One of the keys to affiliate marketing is to continuously provide up to date content on your website. Providing regularly updated and quality content will mean better Search Engine rankings, more traffic, and higher conversions, just to name a few. The problem is finding or making the time to write that content.

The easy solution is to buy Private Label Rights (material that you own all editorial rights to and can change anyway you want), also referred to as PLR. When you have the PLR rights to articles you can change the content however you want to suit your own needs, putting your own individual style on them.

Now one of the drawbacks to PLR content is that some of the sites that sell PLR products, sell them to thousands of marketers. So if you are interested in using PLR, you should use a provider that limits the number of members allowed to use their products.

One of the best services that I know of is from Matt Callen.

One of the most important considerations in using PLR content is the need to rewrite it. It doesn’t matter if the package you purchased is limited to a few hundred, or available to several thousand, you need to rewrite it. This is neccessary to make the content uniquely yours. The last thing you want is to put your name on something as the original author, and have your readers find the exact same information, word for word, somewhere else.

A huge benefit to using PLR content is you don’t have to write your content from scratch. Someone else has done the research ad already written the content. So all you have to do is change it up, add whatever you want, remove what you want, and give it your own personality. Using PLR allows you to write content much faster than you could otherwise.

Here are a few suggestions that will help new affiliate marketers tailor PLR content to their personal needs:

1. Put your own personality on it

As long as you put your own personality and flair into your PLR content it will never be the same as someone elses content. Don’t be afraid to be controversial either.

Several years ago there was a study done on the listeners of radio shock jock Howard Stern. Listeners who loved him listened for an average of 2 hours a day, the number 1 reason they continued listening was to see what he would say next. Listeners who hated him listened an average of 3 hours a day. The number 1 reason they gave for listening? They wanted to see what he would say next!

2. Combine with other content

When you own PLR content you can do just about anything you want with it. So you can alter how long it is by removing some of it or breaking long sections into smaller pieces.You can also take different pieces of content and combine them to make a larger piece of content.

If you own omre than one kind of PLR content you can combine them also. A good example would be taking several articles on a topic, rewrite them, then package it as a report or ebook for your visitors. You could also take PLR videos and combine them with your report.

For PLR Videos I recommend Instant Video Empire. The normally charge $97 for access to this site. I talked to them recently, and they have allowed me to give my readers a free membership. But you have to go through this link >>> Instant Video Empire.

3. Adapt to your target audience

Some of the things you need to take into account when working with PLR content is your target audience. Who are you trying to reach? You want to speak in the same kind of language they speak in. So you need to consider things like age, sex, cultural differences, income level, and education level of your audience.

All these things are going to be considerations for how you want to structure your content for your audience. I don’t mean to put anyone down, but what I’m about to say is a fact. The way you have to write to communicate with a doctor who makes $250,000 a year is going to be different than how you communicate with a construction worker who makes $20,000 a year.

That’s just a fact. I say that as a guy who worked in the construction industry for a few years. There is a whole different way that construction workers communicate that a medical professional would find unacceptable. So pay attention to this.

4. Double check grammer and spelling

Do not assume that just because you spent money on a product, that the spelling and grammer is going to be acceptable. The product should be acceptable if you are spending any decent money on it, but don’t take any chances. It’s your reputation on the line.

One thing to keep in mind with PLR content, you get what you pay for. Buy an entire book for $2, and you should not expect much. If you are paying $40 0r $50 a month for content, you should expect it to be well researched, with proper spelling and grammar for the most part. Nothing is going to be perfect though, so read it completely and rewrite at least 75% of the content.

One of the things I like about PLR so much is that the possibilities are virtually limitless. You can take one piece of content and do a lot of different things with it. It also allows you to quickly put out some quality content. Instead spending your time researching, you can be spending your time building your business.

A lot of us have been wondering recentlyhow the problems affecting our economy are going to impact our affiliate marketing businesses.  I was reading around today finding out a little about this from some other people.

Here’s some of what I learned:

26% of consumers surveyed in January said that if the economy worsens over te course of the next year tey wll acctually shop online MORE. Mark Kirschner, chief marketing officer at affiliate marketing company LinkShare Corp., said “They see online as part of the solution to the challenges they face right now.”

