domain name!

There are many advantages to adding a sub-domain to your Build A Niche Store site. Here are just a few.

1. Increased rankings. Google loves blogs, especially WordPress blogs. Expect your post to get indexed faster with a blog.
2. Easier Content Creation. What I started doing was featuring some products from my BANS site on my blog. I then link from my blog back to the page on my main BANS site where they find many of the products for sale. Let’s say you had a post about fake Rolex watches. You’d create the post on your WordPress blog then link back to the category on your Build A Niche Store site that had all the auctions for fake Rolex watches. Now you’ve also created one way links with anchor text AND directed visitors to a place where they can by fake Rolex watches.
3. Easy link building. Blogs just naturally attract backlinks if the content is anywhere near informative. But the real advantage of having a blog as a sub-domain is that you can create one way anchor text links from the blog back to your BANS site. This will give your BANS site a boost in the Google SERPS.
4. More income streams. With WordPress, you can add a few plugins and actually increase the income your Build A Niche Store is capable of making. For example, on my Build A Niche Store blogs, I use the PopShops WordPress plugin and PHPBay plugin. I have several BANS sites where the sub-domain actually makes more than the main site. Let’s go back to your Watch blog. With PopShops plugin, you can feature new Watches from merchants on any affiliate network where you’re a member. (don’t forget to sign up with the merchant first!) Then at the end of the post, you can add ebay auctions from PHPBay. Your giving your customer many ways to buy from you and little reason to click off of your website!

Think this out. With WordPress as a blog on your Build A Niche Store sub-domain, you can do many, many things that will enhance your main site. Don’t be surprised to see your sub-domain actually make more than your main site. The sites I have PHPBay on are really outpacing my Build A Niche Store only sites.

What do I blog about on my Build A Niche Store Blog?

Anything I want!

Seriously, I will do product reviews, special deals from merchants, hot auctions on eBay, coupons and I even search article directories about articles relevant to the content on my BANS site. At the end of the article, I put the PHPBay auction in and sometimes even some new products with PopShops. This is all good stuff! 

PopShops is also adding a nice stream of income for those Customers who come to my sites but want to buy something new rather than play the eBay game.

Currently I’m playing with 3 other plugins to see if they can help my Build A Niche Store or not. I’ll keep you updated on those results!

Tools Used In This Strategy

• Build A Niche Store Program
• PHPBay WordPress Plugin
• PopShops WordPress Plugin

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I don’t think the average affiliate marketer could find anything easier or quicker to include relevant products in their WordPress blogs.

For those of you who haven’t heard about PopShops or who don’t now what they do, PopShops offers a service that makes it quick and easy to include products into websites and blogs.

PopShops works with many different Affiliate Networks. From what I can tell, they work with Commission Junction, ShareASale, LinkConnector, LinkShare, Pepperjam Network, Performics, Bridalux and several Independent programs.

The WordPress plugin for PopShops installs like any other Plugin. You upload it to your blog files, go into your control panel and activate it. Then on your Editor there will be a logo that you can click to add products to your blog post.

In a nutshell, here’s how it works.

Let’s say you have a blog about Tech Gadgets. Obviously you’ll probably review all the new cool gadgets. Let’s say you’re reviewing a new WiFi card. Once you write the blog post, you can then search PopShops by typing in the brand or model of the WiFi card. If there are merchants who sell this card, they will appear to the left. You then select which merchant or merchants you want and click. (click on the Thumbnail to see the example)

Notice that to the left of the Merchants name it there will be a small logo that will tell you which Affiliate Network the Merchant is with. This is important as some Merchants are with several Affiliate Networks.

You can add as many or few items as you want, I generally stick to only using one product per blog post.

Make sure you’ve signed up for each Affiliate Network that you choose. It would be a shame to not get paid!

Another nice feature of this WordPress Plugin for PopShops is that it is highly customizable. It allows you to put the products in the sidebar, on a Post page, footer, satic pages or under a post. You have the power to layout your blog the way you want with only the products you want!

This plugin will help many affiliate marketers, especially beginners, set up profitable blogs in no time.

