MoneyBlogNewz | Financial Education & Gossip » affiliate marketing

Finding and using images in commission writer articles

Andrea Parrish — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:06:05 +0000

Properly crediting photographers for their work is very important. Image: rawheadrex/Flickr/CC BY-SA

All articles submitted to the Personal Money Market Commissioned Writer program must include a photograph or illustration that is licensed for commercial use. Most often, the easiest way to find commercially licensed photographs is to search the Flickr photo-sharing site or Wikimedia Commons. These photographs must be correctly credited, and the HTML should be included at the top of the text of your article. Here is how to find, credit, and insert the photographs into your article.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a system photographers can use to license their work for use by others. Flickr, Wikimedia and other photo hosting sites online make photo sharing easy by using images that are uploaded onto their websites and licensed under Creative Commons. It is important that you understand all six types of licenses Creative Commons supports, how to determine which type of license a photo carries, and how to properly credit the author; using Creative Commons licensed photographs incorrectly violates copyright laws. There are three Creative Commons Licenses that allow for commercial use and that can be used in commission articles.

Attribution: This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak and build upon an image, even commercially, as long as they credit the original creation.
Attribution Share Alike: This license lets others remix, tweak and build upon a work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
Attribution No Derivatives: This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to the photographer.

How to find and use commercially licensed photos

Go to www.google.com
Click “Images” in the top left corner of the homepage
Click “advance image search” next to the Google search bar
In the first box, type in a keyword term related to the type of photo you would like to use (for example, “money” or “hiking boots”)
In the Usage Rights section, drop down and select “labeled for commercial reuse” and click “search”
Once you find an image you would like to use, click on it to open the image in its original page
Paste this code into your article, above all the text:

[ caption align="alignright" caption="CAPTION HERE" ][ /caption ]
At the top of window with the image open, highlight the URL and copy the information. Highlight IMAGE URL and paste the URL, keeping the quotation marks.
Right-click on the image you have found (if you are in Flickr, choose “Medium 500″ then right-click the resulting image) and click “copy image location.” Highlight IMAGE LOCATION and replace it with the copied location. It should end in .jpg or .gif. If it ends in .html or .php, you will need to try again.
Fill in the IMAGE TITLE and IMAGE ALTERNATE TEXT with a phrase that describes the image (for example “A pair of large hiking boots.”)
Finally, where the code says “CAPTION HERE”, replace the text with a single-sentence caption for the image. This should describe the photo and its relation to your article (for example “Hiking is a popular low-cost hobby”). At the end of the caption, include the proper crediting information — see below.

Crediting images found on Flickr

We prefer you accredit the photo source as follows, unless specifically stated otherwise by the author: [author name]/Flickr/CC BY-SA

Where to find the photo license on Flickr

Use this Flickr photo page as an example:

On the image page, click on “some rights reserved” located in the side box on the right. The photo conditions listed are Attribution and Share Alike. Using the Creative Commons Licenses, you know that the symbol for these conditions is “cc by-sa.”

Crediting images found on Wikimedia Commons

If you would like to use images on Wikimedia Commons, please make it a priority to thoroughly read the media directory terms of use to meet all free license requirements.

Advanced techniques for increasing article marketing commissions

Andrea Parrish — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:53:37 +0000

You can increase your affiliate commissions with these advanced article marketing techniques. Image: ThinkStock

Once you are comfortable writing commission articles and trend articles for the Personal Money Market Commission Writer Program, there are many things you can do to help increase your commission earning power. Some of these things are quick and simple, others are more involved and complex.

Getting your articles accepted more quickly

One of the easiest things you can do to get your articles accepted more quickly is to code in the HTML that our editors would have to otherwise add. If you know HTML, you will just need to use the

and

tags around your subheads and tags for links. Submit your articles in plain text with the code written right in.
If you do not know HTML, though, you can use the WordPress.com blogging platform to write the code for you.

The WordPress.com platform will also write all of the code for the Creative Commons commercially licensed photos or illustrations that you need to include with your articles.

Remember, if you use WordPress.com, DO NOT publish the article. Save it only in draft form — Personal Money Market accepts only articles that have not previously been published anywhere else.

You can also add tradepartnerships@personalmoneystore.com as an administrator on your WordPress.com account, which will allow our editors to get the article directly from your WordPress account.

