Cathy Stucker - The Idea Lady

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Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

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affiliate-marketing

There are many ways to earn money online and one of the most commonly used is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is popular because it’s relatively easy to make a steady stream of money and you don’t need to develop any products of your own. Of course, if you have your own products, you can still use affiliate marketing to create an additional income stream in your business.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is based on a very simple concept. You share content that informs or entertains your readers. Along with your regular informational content, you also pitch products that your audience would be interested in. These are the products of other vendors, not your own, and you get a commission for any sales you make. You promote, customers click and buy, and the vendor pays you for the sale. [Read more…]

3 Incredible Reasons To Become An Amazon Associates Member

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Amazon Associates is Amazon’s affiliate marketing program. With Amazon Associates, you can make money by referring customers to Amazon.com. It can be as simple as putting a link on your site. Then, when your readers click the link, go to Amazon and buy something, you get paid.

Affiliate marketing doesn’t have to be difficult. Too often, marketers try to talk about how complicated it is to male sales with certain programs, and the fact of the matter is that it can be easy, if you know what affiliate network to join and how to use it to your advantage. If you have a website, any type of site, you have a platform to be successful with affiliate marketing. One of the easier platforms to work with is an option that comes from the powerhouse site Amazon. Amazon Associates is one of the best options that you can sign up for, and if you are not a member yet, you should look into it. Here are 3 reasons you should become a member.
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How to Place a Background Image in PowerPoint [Video Tutorial]

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powerpoint-backgroundI use PowerPoint all the time for creation of my webinars, live presentations and video tutorials. On almost all of my PowerPoint presentations I prepare and install a background slide. There are lots of good reasons to do this including branding, consistent messaging and calls to action and professional appearance.

As effective as having a PowerPoint background is I am amazed at how many people in my audience kept asking me to show them how to install a background image in PowerPoint. But like many other things its easy when you know how. Fortunately for you this video shows you how to install any graphic as the background for any slide within PowerPoint step-by-step… enjoy.
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3 Steps to Claim and Optimize Google Places for Business Page

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google-placesSince the implementation of Google+, Google has made drastic changes to the way businesses set up their Google Places page (now known as Google Places for Business), while adding a social aspect for businesses to participate in by creating a Google+ Local page (Google’s equivalent to a Facebook business page).

If a search phrase is recognized as a local search by Google then the search engine will display business pages that provide that service or product in the searcher’s local area. Google is getting much better at recognizing what’s a local search even without stating the city in the search phrase. Google picks up on your location and attempts to best serve the searcher’s intent. For instance, if you’re located in St. Louis and search “Plumber,” that is a good enough indication for Google provide the searcher with local results in the St. Louis area.

So, how do businesses go about creating and optimizing their Google Places Business page? Well, the following is a 5 step plan to create and optimize your GP Business page. [Read more…]

The Power of Pay Per Click

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This is a guest post from Mike Seddon, co founder of the website promotion specialist KKSmarts.

Pay per click advertising has revolutionised the advertising landscape. Never before has there been an advertising medium that allowed you to advertise specifically to your target audience and measure accurately the results of that advertising.

It’s for these reasons alone that any business should seriously consider using pay per click as part of its marketing mix. However many businesses fail to grasp this opportunity properly.

The other compelling reason for using pay per click is that services like Google Adwords will actually allow small business to compete successfully alongside the big companies with deep advertising pockets. This is because Google rewards advertising that is relevant rather than just selling advertising space to the companies prepared to pay more.

Before I explain all this in more detail, let’s just first make sure we all understand what we mean by pay per click.

I’m sure you’ve all seen those adverts down the left hand side of your search results in Google. Those advertisers have bid in an auction to appear on that page whenever the search phrase you used was entered into Google. They will only pay if you click on their advert. They don’t pay anything just to appear. Hence the name pay per click.

Can you imagine paying for newspaper adverts in the basis that you only paid them for each person that was to contact you? There is no way the newspapers could offer that type of service. They simply can’t measure how people react to adverts. This is one of the great benefits of pay per click. You only pay when your advertising successfully brings in potential customers.

Also because you pick the words (called keywords) that you want your adverts to appear for, then you can effectively control who sees your adverts. By carefully choosing keywords you can ensure your adverts are only seen by people who are looking to buy your products.

Imagine the newspaper example again. Do you think newspapers could sell adverting based on only charging you for the newspapers that are read by the people who are specifically looking to buy your product? Not likely. Of course newspapers do have demographics they appeal to and that does give you some targeting for your advertising but it’s not as precisely targeted as pay per click can be.

So already you can see how pay per click makes a lot of sense.

However, what about my point that services like Google Adwords allows you to compete successfully with the big companies? The reason this is so is because they reward advertisers who deliver adverts that meet the needs of the people searching on Google. They assign a quality score for your keywords and your adverts. This quality score is used to decide the minimum bid you need to pay for your advert to appear and it also decides how high up the page you appear.

So by tailoring your adverts to closely match your keywords you can achieve a good quality score. If your advert then gets more clicks than the average expected for that keyword then Google rewards you by increasing your quality score. Thus you pay even less for your clicks.

The big companies rarely understand this and they just pay high bid prices. They also tend to bid on practically every keyword that can find and they use the same advert for all these keywords. Savvy internet advertisers can beat them every time.

So I urge you to embrace the power of pay per click.

Mike Seddon is co founder of the website promotion specialist KKSmarts. You can find out more about pay per click on their website. In particular they have lots of free guides on how to get the best out of Google Adwords.