Here’s more information from PopShops about the WordPress Plugin if you’re interested.

The Plugin is free to use for anyone having a PopShops account, yes, even you PopShops users with the free account. There’s no reason not to give this PlugIn a try!

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It never occurred to me before then that I’ve been using a Article Rewriting program that turns PLR articles or other articles into quality written articles in about 15 minutes. I assumed everyone else knew about this program, but apparently not!

I’ve tried a lot of article rewriting software before I ran across WordFlood.

This is the first article rewriting software that I found that can take a ordinary PLR Article and spin it into a well written quality article in no time at all.

Who Needs An Article Rewriter?

Anyone who runs multiple blogs or websites and needs quality content can use a quality article rewriter.

Coming up with quality content for my blogs and websites has always been a problem for me. I can rewrite most PLR articles myself in about 30 minutes. That is, rewrite them so they sound good and not a bunch of garbled jargon. 30 minutes isn’t much, but I need about 20 to 40 articles per week and that time adds up.

I thought about hiring a rewriter, but many charge $5 or more for a 500 word article. If I only needed a few articles that might work, but when I need 20 to 40 a week, that can add up to a lot of commission money!

I could tell you that I like WordFlood because it makes rewriting a PLR article a snap. Or that it has many other useful features like keeping a running tab on the Keyword Density of the article your writing.

It also tells you what percentage your current article has been changed from the original. This is helpful to help prevent you from turning out duplicate content.

I will tell you though, unlike a lot of programs out there, WordFlood will let you try the program for 14 days, Free. I rewrote a lot of PLR articles in my free 14 day trial! Of course, after a few days of turning out quality content for my blogs, I knew I would buy it because it saves me so much time and money.

However, the best way to show you how easy WordFlood is to use, is to show you this Video. The video will explain it a lot better than I can! (Note: there’s no sound with the video, so don’t try and adjust your sound!) If you can’t see the Video, click on the link and it will take you to it.

Rewrite More Than PLR Articles

As you can see, WordFlood is not only easy to use, it has many features article marketers find useful.

You can rewrite more than PLR Articles with WordFlood. Basically, you can cut and paste any article into WordFlood and rewrite it. I’ve used to to rewrite Wikipedia pages as well as articles from article directories. The sky is about the limit on what you can rewrite.

Another nice feature about WordFlood is you can rewrite the article you just rewrote! Let’s say you need 10 articles on getting RSS subscribers. You can take a few PLR articles, splice them together and rewrite the one big article in WordFlood. When you get done, save it, then go back and use the other synonyms to make a totally different article out of the one you just rewrote. Save that one and go back and rewrite the second one you rewrote!

You can get a lot of mileage out of this article rewriting program!

To get your Free 14 day trial of WordFlood and start cranking out high quality content from PLR Articles, Cick Here!.

FREE Bonus For AffiliateWatcher.Com Readers ONLY!

To help you get started rewriting PLR Articles, I’m going to give everyone who buys WordFlood through this website 8000 Free PLR Articles.

Yes, you read right.

8000 (eight thousand) FREE PLR Articles covering 252 subjects.

This should be more than enough to get you started turning PLR articles into quality content for you website or blog!

This offer alone could save you hundreds of dollars per month over joining one of those high priced PLR Membership Sites (which, most start out at $97 per month!)

There’s just about any subject you want and no, I’m not going to list all the subjects here! I don’t have that much time

Needless to say, whether you’re starting out trying to build a blog network or just need some quality content for your Hobby blog, these articles rewrote with WordFlood will get you started.

How To Take Advantage of All These Free PLR Articles

All you have to do to receive the 8000 free PLR Articles is to contact me through this Contact form and send me:  Your name, email and transaction details after you’ve purchased WordFlood.

I’ll then send you a link where you can download the .zip file containing 8000 PLR Articles, all for Free!

Good Luck!

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What Are Affiliate Datafeeds?

Affiliate Datafeeds are files that merchants provide that contain all of the products that they carry, or just the products they wish to put online. Typically these files come in a MS Excel format so that they are easier to work with.