A large number of shoppers said they purchased something online with a coupon that they would not have purchased otherwise. Between 64% and 70% said a coupon or discount convinced them to buy a product or service from an online retailer that they would not have purchased from otherwise.

Most suprisingly there were quite a few shoppers who said they planned to purchase more online this year than last year.

Click here to read the entire story.

So a few days ago I told you about my BloggingProfitsBlueprint.com website.

I got the idea from Liz Tomey. I bought a product of hers that showed how to do what it was I did with that site. The two videos she showed on her sales page showed exactly how to get into her site for anyone paying attention.

So I logged into the site she was using as an example and took a look around. I was impressed at how simple the site was, and the kind of money the new owner was already making after just 5 days.

Anyway, I wanted to share this story with you because we all love tohear about someone else who has become successful.

Now if you don’t know, Liz Tomey is an internet marketing expert who is also known as a “softy”. She has a real commitment to people, and when she found one of her close friends in need, she came to the rescue, and turned a total newbie into an “insane affiliate marketing machine”.

You see, Liz’s close friend Michele was going through a divorce, and losing her husband’s income. She knew that she couldn’t pay all the bills and in turn would have to sell her house, and uproot her little boy from his “little world”. All Michele really needed was a few extra grand a month to pay the bills and keep everything “normal” for her son.

Now to some of you that doesn’t seem like much, but to most of you, a few extra grand a month means a lot.

So, Liz took 5 days out of her schedule and showed Michele one of her very own affiliate marketing systems that had worked for her for years.

Now Michele had never heard of affiliate marketing before. She knew how to check email and surf the Internet, but had no idea that you could make money online.

Boy was Michele shocked to find that after 5 days of implementing what Liz taught her she was able to make over $500 and get 400 new subscribers that she could make money off of time and time again.

Michele wont be worrying about bills now as she continues to make money. She’ll even be quitting her job in just a few months!

With Liz’s teachings, Michele has an easy to obtain income goal of $500 a day, and now Liz wants to show you how to do the same thing…

Click here to learn how to get started today.

Like Liz, I’m very proud of Michele, and hope that you will take advantage of Liz’s help, and start creating your own autopilot affiliate income today…

You’ve probably heard that having your own product is a great way to start building an affiliate marketing business. This is the easiest way I’ve seen yet to make your own product, and jump start your affiliate career.

Grab the new course from Liz, and get started right now.

Well it’s been a while since I’ve made a post and I feel like I need to explain myself.

You see this blog is not my full time job. It’s also not my only online project. I have some other websites that I built. A few I am letting go and I’m not going to do anything with them, others I am working on.

I’ll post in a couple of days at least one of my other websites that is active, and I’m thinking about posting the address for one that I am about to start developing.

For now let me explain why its been 7 days since my last post. (Update: I made this post on 1-30-09, but for some reason it is showing a posted date of 11-29-08)

I mentioned above this is not my full time job. In addition to the other online projects I have going, I also am a sheriff.

I’ve had a lot going on with that recently. I am a Sergeant and have had several projects recently.

Every year we have evaluations to document our job performance. I’ve been working on those and it’s been pretty time consuming.

I also have 2 other projects related to that job that I am working on that are due on Feb 2.

So my time has been extremely limited, but I hope to be able to invest more time into this site again in a few days.

So in the next few days look for a post about at least one of my other websites, I’ll even give you the address so you can check it out if you want.

I’m also going to be changing the catagories on this site after reading something about how important they are to search engines.

If you’re like most affiliate marketers, you are itching to get some sales and start seeing money coming in. Some marketers spend hundreds of dollars on their ezine advertising, hoping to make a large profit. For some it works, for others they loose big. If you want to win with your ezine advertising efforts, you need to take into account the following strategies:

1. Who is your target market?

The product that you decide to market in any ezine must be related to the ezine’s readers. That might seem like an obvious statement, but many affiliates forget this. Not everyone is interested in what you have to offer. So make sure you keep it related.

For example, maybe you want to promote a product about obedience training for dogs. You want to make sure that the ezine you target has readers intersted in that topic. So if the ezine is related to training hunting dogs, it will probably not be a good match. That doesn’t mean you can’t try it, but you probably want to wait until you are making good money already before you test it.

2. What are you going to advertise?

What kind of products are you going to advertise to the readers of the ezines you want to target? Are you going to promote your own product, an affiliate product, an ebook, some sort of course?