Once you have received the confirmation from us that your article was published you are free to publish it on your site as well. It is advisable, though, to drastically change the text if you want your article to get traffic from search engines.

Promote your articles with social networking

If you are on social networks such as Facebook, Yahoo Buzz, Google Buzz, Twitter or Digg, you can promote your articles with those networks. Once your article has been posted and you have the URL, you can post a link to your article on your chosen social networks. These links will help build traffic to your articles, which can increase your commissions.

Build your own blog

If you like writing articles and earning commissions, you can drive even more traffic and commissions to your articles by building your own blog. Having your own website will allow you to take on other affiliate offers to earn even more commissions. While Personal Money Market does not accept articles that have been previously posted in other places, you can write as many of your own posts for your own blog as you wish. You can read more about the basics of starting your own website and getting started with affiliate marketing on the Adworkz blog.

Use our content exchange

The articles that you submit for the commission writer program are allowed to have two links to outside pages and/or one image banner. These additions to your commission writer articles can increase traffic to your own blog or your affiliate offers.

Putting links to outside articles in your Commission Writer articles is relatively easy. Around the text that you want to link, put this code in your article: text . Replace URL HERE with the target URL you want the text to link to. Replace TITLE HERE with the “anchor text” for your link – the text you would like to appear when visitors hover over your link. Finally, replace the text with the text you would like to link within the article. You are allowed two of these links for every Commission Writer article you submit.

Adding an image banner to your article is as simple as adding the HTML given to you by your affiliate partner in the plain text you submit with your article. We suggest square or horizontally aligned ads. You can get started by checking out the graphic ad offers available through the Adworkz affiliate network.

Writing trends articles to increase Article Marketing commissions

Andrea Parrish — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:47:04 +0000

Writing articles about popular or newsworthy topics can help increase your affiliate marketing commissions. Photo: ThinkStock.

Once you’ve written several conversion articles for the Commission Writing program, you can help these articles rank even better by writing trends articles. Search engines rank the popularity of a page or article based on the number of links and amount of traffic that goes to that page. Because conversion articles do not naturally develop these links, you can increase your commission by giving them a helping hand. Writing trends articles and linking them to your conversion articles will increase their rankings and help increase your commission.

Writing about trending topics

Once you’ve got a portfolio of conversion articles, writing on hot topics, breaking news, celebrity news and other high traffic topics can help increase your commissions. These trend topics can be just about anything that you think will get lots of readers. We just call them “trends” because, more often than not, the best topics end up on Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz and Bing Popular Searches.

The structure of a Trends article

Trend articles are written with a very similar structure to a standard conversion article. You want to choose one keyword that you think will get traffic, and use that keyword throughout the title, headings, and text in the article. Write an article that will:

Be 300 – 400 words long. (Articles more than 400 words long will not be accepted.)
Have subheadings for each paragraph
Include a title that is 65 characters or fewer
Include a description that is 140 characters or fewer
Include six “tags” – words that describe the topic of the article
Have a Creative Commons commercially licensed photograph or illustration
Be written in clear, correct English

Putting links in your Trends article

Personal Money Market allows commission writers to insert two of their own links into each article they write. These links are what do the “heavy lifting” of connecting your high-traffic trend articles to your high-commission conversion pages.

Our submission form strips all HTML formatting and code when you paste your article body into it — only plain text is accepted. In order to get your links into the articles, you will need to paste the plain-text HTML code into the submission box. Here is an example:

If you have the phrase “payday loans” in your article and you would like it to link to a payday loans page, paste the HTML for the link into the submission form. This HTML should look like: payday loans . When our editors see this they will know how to use it to get the text link into your article. When it is published it will have a payday loans link to the payday loans article. It’s that easy.

You can also add an “anchor link title” to help increase the search engine power of your link. This will help you attach keyword value to your link in situations where saying the keyword phrase might not sound right with sentence. Many blog editors like WordPress have an HTML view button. Typically you can just put links in like you do with email and click HTML view to get access to the code so you can copy and paste it into the submission form.

Following is an example of how you could say a phrase like “internet lending is the future of the sub-prime lending market” with a link to a cash advance article.

internet cash lending is the future of the sub-prime lending market.