Some stores, like BettyMills, have datafeeds with over 50,000 products. This means that once you get your datafeeds online, your affiliate store will be populated with over 50,000 items from Betty Mills.

A good place to find Merchants who have datafeeds is ShareASale.Com. Not all merchants have datafeeds, but you’ll find many on ShareASale that do. Simply sign up for their Affiliate Program and download the datafeeds.

Not All Datafeeds Are Created Equal

Sadly, not all merchants produce the same quality of datafeeds. A nice feature about the merchants on ShareASale is that you can preview the datafeed before downloading. The preview will give you a few examples of what the datafeed will look like. You’ll see some that have very lame or minimal descriptions. That’s okay if it’s a merchant you really like and you’ll take time rewriting the descriptions. The description is where the money is in datafeeds. More on that later.

Programs and Services That Turn Affiliate Datafeeds Into Web Pages

As some of you may recall, I did a review of Goldencan some time ago. It’s a simple service where you can put entire stores from different merchants on your websites. Just make sure you’re signed up with the merchants before getting the code for those stores!

Another program I used and reviewed here is PopShops. Generally Popshops works the same way as Goldencan but not really…if you can follow that! With PopShops you get the choice of using either JavaScript, PHP or HTML to insert products from datafeeds into your website.  Unlike Goldencan, PopShops charges money for their service (except the basic level which gives you minimum products) . The prices are very reasonable for what you get. You can start with the free package and later on, if you want more products, you can choose which package suits your needs.

Goldencan on the other hand is free to use. However, with some merchants Goldencan will take the 4th click as part of the “fee” for their service. Having said that, there are plenty of other merchants on Goldencan that pay their own way so that all clicks are yours. If giving every 4th click to Goldencan is going to be a problem, you need to check the Goldencan website before you decide on a merchant and see which merchants pay their own way and which ones will cost you every 4th click.

Another service that I’ve used briefly was DataFeedFile.com. I used them briefly on several Affiliate sites. This was a couple years ago and one problem I was having would be dead pages. By this I mean you’d click on a page that DataFeedFile produced and there would be no product, just a statement saying the file didn’t exist. I hate to think about how much that cost me. To be perfectly honest, the best I remember, all dead pages came from Performics, so take that with a grain of salt. It could have been Performics problem, I don’t know. I just know that I do not use either one as of now.

The programs above work well for most affiliate marketers. Having said that, with these type of programs I feel that you loose some control over the products offered. I like to tweak my datafeeds. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying that you need to tweak your datafeeds to get the most money out of them so they will convert well. You don’t have that luxury with the above services, at least not that I’ve seen. But remember, they are easy for the novice to use, so there is a trade off. Control vs Ease of Use.

A program that I use that will give you complete control over your data feed is Webmerge. I guess that I would say that my biggest complaint with Webmerge is the lack of good video tutorials on how to set it up and get started. Webmerge can be a bear to learn, but once you do, oh boy, you have a lot of control at your finger tips. Webmerge does link to some third party tutorials written by other websites, but so far I haven’t found any good video tutorials. I think novices would eat this program up if they realized how much control they get to keep using a product like Webmerge.

With Webmerge, the program creates static HTML page for every product in your datafeed. It will also create static HTML navigation pages. Once you have imported your Datafeed into Webmerge and then went through the paces to export your finished HTML pages, all you have to do is upload them to your server.

Just over a month ago I came across a script that took data feeds and created dynamic web pages with each product. This script created a whole store from datafeeds. You can even have multiple datafeeds running under one store. This is great if you want a comparison shopping site.

The program I discovered was AffiliStore 2.0. This script makes it easy to import merchant datafeeds and turn them into working real time stores. You really need to go and look at their sample sites to get an idea of how powerful this script is.

I call this script BANS sites on Steroids because this script will build stores for you that have thousands of pages!

One word of caution though. In the AffiliStore forums, I saw quite a few people complaining about their sites slowing down or misbehaving when they exceeded 10,000 products. So if you have a store with 30, 40 or over 50,000 products, you may want to try it out with a smaller datafeed. On the two sites I used to build with datafeeds, one has just over 8500 products and the other has just over 6000 products and I’ve had no problem out of either one. So far in my experiments, it looks like this script will be damn good in targeting and conquering niches.