When you are thinking about what to promote to an ezine, you need to think about the following:

Is the product geared toward my target audience?
Does the product have any value to the audience?
Does the sales page look professional or like a 3rd grader made it?
Does the sales page make you want to buy?
Is there a money back guarantee?

These are all elements that you need to evaluate in order to make certain you have an offer that will produce results.

3. Where do you find an ezine for your niche?

I have some directories listed below where you can search for an ezine related to your niche. When you do your search you want to keep in mind that the more tightly focused the ezine is to your niche, the more sales you are likely to receive.

www.ezine-dir.com

www.ezinelisting.com

subs.zinester.com

4. Determine your advertising budget.

Don’t spend all the money from your advertising budget on one ezine. You will have to decide what price is comfortable for you to pay for one ezine, but you need to be careful.

The price will depend on several factors. How many people are on the ezine, how effective is the ezine, etc. You also want your ad to be the only one shown. This is called a solo ad. If there is more than one ad in the ezine, the effectiveness goes way down. You might ask the owner for references from previous advertisers also.

Now I mentioned the number of subscribers will effect the advertising rate. You should not get hung up on numbers only. The number of subscribers is not as important as the quality of the ezine content. If the ezine publisher send too many ads to the list, they are more likely to ignore your ad. If the ezine has a lot of content with only one ad, you will have more luck with making sales.

5. Write great ad copy.

Great ad copy is the secret to getting people to buy your product, but how do you write great copy? I’m going to give you a sneaky way to write effective ad copy.

First you need to understand what makes people buy. People buy because of benefits, not because of features. When you look at good ad copy it will be fill of bullet points. The bullet points focus on the benefits of a product.

So to write great ad copy we want to do three main things. Capture attention with a great headline. Rewrite the headline of the products copy, don’t simply copy it this is illegal. Just rewrite it in your own words. Grab a couple of benefits and do the same thing. Finally you need a call to action. Tell them to do whatever it is you want them to do. Most likely that is “click here for more information” or something like that.

These are some of the worst affiliate marketing mistakes that people make. They are made by both new affiliates and seasoned pros who just have not had the benefit of coming across an article like this. Some of these i have learned as a result of my own experience, and other have been shared with me by other affiliate program marketers.

1: Too much Flash

Using a lot of flash can be a huge mistake. People typically come to websites to get information, not watch your flash presentations. While high speed internet is becoming more common, there are still a lot of people that use dial-up.

Think about your actions at sites with a flash animation on the home page. Do you sit and wait for it to load, or do you click the skip flash button, most people skip it. Keep your website simple. Look at Google. They have the money to do whatever they want, but they don’t use flash. Why? They know people want information, and do not want to wait for the flash to load. Keep your website simple so it will load quickly for everyone. You will loose people who have to wait.

2: Difficult Navigation

If your visitor has to try and figure out how to navigate your site, they will leave. It’s easier to click the back button then it is to try and figure out how to get around your site. Don’t use animated buttons, or cute pictures to get people to navigate around your site. You are ultimately asking people to purchase a product. You want people to know you are a professional business, not some kid trying to scam someone out of their money.

3: Not writing your own text

There are companies out there that allow their webmasters to write the text for their website. Most webmasters are programmers and not marketers. They know how to try and make your website relevant to the search engines, and that is their main focus. Your main focus is making sales. Simply finding your website is not enough, the visitor needs to take action when they are there by clicking through to the sales page.

If you lack the confidence to write a copy that will make visitor click to your sales page, you have a couple of options. First you can hire a person who is a copywriter. They get paid to make people want to buy, that is their job. They make people want to buy. The second option is to learn copy writing yourself.

No one is more interested in seeing you succeed than you. You can get e-books and e-courses over the internet that teach you copy writing. Writing copy is not easy. That’s why those who do it well get paid so much for it. If you want to learn you do it yourself, become a student of copy writing and take this aspect of your business into your own hands.

4: Playing it cheap

Nothing says cheap and un-professional like a free website. Look at the sites that people put up at places like Yahoo’s geocities.com. They scream free and cheap when you look at them. There’s nothing wrong with free and cheap when you are building a personal page about yourself. But when you are trying to run a business and makes sales, it just doesn’t work because you don’t build any confindence in the visitor.