This would look like

internet cash lending is the future of the sub-prime lending market.

The raw HTML you would paste into the submission page would be:

internet cash lending

You can copy this HTML, but make sure you change the title words in between the first set of quotation marks (“) and make sure you paste the url of your past article in the href area between the second set of quotation marks to complete the customization.

Read examples of Trends articles

These are Trends articles written by Commission Writers that link to conversion articles.
Belinda Jackson’s XMen Origins

Jade Neilsson’s Crystal Bowersox

Bonnie Jones’ Home Buyer Tax Credit

You can continue reading about the Commission Writer Article Marketing program with Personal Money Market with these articles, or submit your own article below.
The basics of the Commission Writer Article Marketing program
Writing high-quality conversion articles for the Article Marketing program
Advanced Techniques for increasing Article Marketing commissions

Writing high-quality conversion articles for Article Marketing

Andrea Parrish — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:39:33 +0000

With well-written conversion articles, commission writers can make money. Image: ThinkStock

When you are just getting started in Affiliate Article Marketing, conversion articles will help you build commission quickly. A “conversion article” is an article intended to get the reader to take some kind of action. These conversion articles will become the basis of your commissions, so it is important to take the time to write them carefully. Personal Money Market has developed recommendations for conversion commission articles that have proven effective and high-performing over time.

Keywords – The basis of Article Marketing

Helping search engines and individuals find your articles starts with using the right keywords. Once you submit your first Commission Writer article marketing submission, we will send you a long list of keywords that tend to convert well. Articles that use the keyword in exact match in the title, URL, headers and content with a sales pitch convert the best. An “exact match” keyword is when you use the exact phrase you’ve chosen for a keyword many times throughout the article. Before you start writing, chose one keyword that is your target for your conversion article. This is a list of keywords to get you started in writing conversion articles:

Cash Advance
Cash Advance Loans
Installment Loans
Instant Payday Loans
Military Loans
No Fax Cash Advance
No Fax Payday Loans
Online Cash Advance
Online Payday Loans
Payday Cash Advance Loans
Payday Loans
Personal Loans
Quick Payday Loans
Short Term Loans

Longtail keywords are keywords that do not get a lot of search traffic, but tend to perform well with very few searches. Read more about longtail marketing in the longtail marketing article.

The structure of a conversion article

A conversion article for the Personal Money Market Commissioned Writer program should:

Be 300 – 500 words long
Have subheadings for each paragraph
Include a title that is 65 characters or fewer
Include a description that is 140 characters or fewer
Include six to 12 “tags” – words that describe the topic of the article
Have a Creative Commons commercially licensed photograph or illustration
Be written in clear, correct English

A good conversion article should have an opening paragraph that summarizes the rest of your article and includes your keyword at least once. You should then include a subheading that also includes your keyword. The following paragraphs for your article should each be clear, concise, and make a point. Every paragraph should have a subheading. The final paragraph should be a summarization and conclusion to your article. Create a title for your article that includes your keyword and is fewer than 65 characters long. If you are not sure of the title length, use this tool to count.

Sales points for conversion articles

Conversion articles should include information about the product and/or action that you want the reader of your article to take. The sales points of the personal loan, payday loan, and installment loan products that Personal Money Market offers include:

There are no credit checks for loans less than $1,500
No faxing of documentation back and forth required
Decisions are usually made in less than three minutes
Money can be deposited directly into the borrower’s bank account in as little as two hours
Bankruptcy and bad credit do not affect the application
No collateral required
Fixed income applications are sometimes accepted
Military applications are sometimes accepted
Installment payments are available
Borrowers have the choice of accepting or rejecting the loan offer
The application information is protected with 128-bit encryption

You can see more frequently asked questions about the loan products on the FAQ page

Read high-performing conversion articles

Before you write a conversion article, you should take a few minutes to read some well-written articles by other authors. There are many factors that go into the success of an article, but these are good examples to build from.
Bonnie Jones’ Short Term Installment Loans Online

Victoria Kingston’s Installment Loans for Bad Credit

Jade Neilsson’s No credit check installment loans

You can continue reading about the Commission Writer Article Marketing program with Personal Money Market with these articles.