One of the best things about AffiliStore is that it’s free! Yeah, freakin’ free! That makes it better than BANS any day!

A Word About Affiliate Data feeds

I saved this for last because many of you, especially the new people, need to know this. I see a majority of you failing to do this and you’re leaving money on the table.

There are many so called “guru’s” out there that will claim datafeeds at unique content for your website.

I’m calling bullshit on that one peeps!

If you can download a datafeed from your merchant, then so can all 2000 of the other Affiliates that have signed up for their affiliate program.

Then what happens when say… 5% of those affiliates, including you,  publish those raw datafeeds? Yep…duplicate content and then you run the risk of being labeled a “thin affiliate site” by Google. Something you’ll always be fighting against.

The way you turn that datafeed into dollars is that you open the datafeed in MS Excel and pull up the descriptions. Once you’ve opened your affiliate datafeed, you’ll go through those product records and modify the descriptions to be SEO friendly and informative.

This will get you higher in the Search Engines. The higher you are in the search engines, the higher the traffic. The more traffic you have coming in, the more bank you take home!

I can’t stress how important it is for you to spend time customizing and seo optimizing these product descriptions. It’s not uncommon for me to spend a few days tweaking my data feeds. This is where your payday is at!

I’m also currently experimenting with a Affiliate datafeed WordPress Plugin. The jury is still out, but just as soon as I feel comfortable writing a review of this Plugin, I’ll let you know.

Okay, this should be plenty of information to get you set up and going with affiliate datafeeds. This is the nuts and bolts of affiliate marketing. Now go forward and build your affiliate empire!

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Now another service has entered the affiliate marketing industry and it’s as good as, if not better, than anything I’ve seen on the Internet.

It’s called PopShops. PopShops generates product pages for you based on your selection. I signed up for the free version last week just to see how it worked. I’ve never seen anything easier or faster. Within 15 minutes from sign up, I had a product page ready to upload to one of my websites.

The longest part of the process was me finding my affiliate numbers to insert into the program.

To say I was blown away by how easy the control panel was to use is an understatement. I’m the type of person who’ll dive right in and start messing with something before reading the directions. Lucky for me, I didn’t need the instructions on this control panel because it’s so easy to use.

How easy is it?

Take a look at this video of a 3 year old making an affiliate site about bulldozers.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvrlYaeCWZA]

By the way, while trying to retrieve my LinkShare affiliate number, I was reminded again why I hate them and do not use their service unless I absolutely have to. I could never login to their damn site even though it was telling me I was logged in!

Try the free version of PopShops. I guessing you’ll be like me and sign up for their paid service, which starts at a whopping 5 bucks per month. For all the extra benefits you get over the free version, it’s well worth it! Now if they would just accept PayPal!

Creating affiliate marketing sites or adding a page of affiliate products to your blog has never been easier! Now you have no reason not to succeed!

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Are you satisfied with the money you’re making off of your Blog? Are the Adsense dollars pouring in? How about those Affiliate links? If so, stop reading, this post is not for you. Now if you’re in the group that is not satsified with your Blog’s earnings potential, I have on technique that will likely be more profitable than Adsense and Affiliate links combined.

To maximize your Blog’s earnings, you should offer your very own information in the form of an eBook or Special Report. Yeah, for some of you that may sound corny, but it happens to be a fact. Why else do people visit your blog other than to obtain information you have to offer?

What is a niche blog? You should already have the answer to that, if not, here is the definition of a niche blog in a nutshell.

A niche blog is a very focused blog about 1 aspect of a subject. Let’s say you have a Car blog. A niche blog would be a blog about Muscle Cars. No VW’s or Pontiac Sunbirds. Muscle Cars from the late 60′s and early 70′s and that’s it. That’s a niche blog pure and simple.

I have two niche blogs that I’ve been experimenting with. Both were ho hum performers with Adsense and Affiliate links. I then had an idea to write a small ebook (well, more like a Special Report) on one aspect of the niche. I wrote one 24 page report and then I hired a writer from eLance to write the other (16 pages). Needless to say, the one I had written was a lot more professional looking but it did take longer to pay for itself. The one I wrote was making money on the very first sale.

Both eBooks were sold for $10 each on their respective blogs.

I ratcheted up my marketing efforts for these two niche blogs over a period of 1 month. These two blogs made anywhere from $3 to 7$ per day with Adsense and Affiliate links prior to adding the eBooks.

After the eBooks were added, the Adsense and Affiliate link income remained basically the same, however I was selling between 2 and 5 ebooks per day. Now I know that’s not earth shattering, but then again, neither was the traffic to these sites. These sites only average about a couple hundred hits per day. The conversion rate was extremely good I might add (no pun intended ). One benefit of traffic to a niche blog is that your traffic is interested in what you have to say or they wouldn’t be there in the first place!

Is this really a “secret”? It must be. Have you ever visited a site that you were interested in and spent hours, if not days or a week clicking around looking for more information and caught yourself thinking “Damn, why don’t they just put all this information in one place that is easy to get to?” I have and I bet you have too. But they don’t make that info easy to get at. Click here, click there, follow this link. I want my information in one place that is easy too get and I’m willing to pay for it! Guess what, so are your readers!

If you’re looking to maximize your niche blogs earnings, seriously look into offering your own informational product. You don’t have to be a great writer to do it. You can hire your own great writer to do it for you. Do you think all the Guru’s write every single eBook or all the content for their websites? Not at all. They all use paid writers to leverage their time and their site’s earning potential, at some point you’ll have to consider hiring your own as well.

But for the mean time, write down several ideas for an information product that you can include on your niche blog. Begin the research and start writing. Give yourself a time line of one week to finish this project, otherwise it may be one of those projects that never get done. I finished one eBook in about 3 hours working on it part time for 3 nights after getting home from my “real” job.

Good luck, go out there and make some money with your blog!

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For example, say you have a blog or website that pertains to Ham Radio’s. After you sign up with AuctionAds, you can specify the keywords for the eBay auctions you want to show up on your site such as “Ham Radio” or “Ham Radio Antenna”.

I’ve always liked eBay auctions ads on my sites because they tended to pay a lot better than other affiliate programs. Now, I have a variety of ad sizes to choose from and making my ads for my sites is a lot easier with AuctionAds.

AuctionAds just posted an article on the hardware that they are using to run thier site. If you’re into this type of stuff, it’s pretty impressive. They stated that they are averaging 60 million hits a day…yes that’s right…60 MILLION HITS A DAY!

This should be a very profitable and interesting affiliate program for most of us. If you’ve never tried eBay auction ads, they can certainly give you a greater conversion rates than adsense with the right website and ad placement. Give AuctionAds a try!

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Simple, those cheezy squeeze pages will cost their owners more money every time some one clicks an ad to them. Also, according to Yahoo, it’s highly likely that someone bidding less than you can outrank you in their new advertising model. This is true if their landing page is deemed to have more “quality” issues than yours.

This new ranking model from Yahoo also takes into account the ads performance history based on its previous click through rates relative to its position on the page and the bid amount.

Standard match type ads will no longer receive priority placement over Advanced match type ads.

If you use Google search very often, you know those Adsense ads do not always land you on a quality pages. There are still a lot of Adsense ads landing on squeeze pages with little content and “Made For Adsense” pages. If the Yahoo model ends up like Googles, I suspect we’ll see the same results.

Once you’ve updated to the new Sponsored Search system, you’ll be able to look at a pages Quality Index.

Here are three items that Yahoo recommends for taking advantage of their new PPC Ranking model.

1. Use keywords in your ad. (I hope you’ve already been doing this?) For example; If you’re selling blue widgets, you title AND ad should have the keywords “blue widgets” in them.
2. Use Excluded Words to optimize your Advanced match type ads.
3. Review your current bids and set a budget to meet your business goals (again, I hope you’re alread doing this!)

If you use Yahoo’s PPC marketing, then click on over here to learn more about the new ranking model.

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