The basics of Article Marketing for Personal Money Market
Writing Trends articles to increase commissions for the Article Marketing program
Advanced Techniques for increasing Article Marketing commissions

Making Money Online: Affiliate Marketing?

Kevin Wren — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:48:24 +0000

What is affiliate marketing?

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

With the current financial crisis and increased unemployment, many people have explored the various possibilities of making money online in an effort to subsidize their incomes. Those looking for online money-making possibilities have inevitably come across the concept of affiliate marketing. This is essentially the idea of promoting an online business and receiving payments for every referral you manage to send to the business.

The method of compensation varies among companies, but the basic idea is to promote a product or service online and when you succeed in getting others to visit the company’s website, you receive a small cash payment for your efforts. For the company this amounts to outsourcing online advertising and promotion to affiliate marketers who work as independent contractors

Does affiliate marketing work for businesses?

Whether or not affiliate marketing actually works depends upon your perspective. For many businesses, the idea is excellent because it operates on a “pay for performance” model; meaning that the business pays only when an affiliate successfully generates tangible results. A number of major online businesses, such as Amazon.com, did very well with affiliate marketing in their early years.
Similarly, since the online business can develop its own affiliate programs that operate under its own terms and conditions, many online businesses have chosen to set them up. On the other hand, affiliate marketing offers few benefits for businesses that operate on a local basis or whose product or service is off-line in nature. Further, failure to properly restrict the activity of affiliates or to monitor for abuses also leads to many unscrupulous affiliate marketers giving the business they are promoting a bad name or negative associations.

Does affiliate marketing work for affiliates?

It is undeniable that at least some people have built successful careers from affiliate marketing, but at the same time, it appears that the overwhelming majority of affiliate marketers make very little money, if any at all. Because affiliate marketers are independent service providers, the industry is completely unregulated which makes it very difficult to get exact numbers on how successful the industry is for most people.
Another difficulty in assessing the effectiveness of affiliate marketing is that one of its primary niches is the selling of information about how to become an effective affiliate marketer. This means that there is an enormous amount of misleading information online about how successful affiliate marketers can be, since the promoters have a vested interested in getting people to buy their “how to” materials. Because affiliate marketing is primarily an online endeavor, people are able to make whatever claims they want and it is virtually impossible to confirm them. Just because an affiliate marketer claims to make $60,000 a month does not mean it is true at all, and there is virtually no way to find out whether or not it is.

Who is successful at affiliate marketing?

Like any industry, there are occasional flukes where people succeed by sheer luck as opposed to skill or talent; but as always, these are the exceptions. In general, most of the confirmed successful affiliate marketers are people who already had a strong background in advertising and marketing before they took up affiliate marketing. Additionally, most of the proven success stories concern people who have been involved since the beginning of the industry in the late 1990s.
There are very few success stories about people who jump into the industry and become immediately successful, and the stories that do exist are impossible to verify. The few who have become successful very quickly usually have had access to some new innovation, such as the development of a completely new niche, technology, or marketing strategy. Despite claims to the contrary, there is virtually no verifiable evidence that most affiliate marketers ever make significant amounts of money.

Get rich quick? Probably not.

Since so many affiliate marketers are making their money by selling instructional affiliate marketing materials, there are many claims that affiliate marketing offers the opportunity to get rich quick. These claims tend to resonate loudly in the current economic climate where so many desperate people are looking for ways to make livings or supplement incomes. However, as is the case with most “get rich quick” schemes, more often than not it’s just a scam. Even if you have an innovative concept that might open a new niche or market and even if you have a strong background in advertising or marketing, the odds are that it will take years to turn these ideas into enough money to live on.
While setting up the basic online infrastructure for affiliate marketing can be done within a couple of months, actually making money from it always takes much longer. Most of the confirmed successful affiliate marketers freely admit that it took them anywhere from one to five years before they were making enough to even consider dropping their day jobs.

Is affiliate marketing right for you?

If you already have a solid background in advertising or marketing or you have some brilliant new idea, you may be able to make a fortune with affiliate marketing. However, even if this is the case, don’t expect to do so overnight or to be able to do it without investing a lot of time and energy. If you have no experience in the field and are simply looking for a quick and easy way to make some emergency cash, realistically speaking, affiliate marketing is probably not going to be the solution to your problem.